When I’m asked, “Where are you headed? Do you need any help“ Or, “What are you doing?” My default answer has become, “Just driving around … and drawing.” So that’s what I’ll call these weekly reports.

I live in Belfast, but grew up in Delaware and I’ll start there as it has other claims to being the “first state”. I’m in a 1997 Dodge Roadtrek camper and I’m traveling with Dolly, a seven-year-old terrier.

 Fishy country. Poking my way along rivers. Thursday It was the Delaware. After a night between two semis at the Smyrna rest stop I returned early to Collins Beach, a boat launch in the Cedar Swamp Wildlife Management Area.  Dolly and I had the place to ourselves as the dawn broke. Beautiful marshy estuarine landscape with the cooling tower of the Salem nuke billowing white across the river.

  A fisherman showed up in a Mercedes work van and started dipping bait with a long handled net. He was in a beat-up little john boat with a ladder c-clamped across the gunnels and floats lashed to either end of the ladder as outriggers. He had a balky 9 hp Nissan that I suppose he must have eventually gotten started after several trips to the van for tools. 

 I went down to chat him up and to find out what he was fishing for, but he was Japanese and seemed to speak no English. When he finally got back I never saw what, if anything he caught because he beat it out of there. Maybe he thought I was ICE.

  A crabber tried to put his boat in, but the tide must have been too low. He was in camo gear, with a nice truck, and a serious work boat. You’d think he would have checked the tide.

 Then today across the peninsula I poked along the Nanticoke River where I once pushed an oil barge up to a Perdue chicken factory. The whole flat peninsula is soy beans and chicken barns.

  The farmers were out mowing down their un-harvested soybean fields in the sunshine. At least they looked un-harvested, but what do I know about soybean farming? Boats and docks and crab gear all along the Nanticoke.

  I’m camped tonight in my first RV campsite  — water, electric, and dump-out hookups. There’s a shower room and a laundry.  I might use one or the other in the morning.  Maybe both. It’s the Delaware Seashore State Park where along the beaches there are concrete towers with high school romantic histories. We understood they were lookout towers for German U-boats during WWII.

 The campsite is next to the Indian River Inlet, which connects the coastal lagoon, Little Assawoman Bay, with the Delaware Bay.  My father used to occasionally brave the fast running current in the next cut down at Ocean City in his little boat, the SSA, and come up to the river end of the Inlet to fish. The best fishing was always the most dangerous.  The rip-rapped banks were lined with fishermen when I arrived today. I didn’t see anyone doing anything as Dolly and I strolled along the banks. 

  I wouldn’t have minded giving it a go.

  Most of my issues so far have been with keeping my cell phone charged.  I was at Walmart when they opened at 6 this morning and bought a new charging cable which seems to have done the trick.  

I’m in bed early and the nights are a little long. I’m up at 4 killing time until McDonalds opens with 89 cent black senior coffee and the internet.