DOVER,
Delaware - Any bucket list is meaningless save for the one who
matters the most: The person actually compiling the list.
It
all comes down to what he (or she) would like to see accomplished
before being placed in that lonesome valley. From big ticket items
that are defined by wealth, time and health, to small and mundane
things for which a person had not gotten around to doing for one
reason or another.
In
truth, a bucket list doesn’t have to make sense and in some
measure, ought not to, either. They are the dreams found in one’s
back-of-the-head diary.
Alas,
I have several items on my bucket list that never will see themselves
being checked off.
I
had always wanted to cover as a reporter Alaska’s Iditarod Sled Dog
Race. And I came oh, so, close a number of years back. But my doctor
would have no part of it when he discovered my effort would require
abandoning civilization for the outback and thus require extensive
physical exertion of the kind that my all ready deteriorating spine
would not tolerate.
Ditto
with a withdrawn acceptance to fly aboard one of those aircraft that
climbs high, fast and cocked vertically only to dive towards the
earth just as fast and just as straight. For a few brief moments the
effect mimics weightlessness. My doctor’s response was as expected
as was my wife’s “Are you nuts?”
So
I (very reluctantly) bowed out on doctors’ orders.
Even
so, my bucket list does contain any number of “reasonable to
acquire” items; and one of those I recently saw go from “to do”
to “have done” ledgers. Oh, nothing major, but it was somewhat
spontaneous, not all that expensive, with the bonus of being
downright fun. Perfect bucket list criteria.
Up
until a couple of weeks ago I had just one state left to have set my
foot in – Delaware, of all places, the land of soft-shelled crab
cakes, salt-water marshes, and Joe Biden. The remaining 49 states
were colored in, including Mississippi, which felt my hiking boot’s
impact last late spring.
I
could not plan on doing a several-state tour to complete the bucket
list, needing to head directly to Delaware. This mid-Atlantic state
bills itself as the nation’s “First State,” a claim it can make
since it was the initial one to ratify the Constitution.
Anyway,
my wife, Bev, and I gathered up a AAA trip planner, loosely tossed
some clothing into gym bags, kennel-upped our two dogs into the car
and headed east for around 423 miles to Dover, Delaware. Don’t ask
me why I selected Dover, either. I really was thinking “Wilmington”
but Dover sort of popped out of my mouth.
The
drive carried us through Pennsylvania’s southern tier of counties,
across Maryland and around Baltimore and then up and over the
4.3-mile-long Chesapeake Bay Bridge. The bridge is billed as the
world’s longest continuous over-water steel structure
and which costs $4 to cross but only if you’re headed east. People
heading west in the opposite direction pay nothing. I know, that
doesn’t make any more sense than me trying to scratch
off
a silly bucket list item. Then
again, Joe Biden as a presidential candidate doesn’t make much
sense either.
Once
across the Bay and back on dry land in Maryland’s Eastern Shore it
was just a hop, skip and Triple-A trip planner drive to Delaware. And
than another 45 minute or so drive to Dover, the state’s capital
and home to one of the Air Force’s largest encampments.
Now
that we were there and found a motel room for the night – not an
easy proposition since all but one of the motels we visited said no
to our two Labrador retrievers. As Bev would opine during our motel
search “Dover is not dog friendly.” But I digress.
Perhaps,
but what is
dog friendly (as long as an animal is on a lead no longer than 10
feet) is the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s 16,251-acre/25 square
mile/eight-mile-long Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge. The
refuge’s front is edged by massive farm fields
while its backside butts up against the Delaware Bay, a salty finger
of the Atlantic Ocean.
And
it was at Bombay that the bucket list became more than just my
last
state check-off item.
Bombay NWR
- Bev
and I discovered in a bit of pre-trip
research
-
includes
a 12-mile motor vehicle drive.
No four-lane highway, for sure, but the drive offers
up tremendous wildlife viewing opportunities.
Ducks
were plentiful and included the usual assortment one
would
expect of a migratory bird wintering ground.
Pintails in
large numbers as well as mallards, shovelers and even a pair of black
ducks
that
were picking their
way through
a tidal
mud
flat. Then
there were humongous
flocks
of snow geese and Canada geese and tundra swans.
No
wonder that a goodly portion of the large farms we drove past had
waterfowl-hunting blinds anchored to them. Oh, and an equal number of
deer-hunting blinds. It appears that the Eastern Shore hunters take
their big-game and waterfowl hunting seriously.
It
would have proven foolish to race the course, even if the site had no
posted 25 mile-per-hour speed limit.
We’d
stop here or pulled over there in order to unpack the binoculars or
to
leash the dogs for a quick walk to observation towers
overlooking waterfowl-filled marshes.
Once
we even had a red fox come trotting up the road towards us, stopping
directly opposite the car which enabled us to
shoot a bunch of photographs.
After
four hours of touring, stopping to ogle the assembled wildlife it was
time to leave the Bombay NWR, the city of Dover and the state of
Delaware behind. I had checked off a bucket list minutia. A fly speck
of an interesting item in a lifetime of one’s existence, though
important to me none-the-less.
And
I would suppose there are people who
would
snort
that a 1,100-mile round trip journey
and
a $400 or so wallet reduction was on the silly side just
to fulfill a bucket list wish item.
These
folks
are correct in some respects, though in the end having the First
State become my last to visit (as an approving niece would later say)
meant that not only was a bucket
list entry crossed
off, it was memorably
noted
with the
inclusion of a
very large and very red circle.
- Jeffrey L. Frischkorn
JFrischk@Ameritech.net
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