I paddled back and forth in front of the entrance
all the while whistling and singing as loudly as
I could in an attempt to attract whatever
creature might be living on the island while I was
still a safe distance away - in the water. However,
all that I got for my troubles were some irate
seagulls flying a little too closely for my
comfort. It was at this point that I had to make
one of those critical life decisions. Did I
believe the sign and heed its warning or did I
trust my instinct and figure that the sign may
have been a remnant of earlier times and the
guard dog had long since retired to an old age
kennel in florida or some equally benign place.
From what I could gather, the only thing guarding
the island were thousands of very loud, very
annoyed seagulls that seemed to have no problem
whatsoever with 'irregularity'. In fact, many of
the once dark brown granite walls looked more
like pure white marble after years of sea gull
offerings.
By timing my approach just right, I was able to
come alongside what was left of a dock on the
smaller island and quickly jump onto the
algae-covered (aka slippery) rocks and just
barely hang onto the kayak before it was swept
away by yet another set of waves created by the
passing ships. I hauled the kayak up onto the
rocks making sure that it was well out of the reach
of any subsequent waves. The last thing that I wanted
to do was to be stranded on that island watching my
little blue boat sail off into the sunset, without me.
As I stood on the edge of the little island where
the steel girders formed the rather tenuous
bridge across the waters to the fort, I held my
paddle close by my side - just in case the warning
sign was real and the dog had less fear than I
did of crossing those rickety, old beams. Again
I shouted, and again was answered with only the
shrieking of the gulls. In true military
fashion, the army had taken two very large
cannons and stuck them, barrels down into the
ground to serve as places for the supply ships to
tie off to.
Having (almost) assured myself that the island
was indeed deserted, I decided to figure out a way
across the beams so that I could explore what
looked to me like a very interesting bit of
American history. Having been to more than one
circus as a child, I always remembered the people
who walked across the tightrope carrying a long
pole. I figured that although my kayak paddle
would certainly qualify as a long pole, I began
to wonder whether or not wearing those tight
little sequined leotards was also required to
assure my safe passage across the beams. If that
were the case, then I was seriously out of luck.
Well, I slowly made my way across the beams,
still half expecting some seriously pissed off,
half-rabid dog to appear at any second, or to
have the beam snap in half, dumping me
unceremoniosly into the murky waters of Baltimore
harbor. Thankfully, neither event transpired and
I was able to make it safely across and jumped
the last few feet into the entrance of the fort.
Just when I was feeling pretty comfortable about the
whole thing, I looked down at my
feet and noticed that I had just barely missed landing on top
of a recently dead (or recently killed) seagull. Having
just this past week seen the movie "The Blair
Witch Project" I knew that this was NOT a good
omen.
I stood in what must have been the main entrance
to the fort - a long, dark, brick-lined vault
about thirty feet across and fifty feet in
length. On either side were two narrow stairways
cut into the brick walls leading up onto the
ramparts. Feeling a little bit uncomfortable in
the darkness of this room, not to mention the rather
pungent welcome mat, I headed up the
closest stairs and came out upon the top of the
fort. I would have loved to have been able to understand
what the seagulls were 'saying' as I emerged from the
stairs. At first they seemed merely curious, but then once
they came to their senses, they realized that they were supposed to
run around, squawk, fly off in a huff and poop.
The ramparts circled the entire fort which
from above had the appearance of a
giant six-sided doughnut.
However, after years of being left to its own devices, nature
had just about reclaimed the center of the fort, so
much so that it was impossible to see from one
side to the other. Trees, bushes and vines
filled the center of the fort and I was unable to
see anything that might have been down there. I
would have imagined that the workers who built the fort
and the troops that would have been stationed here must have
been housed in barracks built in the central part
of the island which by now was completely overgrown.
I slowly made my way around the island, watching
countless seagulls dart out from under bushes as
I approached. Off in the distance I could just barely
make out the skyscrapers of downtown Baltimore. After having
gone almost halfway around the fort, i came upon a hole in the middle
of the rampart where a winding brick stairway lead down below.
Deciding to see where it lead, I carefully
made my way down the stairs.
