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.
Each cake before we walked to the music was sliced in half for inspection. The islanders, who could be gentle, were severe cake critics: "I wouldn't pay a quarter for that one," a man said loudly.
Cheri's effort at a trifling three-layer cake had failed so badly that we left it home, and suddenly we were very glad.
During three years in residence, we came to accept slices of cakes proffered as readily as one might brew a visitor a cup of tea.
Once I timed Mary Ada Marshall, my island neighbor and recent co-testifier before the legislature. She mixed up an eight-layer chocolate cake, baked it, iced it and washed and put away her pans and bowls in 29 minutes flat.
Recently, I remarked that in a family photo taken when we departed, I looked heavier that I do now. "That would be the eight-layer cake, Dad," my daughter said.
Nowadays, Smith Island can't make it anymore just by catching crabs and oysters and fish. Its population has fallen from around 400 when we lived there 20 years ago to around 200, a trend that can't continue much longer.
The island and those of us who love it are trying to reinvent the place. A women's crab-picking co-op welcomes visitors and sells CDs of the pickers singing hymns as they work. We've just established a fine, well-mapped canoe and kayak trail connecting the island's three towns. Bed-and-breakfasts have opened.
Places selling Smith Island eight-layer cake have succeeded in Crisfield and Salisbury, and some mainland restaurants are featuring it on the menu. There seems to be a demand for cooking classes, where Mary Ada and others will teach you how to make world-beating cakes (both sweet and crab).
So while it's about an official state dessert, it's also about tourism, economic development and marketing a unique heritage - about survival. Working the water will remain the island's main course, but now dessert is important too.
Tom Horton is author of "An Island Out of Time," a memoir of Smith Island. His e-mail is twh@intercom.net.
