WOODLAND BEACH -- It's eerily quiet.
"I come down just to sit and listen to the water," says John Monroe, clutching a fishing pole holding taut its long line in the water. "Or sit on the rocks and watch the boats go by."
This is a hometown beach where, on most days, you're likely to see only a handful of people.
"It's not like Rehoboth, where there's a thousand people every square mile," the Clayton resident says.
That's for sure.
The first of several abbreviated beaches stretching unobtrusively at that amorphous place where the Delaware River becomes the upper Delaware Bay, Woodland Beach is home to fishermen, crabbers, families -- some retired or just starting -- and a stillness, punctuated by the cries of birds and hushed slaps of water against the sand.
And where, if you step on a piece of glass, you're more than likely not going to cut your foot.
It's a beach where you'll find Monroe with his friend Mary Smith of Townsend on most Fridays in the spring and summer, casting their lines to catch catfish or perch. And even then, when Smith does catch something, she throws it, bloodied mouth and all, back into the water.
After all, Monroe says, it's still the Delaware River up here, the northernmost Delaware beach in the estuary. Tidal, brackish, it's more river than bay, let alone ocean.
"It's actually nice now," he says of the river. "Back in the day, it was ugly, when I was young. But you still don't want to eat the fish."
Smith, a waitress, often brings her kids.
"It's much more family-oriented than the boardwalk crowd," she says.
Monroe, who retired a couple of years ago as a chef, says, "The kids don't know the difference between here and there. There's sand. There's water."
And there's history.
"It's a small fishing community, and a lot of people who own there have been there all their lives," says Loral Johnson, a realtor who moved to Woodland Beach three years ago.
It's a town to walk around in, he says. "Since it's the end of the road, you don't have to worry about cars."
It lies at the end of Del. 6, which unspools from Smyrna's strip-mall on U.S. 13 toward a time when midstate Delaware was mostly characterized by ripening fields, lonely two-lane highways, flies and mosquitoes.
Speaking of flies, the first two weeks in June are prime time for a strain of horsefly known locally as greenheads, big, agile, nasty things that swarm beachgoers when the wind blows from the west to east.
They can be maddening, and at times you can feel like Tippi Hedren fighting off a blizzard of ravens. You might even long for the crowds, traffic and overpriced soft drinks at Rehoboth Beach.
But that feeling doesn't last for long.
"It's so quiet," Loral says. "It's charming. On the Fourth of July, you can see the New Jersey coastline, sit on the porch and watch fireworks going off in six different locations."
You also can see the Salem nuclear power plant, just to the left of the concrete and aluminum pier. It's only belching steam, but its sinister, convoluted cone shape gives you the greenheaded willies.
"That's another reason to throw the fish back in the river," Monroe says.
If it's old glass you want ...
But it's not a good enough reason to avoid this beach.
If you look hard and long enough at parts of this stretch of sand caressed smooth by decades of moody water, you may find the trace of a celebration from a very long time ago.
During several of those horse-drawn, then flivver-honking years, amid the scented steam of roasting oxen and skewered pork -- when locals would gather here to listen to political speeches while getting liquored up during the early part of the 20th century -- people left bottles behind.
Over the decades, as the water and sand broke and then licked the glass, bits have returned as works of art known as sea glass.
Glass, after all, consists of 75 percent sand, so it seems a natural marriage.
You can find these artistic pieces of the past everywhere along the beaches of the upper bay. They are found near river mouths all over the world, and, nearby, from the mouth of the Potomac on Chesapeake Bay to Long Island Sound -- and Woodland Beach.
Before the 20th century, vacationers skirted this beach in steamers, on their way to Cape May from Baltimore, across the Chesapeake Bay to Chestertown and on to Bombay Hook Landing, just south of here.
From that time period, one might find the bottles used by snake-oil salesmen, or ones from small brew pubs that would emboss their names on the side. Even those of political candidates, when it was just fine to get a voter drunk before he cast his ballot.
Michael Owens invented the automated bottle machine in 1903 (he's the Owens of Owens-Corning) that "really lifted the volume of glass production in the bottle industry," says Richard Lamotte, whose book, "Pure Sea Glass," published in 2004, nearly single-handedly set off a craft craze for the old glass.
"The water impregnates the thin layer of the surface, and extracts the soda and lime out of the glass, which helps develop the frosted patina that people like," Lamotte says.
You'll find an occasional tire on this beach, as well as a bottle that wouldn't be very good for you to step on.
But mostly one will discover bits of black, green and white frosted glass, a sandy marriage of art and history, bits of which will wend their way into homemade jewelry, or be on display, either at home, or at the 2008 National Sea Glass Festival, to be held this year in Lewes Oct. 11-12.
It's always the weekend here
Every day is Saturday for Andy Marinari.
Firmly clasping his rubber-holdered Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, Marinari recalls the time when Kitts Hummock was a paradise for kids.
"It's still paradise," he says.
