TO LOOK INTO the future, you need a tool: a chicken's gizzard, a glass ball, a system of mathematics, some device rooted in the belief system of the age you live in, be it based on magic, faith or science.
Whatever it is, you must believe in your tool, and the farther you want to see, the stronger you must believe. And you need something else: some knowledge of the past, for the perspective to render intelligible what is met with in the future.
My device for penetrating Maryland's deep future is a metaphor, the traditional literary contrivance to attain knowledge of the unknowable. If you can accept such an idea, imagine a time telescope. This is our metaphor, a time telescope set for 2,000 years, a millennium into the future and a millennium into the past, to meet the need for perspective.
Now, where to place it?
Before we decide that, we must take the idea of our state, our polity, and examine it closely. It is a patch of the Earth small by comparison to most other subdivisions of our federation built on this continent. Its border is artificial and has nothing to do with natural demarcations. In the west, Maryland is hilly, in the east it is flat; by the sea, it is full of water and trees; it has no natural lakes, because it was never gouged by the glaciers of the Ice Age, as our neighbor states to the north were.
The single feature, the topographic icon that springs to mind when contemplating the idea of Maryland, is the Chesapeake Bay, created by water trapped from the melting glaciers as they withdrew. The bay and its watershed of 64,000 acres encompass not only Maryland (population, about 5 million) but also Virginia, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Delaware and New York.
There is reason for this focus: Fernand Braudel began his classic history of the Mediterranean civilization by assuming the primacy of geography. Why? Because he was certain that geography, or the examination of it, provided "a history in slow motion from which permanent values can be detected."
Geography determines all: politics, social structure, economics, civilization in all its facets, including, as Braudel says, values. Values. Remember that.
By this time, we have chosen where we will push our time telescope into the ground, a full half of its length. Since this is only a metaphor, we will have no difficulty using the thing. When we look in one end, we see 1,000 years into the past. The other end projects our gaze a millennium ahead. We will only sketch what we see of the past.
Our site is on the Potomac at a place called Pope's Creek. Why there? Because it is at the center of a huge shell midden, a great feasting grounds where Marylanders (this, of course, is a gratuitous appellation, since there was no Maryland 1,000 years ago) came to gorge on clams, oysters and other mollusks of the bay. The midden is about 30 acres in extent: Activity can be detected there from 10,000 years back. Our view extends only a thousand, and what we see are people formed up in villages spread throughout the watershed, maybe 20,000 of them. They are of the Algonquian linguistic group, which dominates over the northern and middle-Atlantic states. They are governed by chiefs or groups of wise men. They grow corn, beans, squash. They have domesticated dogs. They prowl dense forests of gigantic oak and chestnut trees, hunt elk and whitetail deer. The bay is clear, and in places you can see down 30 feet. Silting did not begin until after the English farmers arrived in the 17th century. The sea level is 4 feet lower than it is today.
It is a rough paradise with well-defined seasons.
Now, as we look forward, the view is cloudier, so we must rely on rational projections. These indicate dramatic changes, beginning, as all things do, with topography and climate. Most of the fauna, the elk, the wolf, are long gone. The whitetail deer -- which flourished 1,000 years ago and almost went extinct, only to bounce back in our own time -- is not so evident in the deep future. There is little habitat left for them.
The blue crab? It would be a miracle if it survived in the bay. Probably, as the bay was suffocated by algae fed by nutrients running off the land, the crab went the way of the sheepshead fish, which, according to accounts written before they were fished to extinction in the 19th century, were plentiful, and delicious.
There would be far fewer trees throughout the huge watershed. Tulip poplar, walnut, oak, chestnut in Pennsylvania would hold out. Even with a warming climate and the northward march of heat-loving plants, the species variety might not change that much. In fact, in certain corners of Maryland, species of 9,000 years ago endure today -- the larch and hemlock in small stands of old forest, such as that around Swallow Falls in Garrett County.
