NEW YORK — The United States sets aside an area larger than Japan for wildlife conservation. This is one of the things I found out as we spent two weeks this past summer at an isolated cottage on the Chesapeake Bay.
"Cottage," I gather, is a vacation term here. The one we rented was a legitimate house by any standards. Because of its old-fashioned wooden floor, I asked its owner, Bob Locastro, and he said it was indeed built in the 1940s. He bought it for his mother and brother not many years ago, and his sons helped renovate it by, among other things, refinishing the original pine floor.
It is on Gary Creek, west of Cambridge, Maryland, and the land along the creek — here one of the innumerable riverlike inlets that wedge into the Chesapeake littoral — is sparsely populated.