Posts Tagged ‘Calvert Cliffs’

Did the Tusken Raiders have pet dogs?

Monday, February 16th, 2015

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While looking through some old photos this morning, one snapshot from June, 2008, of my golden retriever Jesse, made me pause and reminisce. The location was the Calvert Cliffs formation on the western shore of Chesapeake Bay. Jesse had climbed up into the debris of a fallen section of the cliff, and I snapped him when he worked his way around to this position:

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It looks like Jesse wanted to reenact a scene from Star Wars — the scene on the planet Tatooine when the Tusken Raiders (less formally referred to as Sand People) make their scary appearance:

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Jesse found a similar protective position, and he even managed to emit a low-voltage eerie glow from his otherwise dark eyes, just like the yellow-eyed Jawas below.

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But as for creating just as threatening a look as those two native species of Tatooine? Bah! Earth-bound Jesse totally fails it.

Edgar Hewitt Nye, “The Great Bluff, Chesapeake Beach, Maryland”

Monday, October 25th, 2010

Earlier in the month I bought at auction a painting by the Washington, D.C. painter Edgar Hewitt Nye (1879-1943):

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A plein air sketch (oil on canvas, 18″ x 22″, signed, lr, “E. Nye”, ca. 1920s), this bright landscape was untitled in the auction catalog and otherwise lacked information about its location. It looked familiar, though. The mystery was solved when I found a few souvenir postcards dating back to the early 1900’s when Chesapeake Beach, Maryland, was a popular tourist destination for day-tripping Washingtonians (who arrived there by railway) and Baltimoreans (who traveled by excursion ship). Edgar Nye was one such traveler. What he decided to capture on canvas was not the crowds attracted to the roller coaster and other boardwalk diversions, but an untouched stretch of Calvert Cliffs just to the south of the town. The cliffs are a fossil-rich, Miocene era formation stretching for 30 miles along the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay in Calvert County, Maryland.

Here, then, on a summer day, just a short remove from the noise of the resort, we can imagine Nye walking down to the water’s edge. He finds himself in a place where the air is laden with moisture, where baby waves break softly on the beach. It is here the artist plants his easel in the sand and spends a few hours playing with colors.

He puts to shame the dull penny postcards.

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