Right on the Water
The Only Retreat for Cheney and Rumsfeld: St. Michaels

By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 2, 2006

ST. MICHAELS, Md. -- It's tempting to seek deeper meaning and clues to character in the way Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld kick back in this lovely Eastern Shore community, where both have bought expensive waterfront estates.

Cheney shops for shotgun shells, Rumsfeld buys ice cream.

Rumsfeld's retreat -- a former bed and breakfast built in 1804, for which he paid $1.5 million six months after the invasion of Iraq -- is called Mount Misery. After he took title, two cannonballs were found on the four-acre property: weapons of mass destruction! -- circa 1812.

Cheney's place, named Ballintober after a previous owner's Irish ancestral home, was originally listed for $3.1 million, but the veep drove a hard bargain and paid $2.7 million in September. Among such amenities as a wisteria arbor and swimming pool on nine acres, Ballintober has radiant heat beneath the kitchen and living room floors, especially nice if the vice president pads around in his socks.

Cheney travels through town in brusque black-SUV convoys, emerging with wife Lynne to eat in the best restaurants. Rumsfeld has been spotted driving a Volkswagen Jetta and pumping his own gas. He goes on shopping missions with wife Joyce, lugging antique knickknacks in her wake.

"Like every other husband who comes to St. Michaels," says Peter Gregorio, a gallery owner, who imitates Rumsfeld in this role, trudging with shoulders hunched, bearing a just-purchased old washing tub sort of thing, as his wife presses onward. "One of the most powerful individuals in the world," Gregorio marvels. "I thought it was cute."

The most curious phenomenon of all, of course, is the underlying one: What is the significance of these two Bush Hawks, friends for more than 30 years, feathering nearly adjacent nests in the same hunting grounds? They are separated by two miles of narrow lanes -- nothing but cows and long driveways into the woods. Dock to dock, from Mount Misery on Broad Creek to Ballintober on San Domingo Creek, is about a three-mile sail among the herons and ospreys.

What gives? Is a secret weekend war cabinet forming? Are yachts and duck decoys part of the plan to transform the military? Did Cheney tire of his secure undisclosed hideaway and opt to join Rummy in his serene disclosed getaway?

Whither goes the neighborhood?

One Man's Retreat Is Another's Invasion

We are probably thinking too hard. The search for obscure meaning -- that reflex for overinterpretation -- is so Western Shore. The Bay Bridge is where you lighten up and leave behind your fevered quest for the matrix behind the mask.

Washington assumes the Eastern Shore revolves around it. The Shore is the Holodeck, the other side of the looking glass, the almost imaginary annex and prop closet where we keep in reserve the beach, sun, water, crabs, ducks, oysters, watermen and other endangered species. St. Michaels pops up on the plasma screen in our brains when we punch in "quaint," "historic" and "pricey hand-crafted water-themed tchotchke."

Now with Cheney and Rumsfeld out there somewhere in the tall grass, St. Michaels is the latest place to be sucked into potential Beltway drama, like poor Crawford, Tex.

But there's another way to think about this. Consider an Eastern Shore-centric view.

In such a cosmos, Washington is a faraway moon, rich in resources and raw material, if not manners, sending a one-way stream of immigrants and currency. The moon serves the mother planet, not the other way around. If not managed properly, the immigrants may transform the Shore in negative ways. Some say they already have.

But the money is nice.

Cheney and Rumsfeld, in other words, are avatars of a familiar Western Shore species, riding a predictable wave to the Eastern Shore. Cheney may be the first part-time resident with a full Secret Service detail, but the famous, the rich and the powerful of Washington (and New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh) have been setting a course for St. Michaels and the wider, watery Talbot County for generations.

The area has functioned like the Adirondacks did for the swells of the Gilded Age, Newport for the robber barons and the Hamptons for Wall Street. But somehow St. Michaels -- on the genteel, bay side of the Eastern Shore, 90 minutes from Washington and 90 miles from its boisterous cousin Ocean City -- survives as an anti-Newport, a non-Nantucket, an un-Hamptons. Not overrun, overpriced, overglitzed. Not yet.

The men and women who come here accustomed to conquering their environment and leaving their mark in other spheres find that the ageless, natural rhythms of the Shore tend to absorb and leave an imprint on them . They become part of the story of the Shore, not the other way around.

Now, Cheney has been harder to absorb than Rumsfeld, for security reasons. There's a one-mile-diameter no-fly zone over Ballintober whether Cheney is there or not. Some pilots find this inconvenient and absurd. Resident Bob Welte still grumbles about the night he went to one of his favorite restaurants -- he and Cheney were on the reservation book -- and some security guys frisked him. He took his business elsewhere.