Once my eyes had
adjusted to what little light that was available,
I saw that I was standing in a very long, brick
corridor where the cannons must have been
housed. Along one side were the openings in the
ten foot thick walls where, once the steel doors
were opened, would have been placed the muzzles of the
guns. I walked over to one of the opened gunports
half expecting to see one of the iron clad
gunships of the Civil War steaming past, smokestacks
belching forth huge clouds of black smoke, gun turrets
blazing and the Confederate flag flying proudly, but was
brought back to reality by the sight and
sound (I think they had disco playing on their
stereo) of a
large, glaringly white floating fiberglass
fiasco. In a few of the gun bays I could still see the
remnants of the wooden caisons that held the
cannons.
Opposite the gunports, the corridor opened out towards
the central part of the fort which was filled
with vegetation of every kind imaginable. In many
ways it reminded me of an old Romanesque catherdral
with the heavy stone arches and long, narrow passageways.
I could just as easily imagine monks walking along the
corridors on their way to morning prayers as I could
envision soldiers marching off to battle. I was very
curious about what might have been in the center of the fort
so I walked around the entire inner perimeter hoping to
find a place where the vegetation was sparce enough to
allow me to make my way in.
Unfortunately, the overgrowth was just too thick to allow
it and the thought of forcing my way through all the
dense underbrush in just a pair of cut-offs was not something
I really wanted to do.
Also by this point it began to dawn on me that perhaps
some passing boat might take an interest in my kayak thinking
that maybe it had washed up on the island and decide to
take it home for a souvenir. I really did not want to
have to figure out how to survive on seagull until some other
foolhardy soul decided to explore the island..
Having now decided that it was time to return to my boat, I realized that
I would have to find my way out of here first. Looking
both ways all I could see were seemingly endless corridors. I started
walking in the direction I remembered coming from but couldn't
remember exactly where the stairs to the ramparts were. I finally
came upon what I thought was another stairway although it was
much darker than the one I had used before. It was built into one
of the walls and I cautiously made my way into what I believed
was the opening. However, the further in I walked, the darker
it became until I could no longer see anything. It finally dawned on
me that this really wasn't a way out but rather was probably one of
those very heavily built rooms where they used to store the gunpowder
and cannonballs. Just as this realization made its way into my
brain, I heard something scamper across the floor at my feet.
Being in a dark room, on a deserted island, wearing shorts and sandles,
without a flashlight, holding nothing but a paddle while things unknown
crawled around on the floor all around me was
something that I realized was really NOT something that I enjoyed.
With as much haste and stealth as I could muster, I backed out of that room and
into the relative comfort of the passageway. I won't say that I
began to panic, but I suddenly realized that I had absolutely no good
idea of how long
I had been on the island and really began to wonder whether or not my
boat was going to be there when I finally did manage to find my
way out.
After it seemed as if I had walked for miles, I
came to what this time I knew was a stairway and
with great leaps made my way back up into the
sunlight and seagulls. However, in all my
wanderings I had somehow managed to make my way
clear around to the other side of the island, opposite
where I had left the boat. So with a feeling of
mild apprehension I quickly made my way around the
ramparts until I finally saw the little landing
dock. However, from where I stood I could not see
my kayak. All I saw were a bunch of large
powerboats cruising around the island. This did
not bode well. Just then I realized that I was
approaching the landing dock from the opposite
side and that was the reason (I hoped) that I
couldn't see my kayak. As I made my way around
to the other side I was greatly relieved to see
the little blue bow of my boat sticking up in the
air just where I had left it. Finding the
stairway that I had originally come up was
easier this time and I made my way back down into the
entrance hall. I was somewhat releived to see that
the 'welcome mat' was still there and after crossing
the beams once more I
made my way back to my boat and managed to get it and
myself back into the water without too much excitement.
Rather than heading directly back to the park and my car,
I decided to
paddle over to a small cove that I had
seen as I crossed the bridge earlier that morning.
Although I couldn't be certain, it looked as if there
might have been a couple of half-sunken ships in the
cove. Since today seemed to have already been ruined,
there was no reason why I shouldn't just make a wreck
out of the rest of it. Once again I had to cross the shipping
lane and once again had far more than my fair share of views of the front
ends of overpowered and under-controlled speedboats.
I think I had seriously underestimated the distance to the cove
because it felt like I had to paddle for hours before finally
reaching the bridge that I had crossed that morning.
As I paddled into the cove, off in the distance I
saw the unmistakable shapes of what must have
been the once proud bows of a pair of old wooded
ships - perhaps they were once lumber or cargo
schooners. As I got closer they towered over me
like a couple of dinosaurs from some long ago
time. While their bows and the enormous rudder of one
of them still stood majestically
erect, their entire middle sections had collapsed
into a heap of broken frames and beams while the
rusted iron fastenings that once held the ship
together protruded from the planks like so many
broken and splintered bones. There is something very
sad about seeing once strong and proud
ships dragged off into the shallows to die. It is
one thing to see a ship that has been cast upon the shore
by a violent storm knowing that she fought for
survival until the very end. But these ships ended their
lives in a far different way.
