After a year of public flogging, Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative has agreed to replace behemoth power poles with smaller, less intrusive poles along Calvert County’s winding Bowie Shop Road and Route 2/4 in Huntingtown.     Smaller is relative.     The poles will still be as tall — 75 feet — but a thicker steel plate will allow for the poles to taper toward the top. That, says SMECO spokesman Tom Dennison, is because “The most...

The story of 14-year-old William Ross of Annapolis reads like an adventure straight out of a Robert Louis Stevenson novel. Late one winter night, William flees a life of hardship to hop a passing ship and begin a new life in the West Indies.     Great stuff, until you read closer: William is a slave fleeing not for adventure but for his life.     A “stout healthy lad,” according to his owner, Ross, was one of a cadre of slaves who fled their...

The striped bass, known around the Tidewater as the rockfish, is one of the most popular of all Eastern, saltwater, game fish. Found along the Atlantic Coast from Nova Scotia to Florida, rockfish have a lifespan of up to 30 years and have been know to exceed of 100 pounds. The current Maryland rod-and-reel record is 67 pounds and eight ounces. Maryland rockfish are spawned in the freshwater reaches of Chesapeake Bay tributaries and remain in the Bay until the age of eight or nine, when they...

How did you fall in love? That’s a question worth dwelling on. Girls at least — perhaps boys, too, though they’ll never tell — grow up dreaming of how they’ll fall in love. Most of us eventually achieve our own love story, some of us many times over. Common as the love story is, it never grows stale. An aging couple joins me at the table at a bed and breakfast, and, before our coffee cups are drained, she’s reported their love story, with him adding Amens!...