But in general, St. Michaels has reacted with a shrug. Maybe it's because the good people of St. Michaels -- unlike, say, the worldly yet secretly insecure diners at the Palm whenever serious juice or glam appears -- are so hard to impress. They've seen it before.

One recent freezing morning, after hauling 15 bushels of oysters into St. Michaels Harbor, waterman and farmer Mike Mielke patiently ticks off a list of moguls, pooh-bahs and celebrities connected to St. Michaels. He begins with former Treasury secretary Nicholas Brady, who has a house on the water nearby, and ends with a member of Fleetwood Mac ("I can't remember which one") who used to anchor his boat in the harbor. Over the years, residents or regular visitors have included DuPonts, Chrysler heirs, Barry Goldwater, Walter Cronkite, Robert Mitchum, James Michener, Farrah Fawcett, Christopher Reeve, Julianne Moore and more lobbyists, ambassadors, federal agency honchos and members of Congress than there are geese in the sky this time of year. A-list for Washington, you might say.

Michener's old place, Southwind, where he lived around the time his book "Chesapeake" (set in the area) was published, is just up the road from Ballintober and down the creek from Mount Misery.

Point being, says Mielke, "we're not overwhelmed by celebrity. It takes a lot to get our attention."

What does get their attention is a house with a view, a trim boat, water birds on the wing -- and anything that might threaten the small-town vibe that they know is their greatest asset. Nowadays sprawl, that Western Shore scourge, is causing way more buzz and angst than a mere vice president ever could.

Okay, it's true a starstruck crowd of locals did show up two summers ago to be extras in "The Wedding Crashers," and catch glimpses of Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson and Christopher Walken. But that movie is just popular art imitating life: A secretary of the Treasury has a compound in a Talbot County-like area (exterior shots featured a $16 million manse in Talbot), and his daughter gets married at an Inn at Perry Cabin-like retreat (where the scene was actually filmed, in St. Michaels).

As for the real secretary of defense and vice president: "It's two more people who are noteworthy who have chosen to live here," says Jan Kirsh, a garden designer and sculptor who has beautified the second-home grounds of clients from the Georgetown/Chevy Chase/Bethesda axis for nearly 30 years. "They're not the trend-setters, they're following along. People have been coming here a long time. You put on khakis and Top-Siders and you all look the same."

Unbothered People

The Eastern Shore seems like the kind of place that ought to batten down or vanish completely in cold weather. But people in the know -- including Cheney and Rumsfeld -- understand the area's charms rotate with the seasons.

Right now there's duck hunting from boats, and the sight of the few remaining watermen tonging for oysters at dawn, the rising sun captured in the icicles clinging to the rigging of their workboats. There's the way the flat-angled afternoon sun slices across the bobbing masts in the harbor, and the sound of jabbering squadrons of geese hydroplaning into quiet creeks. There's the off-season emptiness of the roads.

"This is the best time to be there," says Art Roberts, a consultant and former lobbyist who lives in Georgetown but has a weekend house (Windypointe) and a boat (Misappropriations) near St. Michaels. "There's about 4,000 geese off our pier. . . . A little snow on the ground, blue sky, the stars are spectacular, a fire in the fireplace, a book, watch a football game, a drink."

Even better: spotty cell service, unreliable BlackBerry reception, not-yet-ubiquitous high-speed Internet. "My clients and other people can't bother me," says Roberts.

"It's becoming an underpopulated Nantucket area, which is what makes it really likable," says former senator John Breaux, Democrat from Louisiana, now with Patton Boggs. He had visited friends there for years, then several years ago saw property from a boat and bought the place. "It's the closest I can get to Louisiana, this close to Washington. It's got hunting, geese, ducks, oysters, crabs, boating on the water."

Many of the fabulous estates inhabited by cocooning potentates are outside town, including those of Rumsfeld and Cheney, screened by trees at the end of those long driveways. Venture along the country lanes and you hardly know they are there. The great houses of Talbot (pronounced "tall-but") turn their backs on the land while they preen for the water. To appreciate them, you need to take a boat (or a vice presidential helicopter) up the creeks and coves of Talbot's ragged coast. It's called house shopping, St. Michaels style.

"I called a Realtor and started telling him all the places we anchored and which water we liked and which water we didn't like," says Margaret Welch, a financial planner, who moved with husband Dick, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, from Alexandria in 1992. "That's how many of us found Talbot."

Settled in the mid-1600s, St. Michaels itself is only about a mile and a half from end to end, with about 1,200 residents. About half the 670 homes in town are owned by part-time residents.

It got its nickname -- "The Town That Fooled the British" -- from the War of 1812 when one night, so the story goes, residents put lanterns in trees outside town to trick a fleet into bombarding the woods instead of the town. It was a move that established St. Michaels's character: Deflect the invaders without them even knowing. This strategy has persisted for centuries. The town has specialized successively in shipbuilding, then fisheries, now tourism and catering to weekenders -- staying small, while the county grew around it.