Twenty miles south of Woodland Beach on Del. 9, and a short three-mile jog east, brings one to an even more sedate, much homelier, stretch of beach, Kitts Hummock, where Marinari has either visited or lived for six decades now.
It's as silty and lonely here as it is at Pickering Beach a few miles north, filled with the lifeless husks of horseshoe crabs, and mud flats that go out to the widening bay for half the length of a football field.
And birds. Lots of birds that daintily hop across the flats on spoke-like legs, interminably pecking for a morsel.
The beach here is bordered by private homes, their backyard fences sporadically littered with menacing "No Parking" signs.
This is a little-used beach with a vengeance.
But nothing, not even the uninviting nature of the beach, or the recent flood that floated his car away -- at least 150 residents briefly left their homes in Kitts and Pickering Beach in May because of flood waters -- is going to wipe the smile off Marinari's face.
"It's quiet here, and you don't worry about getting shot," he says.
Well, that's something, especially when Marinari, a retired Dover Air Force Base civil service worker who bought a home here 32 years ago, recalls what it was like during the 1950s, when businesses rented boats, and you could still get bushels of crabs and oysters.
Living in Philadelphia as a boy, he summered here with his grandparents. Even back then, he recalls sliding boats out through ankle-deep greasy mud.
Now the mud is knee deep. Back then, he and his friend would get bushels of crabs, he says.
Marinari won't even bother today.
"Nothing's like it used to be," he generalizes.
Marinari entered the service in 1964, and by the time he got back to Kitts a few years later, it all began to change, and the fishing fell off.
This laid-back place's history as a fishing village is well-known, from American Indians to Colonials, like Jehu Curtis, who, in 1738, officially named it Kitts Hummock, perhaps after Captain Kidd, who was thought to have buried treasure here.
Then again, there's a similar legend that the Kidd buried treasure up at Woodland Beach, too. Perhaps the Kidd story evolved into a common tourist draw.
Before the Civil War, the Kitts Hummock Bay View Hotel entertained folks who liked to fish, sit on the sand and feel the breezes from the beach. Soon, family cottages sprang up.
Those days are as gone as Marinari's beer will be in just a minute.
So, what does Marinari do aside from walking around town drinking Pabst, checking the pump house and sitting on the local improvement association with other residents, who include retired firemen and policemen from Pennsylvania?
"I walk the beach," he says.
What about his boat?
"I haul the boat to Bowers," he says.
Sit in peace and quiet
It's a good idea, because Bowers Beach, a short 10 miles south of Kitt's, seems to have been made for boats.
If you stand beside the dock at William "Frenchie" Poulin's crab place, the boats look great, bobbing together like toys in a bathtub.
Standing here, you're at the point where the bay has just made its decision to spread its wings.
It's still another 40 miles to Cape Henlopen and on to the great ocean resorts, but now the bay is so wide the haze of New Jersey becomes just a haze.
And, unlike the conditions of the beaches at Kitts or at Pickering -- and like the beach at Woodland -- one can at least sit with other small, laid-back families and watch the water softly wave.
"I come here a lot because it's so quiet," says Christa Grunsby of Felton, who was sat on the Bowers sand with her sister, Amy Hafer, and two of their children.
"It's nice for the little kids because the water isn't so rough, and there are lots of shells."
Bonuses for Grunsby also include less gas to buy to get here from Felton, and very quiet night walks along the beach with her fiancée.
But this also is a beach with as rich a history as Woodland and Kitts. Even more so, because Bowers had gone through a dozen incarnations, from being a great oyster village and salt-water anglers' resort in summer to muskrat trapping on the Murderkill in winter. For a time, it even attracted painters.
Named after the Bowers family who owned it from 1734 to 1847, beginning in the 1850s Bowers Beach became the setting for two great, albeit segregated, traditions that survived until World War II.
A celebration called Big Thursday, begun in 1852 to celebrate the end of an oyster ban, became an annual tradition for whites, who celebrated on the second Thursday in August -- the actual day when the oyster ban was lifted. Blacks celebrated the following Saturday, which became known as Black Saturday.
As a government publication from the 1930s described the tradition, "Automobiles and trucks bring farm families from nearby necks along the bay or from piney-woods regions near the Maryland Line. Farm work is slack: corn is too big for cultivating, and tomatoes and other crops have not reached their peak. It is a good time to take a breathing spell from hot fields and hotter kitchens."
As in Woodland Beach, during election years the politicians would show up shilling both policy and booze.
"In a state where a farmer in overalls naturally addresses a United States Senator by his nickname, and the Senator just as naturally calls the farmer by his, gatherings like this are not to be neglected," reported the 1938 Works Progress Administration Guide.
All that is gone now, in Bowers, as in Woodland and Kitts.
What's left, for most travelers, a long stretch of nothing between New Castle County and the Sussex County resorts.
What actually remains are quiet, sometimes grimy beaches, pretty sea glass, fishing poles, boats, and a scattering of families.
And a few older gentlemen and ladies taking walks.
Because here, in the summer, every day is Saturday.