North East Isles

26 October 2013       photo by smck©

 On the out-skirts of the small town of North East is a new (relatively speaking) community called North East Isles located at what I knew of as a kid as "out to the Arundel" and where my father as a young man worked as a laborer loading railroad cars with gravel dredged from the Northeast River.  The gravel cars road on a large trestle track that extended a hundred feet or more into the river so that the barged material could be off loaded.  Here I and other kids would go to dive off the then unused  loading pier and swim in the fairly deep waters.  No road led in there for a long time and one walked the main railroad track to the work switch to the river.  My father always warned me never to go there both because of the danger of drowning trapped in underwater coils of rusting cable and because this was a hang-out for boozing neer-do-wells but all we ever saw was the odd fisherman casting from the shore and giving us annoying looks for scaring away the fish.  In the photo above the condominiums are facing directly into the river which is screened from view here by the forest of tree tops on the Elk Neck Peninsula.