The politically conservative region is definitely Cheney-Rumsfeld country, but the near absence of political sparks greeting their arrival -- so hard to understand from Washington -- probably owes as much to the fact that out here, says Breaux, "you leave all political animosities at the bridge."

The Cheneys slipped into town during the annual "Christmas in St. Michaels" weekend. They landed in a helicopter at Easton Airport while the traditional parade was just getting started, but they did not attend.

The parade began at the Inn at Perry Cabin and proceeded down Talbot Street, the main-street-without-a-traffic-light of St. Michaels. Christmas lights twinkled from the historic storefronts and porches. The parade had uniquely St. Michaels touches: farm tractors pulling floats mounted on boat trailers. Santa's sleigh was conveyed by boat trailer, too, and Santa? A dentist who had moved from New Jersey.

Residents in Training

The locals have names for the weekenders.

"Up-the-roaders." "Come-to's."

"Rich, retired and relocated."

But here's the thing about St. Michaels: Scratch a "local," and you'll often find a come-to who came to Talbot 10, 20 or 30 years ago and now almost fits in. The county is like an experiment in sped-up evolution, home to a significant population of Western Shore chrysalises at various stages of becoming Eastern Shore butterflies. It's a way of absorbing change.

Cheney and Rumsfeld probably won't complete the transformation, but many other Washingtonians follow the pattern of starting with a weekend house that eventually becomes a retirement residence. Part-time residents are simply full-time residents-in-training.

(The Cheneys and Rumsfelds did not respond to requests for comment. A source close to the Cheneys says the couple wanted to have a part-time home after their White House years to enjoy with their four grandchildren, who are being raised in the Washington area. The Rumsfelds, who also have a place in Taos, N.M., are said to have wanted a retreat more convenient to Washington.)

Not that born-and-raised Talbot County natives are impossible to find. During the Christmas-in-St.-Michaels fundraising tour of fabulous houses (blue booties to be worn over your shoes, please), a pair of watermen stand in the parking lot of Chubbie's Deli and snicker at the real estate pilgrims with their $25 admission tickets dangling from the lapels of their fine winter coats.

Chuck Roe drains his can of Budweiser and drops it in the back of Bert Blades's pickup, then departs to split wood until dark, which he sells to supplement his waterman's income.

Blades lingers. He has spent the morning taking a party of out-of-towners duck hunting. He's also the caretaker of a 55-acre estate for someone who works on Wall Street -- a common arrangement in the symbiotic economy established between the weekenders and the full-timers.

Blades likes out-of-towners all right -- he partially lives off them -- but some of them "come here and the next thing you know, they complain about the noise of your gun when you're hunting. It disturbs their coffee hour. Or the noise of your motor when you're crabbing in their creek. It disturbs their tranquillity."

But the watermen, with their lilting, musical, so-called Elizabethan accent, are a dwindling breed. Evolving St. Michaels is increasingly represented by a growing class of come-to's who are building the economy designed to support the lifestyle of weekenders like Cheney and Rumsfeld. These are many of the shopkeepers, restaurateurs, bed-and-breakfast owners, real estate agents, builders, architects and landscape designers who have found a Talbot County groove that also pays the bills.

People like Robert Snyder. He is the Coldwell Banker listing agent who sold Ballintober to the Cheneys. He's also one of the five commissioners who govern the town. He was an accountant living in Georgetown, then Calvert County, until 1994 when he visited St. Michaels, and it changed the course of his life.

"I just fell in love with it," he says over a beer in a crab saloon on the Harbor. "It's got history, small-town charm, and it's 90 minutes to D.C."

Within months he was living here full time; now he owns one of the oldest houses. He practiced accounting for a while, then had a revelation after hearing a businessman predict a fast-rising tide of retiring and weekending baby boomers headed their way. Snyder switched careers and now lists some of the multimillion-dollar homes for sale in the area.

Snyder and the other commissioners are considering whether to approve a major new development that would increase the number of homes in St. Michaels by nearly 50 percent. The prospect of so many up-the-roaders descending all at once has bitterly divided Talbot, with opponents (many up-the-roaders themselves) raising traffic and environmental concerns. "Save our St. Michaels," they say.

But others are cautiously confident that, somehow, St. Michaels will survive the waves beating ceaselessly eastward, in Cheney's and Rumsfeld's wake. Adapting, as it always has, fooling invaders, sometimes saying no.

Kathy Stovall, 56, remembers when Burl Ives sailed into the harbor and offered to buy the family home from her father, who wouldn't sell. Now, those people buy from her. Higgins and Spencer, a longtime fixture owned by Stovall's family, has furnished many a big estate.

"I don't think we've lost what makes St. Michaels special," Stovall says. "They keep coming, don't they?"