I could find nothing that would help me identify what the
larger of the two ships might have been named, but on the
smaller one, five faded letters hung tenouously from the bow.
S A A M N
I tried to put together all the possible combinations of letters
that I thought might spell something that could possibly be a
name, but was not able to come up with any at the time. I'm sure
there must be records of the ships that used to carry cargo
in and out of Baltimore, so perhaps it might be possible to
trace the history of this ship.
As I paddled back out of the cove, I passed another ship of an
earlier time and felt an overwhelming need to get out of that
place. It felt almost as if I had stumbled upon some long
forgotten graveyard, where the all the years of memories, dreams,
hopes and fears of the people who had walked the decks of those
ships still lingered.
Later that evening, I decided to see if I could find
any information about the fort that I had visited which
might reveal something about its history. After many searches and
many more dead ends, I came across the following
tantalizing bit of information:
"An early unusual landmark to dot this area was
Fort Carroll, constructed in the Patapsco River
off Hawkins Point in 1848 under the supervision
of the young Colonel Robert E. Lee of the Army
Corps of Engineers. With a hexagonal site of 3.4
acres, 10 foot thick and 40 foot high walls, and
350 guns mounted in three tiers, the Fort was
remarkably similar to Charleston's more famous
Fort Sumter. Work was later suspended because of
uncontrollable settling and the Fort remains an
incomplete ruin today, in the shadow of the new
Outer Harbor crossing."
I remembered the last time I drove over the
bridge that crosses the river and recalled seeing
what looked like an
old fort on a small island in
the middle of the harbor and was curious as to
what it might be. I figured that this was enough
of a reason to go and see if I could find out.
After now having decided where I wanted to go,
the next trick was to figure out how to get
there.
That is a little bit how I felt as I watched the
seemingly endless parade of boats of all shapes,
sizes, colors and with most of the skippers
keeping one hand on the tiller and the other
firmly grasping an ice cold beer. I began to
realize just how tiny my little blue kayak really was
and that with the top of my head only 28 inches
above the surface of the water, I made a pretty
small target (poor choice of word, perhaps). I
was forced to alternate between periods of
ferocious paddling (when there was a break in the
traffic) with periods of madly waving my paddle
in the air as a means of saying "hey, you! with
the beer in your hand and bikinied babe on your
arm........PLEASE look this way for just a
second". Aside from the testosterone-powered
speedboats that roared past, altering course at
seemingly the very last moment possible, there
were also the large, not easy to maneuver and
even harder to stop freighters and tankers that
kept steaming in and out of the harbor. One in
particular was fairly high out of the water and
was pushing an enormous bow wake that would have
been really fun to ride - if I were a porpoise!
After a few close encounters of the almost worst
kind I finally came within sight of the island and
was a little dismayed to see that it looked
exactly like what I imagined a fort should be -
inpenetrable. The flanks of the entire island
were sheathed in enormous blocks of granite,
forming shear walls rising out of the river with
the only breaks being the
ominous looking steel cannon ports that stared
out across the harbor like never blinking eyes.
As I paddled around the
island, hundreds of seagulls watched me from the
ramparts and from the only structure that I could
see behind the fortified walls - a tall wooden
tower with a lookout platform at the very top.
One seagull after another seemed assigned to
sentry duty for no sooner did one bird fly off
than another would land to take its place atop
the tower. The fort I was soon to discover was
built with six sides and I had the misfortune of
starting my circumnavigation on side number
one. By the time I had gone around 5/6ths of
the island, I was beginning to think that the
only way to get in was to try and climb through
one of the open gun ports.
Of course, I am not
sure what I would have done with the kayak at
that point.
This causeway lead directly to
what looked like the front entrance to a medieval
castle lacking only the drawbridge and archers to
complete the picture. However, the ravages of
time and tide had pretty much dealt a death blow
to this causeway, leaving only a few fairly
rusty, very narrow and somewhat disfigured beams
that I believe any circus high wire artist
would think twice about crossing. And as if this
weren't enough to discourage visitors, there was
a very direct warning painted on the wall
alongside the entrance stating in no uncertain
terms:
