A trip to Cape Henlopen is a beach stroller’s heaven
As tradition dictates, we burned our socks in Eastport last weekend, and lo and behold, the sun came out and spring arrived right on cue. Other harbingers include the budding of our forsythia hedges, the charming chur of the tree frogs and peepers, and most definitively, the sight of the first guy wearing shorts.
I snickered at that last one, scoffing at the poor guy’s skinny white legs.
After seeing the photos from our recent excursion to Cape Henlopen State Park, I regret having been so callous. I, too, wore shorts. And there, too, were my bare legs, even skinnier and whiter.
It was really a gesture of utmost optimism, buoyed by the promise of a warm, sunny day strolling along the beach. The day was, indeed, warm and sunny. In Annapolis, that is. Seventy-five miles away, where the Delaware Bay meets the Atlantic Ocean, it was not so. In fact, it reminded me of the Oregon coast, with a chill fog ghosting in across the tops of the breakers, blurring the dunescape of loblolly pines and gnarled oaks.
Still, we had fun frolicking on the beach, Millie and me.
Millie, our new Labrador-ish rescue puppy, has proven again and again to have been a lucky choice for adoption. Sure, there have been some casualties. She has chewed up the wooden base of a comfy chair, bitten chunks out of throw rugs and shredded several shoes (she seems to like gnawing on the right one of the pair, leaving the left one perfectly wearable); but for the most part, she’s been very calm and sweet and more and more responsive to actually coming when we call her.
One of the two cats has begun to venture out of the basement and Millie has learned to differentiate him from the squirrels. Squirrels you chase as they scamper away from you. Cats you sniff as they pretend to ignore you. Mix them up, and it’s suddenly time to take more of what they call “crate conditioning.”
Millie travels well in the car, so I wasn’t concerned about the prospect of driving two hours to get to the shore. One of the wonderful things about living in Annapolis is that the beach and the mountains are about the same distance away in opposite directions.
We headed across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, Millie looking out at the two freighters in the anchorage to the south, me looking straight ahead with both hands on the wheel and driving at a safe, steady rate (remember, my wife edits all my stuff ).
I hadn’t been back to Cape Henlopen since Louise and I spent our honeymoon there 37 years ago. We had another black lab with us then, actually a cross between a Labrador and a Chesapeake. He was the legendary Ruffian, the inspiration for the children’s book, “Chessie, the Sea Monster that ate Annapolis,” in which the Chesapeake Bay sea monster turns out to be a 42-ton Chesapeake Bay retriever. But that’s literally another story.
Millie and I arrived in Lewes, Delaware and bought an out-of-state day pass for $10 to enter the park.
The Colonial history of the area dates back to 1681, when William Penn, the Quaker leader of the Province of Pennsylvania, was given the deed to what was then called “the Lower Counties on the Delaware” by the Duke of York, who would soon become King James II and incidentally, father of our own Queen Anne (name sake of Annapolis).
The park’s web site notes that Penn proclaimed that Cape Henlopen and its natural resources should be open for the common usage of the citizens of Lewes and Sussex County, “thus establishing some of the nation’s first ‘public lands.’ ”
As a side note, William Penn visited southern Anne Arundel County in 1682. There are historical markers in Harwood, Galesville and Mt. Zion. You can search for them at mht. maryland.gov/historicalmarkers. Penn was partly responsible for making this area a hotbed of Quakerism, along with the founder of the Society of Friends, George Fox.
Wouldn’t it be nice if George Fox Middle School were renamed for this George Fox? Just think of what the school board would save on signage alone.
I once flew over both Cape Henlopen and Sandy Hook at the mouth of the Hudson River in the same short flight, and I was surprised at how similar the two peninsulas looked from the air — large serifs of sand catching the silt flowing downstream before it reaches the ocean. Henlopen’s beaches attract thousands of visitors during the season, but not on a weekday this early in the spring. Most of the folks we encountered were riding bikes on the miles of paved trails.
We started our visit at the Fort Miles Historical Area, a former military base. Strategically located high up on a dune overlooking the mouth of Delaware Bay, the fort was key to the nation’s coastal defense from World War II to the early 1970s. The fort’s gun batteries, stout concrete structures built into the sand dunes, protected Wilmington and Philadelphia from Nazi U-boats and Soviet submarines alike.
The Fort Miles Museum was closed when we were there, but I’ve read that it features exhibits and artifacts inside Battery 519, a 15,000-square-foot fortified underground chamber. There are a number of huge guns on display around the grounds, including a 16-inch bruiser that could send a three-foot-long shell 27 miles, way past Cape May, New Jersey, on the far side of the mouth of the bay. It reminded me of that Three Stooges movie where they shot the cannon for target practice and sank the admiral’s flagship. The walk up to the museum entrance gives you a dramatic view over the dunes. I’ll bet that on a clear day you can see across to Cape May.
We stopped by the Seaside Nature Center where there’s a short trail out across the dunes, but we were disappointed to see a sign that said pets are not permitted. The center was also closed at the time, but we did get to chat with a couple of volunteers manning a shed where you can borrow a bike for free. It’s a program offered by the Friends of Cape Henlopen and it’s a great way to do the paved Loop trail around the park.
Next, we explored a portion of the Gordon Pond trail, a 3.2-mile accessible trail that takes you through the park’s coastal habitats, including dunes, forests, and wetlands.
But our favorite part was the beach itself. Millie had only been to the doggie beach on the South River at Quiet Waters Park, where she’s just begun to dip her paws in the water. Here on the wide-open expanse of the Atlantic, almost at the tip of the cape itself, she was in Labrador heaven. We shared the miles of empty beach with just two other humans, a local man who was showing his pre-teen grandson from Philadelphia what he described as his favorite place on Earth.
Once they left, we had the whole Atlantic Ocean all to ourselves. Millie danced with the balls of foam flicked up onto the sand by the waves. She poked her nose at each of the three large horseshoe crab carcasses left at the crest of a recent tide.
These are just a few of the thousands of horseshoe crabs that crawl up these beaches and especially the beaches along the shore of Delaware Bay to spawn. They’ve done this every spring for the past 450 million years. They’re particularly prevalent on the full moons of May and June.
They lay their little green BB-sized eggs in the sand, just in time to feed birds like the threatened red knot. These birds count on this feast to sustain them on their migration from their wintering grounds in South America all the way up to the Arctic. Watermen also harvest horseshoe crabs to bait eel traps. But the most astonishing use for these living fossils is that the horseshoe crab’s copper-based blue blood is used to make a chemical that detects bacterial toxins in medicines. You probably wouldn’t be alive today if it weren’t for these incredible critters.
We wrapped up our adventure with a good toweling-off and got back to Annapolis well before dark. Millie slept in the back seat the whole way home while I drove at a safe, steady rate with both hands on the wheel at all times.
Cape Henlopen State Park
15099 Cape Henlopen Dr Lewes, Delaware 302-644-5007 For more information, visit destateparks.com/Beaches/CapeHenlopen