Going to the tidewater peninsulas like northern and middle neck is crazy because it’s like. Oh this is the birthplace of the deep ancestral evil festering at the root of everything it is right here. Colonialism, slavery, genocide, the nexus of capital and blood at the heart of America. But it’s also almost all gone both in material and popular memory.
So many American historical figures were born there and all made themselves by leaving. Tobacco turned the soil to sand and the blood money got drank up or migrated down the river over the years and a lot of the buildings have rotted away or got burned out in the war (Bacon’s, Revolutionary, Civil) and the islands are slowly sinking into the bay. Ozymandias. It’s quiet there now. Flat and greener than green in the summer. The river yawns open. Not much left but the evil. Alternating English aristocratic and indigenous place names. Water in the air, blood in the dirt. Being there feels different.
