Flag Ponds Nature Park

Author's Comments

Calvert County's western shore is the quiet side of the bay, and Flag Ponds is the place where that quiet becomes almost conspicuous. You walk in through forest and past two freshwater ponds that feel more like the Pine Barrens than the Chesapeake, and then the trail opens onto a beach that looks the way the bay must have looked a hundred years ago. No houses. No piers. Just the water and the bluff and the long curve of sand. I come here for the evenings. The bay faces west from this stretch, which is rarer than people realize, and the sun drops directly into the water in a way that turns the whole beach into something molten. Walk south toward the old fishermen's shacks. That is where the fossil hunters work the tide line for shark teeth, dark little triangles pushed up out of the Miocene cliffs that run behind the beach, and it is also where the views stay most undisturbed. In September and October the light gets long and the crowds thin to almost nothing. The photograph here is wide. The beach is not dramatic in the way of an ocean shore, and the bluffs are low and forested rather than sculptural, so the composition depends entirely on the sky and the water and whatever the light is doing between them. On a good evening that is more than enough. I have sat on the sand past sunset waiting for the color to turn, and the color has always turned.

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