Would this be my Al Gore moment? After a career writing about the plight of the Chesapeake Bay, I had been called to advise a committee of the Maryland General Assembly.
About cake. About making Smith Island eight-layer cake Maryland's official state dessert.
No Oscars for that, or Nobel Prizes. And with taxes and sea levels rising - and the Chesapeake ecosystem tanking - "Let them eat cake" might seem impolitic.
But there's more to saving the bay than boosting oxygen counts and reducing toxic algal blooms. Faster and more irreversibly than we're losing water quality, we're losing a unique heritage: watermen's communities that have endured centuries, linked to nature in ways most of us can't even recall.
We celebrate the natural vegetation of a region, whether cactus, rain forest or black-eyed Susans, as the singular expression of local soils, climate and geology. Too often we forget that humans can be part of the act, not just despoilers of it. I believe, as Lawrence Durrell wrote of France, that if you wiped it bare and began again, in due course, nature there would again give you essential Frenchmen and good Bordeaux.
Same with Smith Island, whose people and culture are as true and essential a praise of the Chesapeake Bay as soft crabs and oysters.
And cake.
I knew in 1987, when I moved my wife, Cheri, and kids to Smith Island, 10 miles out in the bay, that we were entering a culture than took crabbing only slightly less seriously than the Methodist Church.
I soon learned that islanders treated cakes only slightly less seriously than crabs. Our introduction to society there came when Cheri and I were invited to our first cakewalk, which is played like musical chairs.
To music from an old boombox, we all shuffled around numbered squares chalked on the wooden floor of the community hall, plunking down a quarter for each turn. When the music stopped, if you were on the lucky number, you won a freshly baked cake. And not just any cake. The hall that night was chock-a-block with gorgeous, eight-layer confections: eight-layer chocolate, eight-layer fig, eight-layer orange, eight-layer coconut cake.
No one knew the origin of these multilayered masterpieces. Some said they used to be four layers, then six. "It got kinda competitive," said a leading island cook. Others said cakes up to 12 layers had been produced - too much of a good thing, perhaps.
