That was then, this is now.

Russell, at middle-age an accomplished actor with a long list of stage credits, will take a lead role in Chesapeake Shakespeare Co.’s production of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” part of the Baltimore theater community’s three-year celebration of August Wilson’s 10 plays about 20th-century Black life.

Russell will play Seth, owner of the boarding house, circa 1910, where the story unfolds. It’s his first role with Chesapeake Shakespeare but one of many he’s had in his hometown. Russell has been a member of Everyman Theatre’s talented resident company since 2019. He’s traveled far and wide to play all kinds of roles, some Shakespearean, over a professional career stretching back 32 years.

Not bad for a shy guy.

And even more interesting given his first career choice — Baltimore police officer.

Jefferson Russell’s life provides a good lesson for any young man or woman — in high school or just out, in college or just out — who might be quietly fretting the road ahead. Some have decided on a career already, but most are still uncertain, and that’s quite all right. Jefferson Russell will tell you that.

His life’s journey affirms that the choices you make at 18 or 22 do not lock you into a career. You could be on a completely different path at 30 or 40 or 50.

And if you think you’re too shy — or too this or too that — you might prove yourself wrong, in a good way.

The son of William and Alice Russell, a doctor and nurse, Jefferson Russell got a taste of acting when he was a boy growing up in Baltimore. His mother knew her youngest child was on the shy side, so she enrolled him in a couple of summer theater programs for kids.

But by the time Russell was a senior at City, he had decided on a career in law enforcement. He studied sociology and criminal justice at Hampton University in Virginia. He graduated in the mid-1980s, around the time Kurt Schmoke became the first Black man elected mayor of Baltimore. That got Russell interested in serving his hometown.

“I decided to come back home to be a police officer because it really felt like a shift, a big shift,” he says. “And I wanted to be a part of it. …[Becoming an officer] was, truly, to work for my people, my neighborhood and my city. I wasn’t interested in being a police officer any place else.”

His first stop was Greenmount Avenue and Eager Street, his post as a new officer in the tough Eastern District, in the midst of the war on drugs. He spent four years in uniform before deciding to take another path.

Two things had bothered him — the increasing number of young boys getting in trouble for acts of violence and the behavior of fellow officers. “You see certain things,” he says. “You’re exposed to certain things, and I didn’t need to be a part of it.”

He thought he could be most effective counseling kids instead of arresting them. “I didn’t get the job to knock heads,” he says.

So he took a state position as a juvenile probation officer, checking up on minors in Prince George’s County who were under court supervision.

Russell found that work rewarding, but, as it turns out, the seed for a career in acting had been planted several years earlier, back at Hampton University.

In his freshman year, Russell was homesick and wanted to transfer to another school. His mother would have none of that and, as she had done similarly when he was a boy, she suggested her son “go to the theater department and see what’s going on.”

And that’s exactly what he did. Russell got busy with student productions. During an exciting and successful trip to Chicago for a drama competition with other college students, the acting seed took root.

“My world just opened up,” he says.

Still, he came back to Baltimore, entered the police academy and went to the Eastern District. During his years as a police officer and his time in juvenile justice, acting remained a side gig, not a career.

Which gets us to the other lesson from the life of Jefferson Russell, this one for the adults in the room: If you see something in a young man or woman, some skill or talent that they do not see themselves — because they lack confidence, because they’re shy, because they’re distracted — you have a duty to point it out. You have an adult responsibility to be encouraging.

“I have benefited from people seeing things in me that I was not ready to recognize,” Russell says.

His parents, especially his mother, supported him in his endeavors. And at Arena Players in Baltimore, Amini Courts and Donald Owens, the artistic directors, encouraged Russell to be an actor. “Those two people are my mentors,” he says, “and they are people who see something in you that you don’t see in yourself.”

What they saw was what has emerged — a skilled actor with a robust persona and arresting stage presence. Not bad for a shy guy.

We met on a day in June, along a branch of the Potomac River. He was a pleasant guy, eager as a farm boy to go fishing, but his near toothlessness made him seem much older than his years.

Cue Sen. Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont:

“Far too many Americans, especially in rural areas, do not have access to a dentist, which forces them to either travel long distances or go without the care they need. Very few dentists accept Medicaid (for low-income patients), preventing the most vulnerable people in America from getting the dental procedures they need.”

That’s what Sanders had to say in May when he filed legislation to expand government-funded dental coverage for seniors, veterans and low-income families. The Comprehensive Dental Reform Act of 2024 would also increase the number of dentists and dental hygienists, filling a particularly big need in rural areas.

More than anyone in the Senate, Sanders points out inconvenient truths. Like the late Rep. Elijah Cummings of Baltimore, a champion of oral health who pushed Maryland to expand dental coverage for the disadvantaged, Sanders wants the federal government to do more through Medicaid, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The nation has a dental crisis, he says, and brings data to the claim:

“Nearly 70 million adults and nearly eight million children have no dental insurance and many of those who do have dental insurance find that coverage to be totally inadequate. …One out of five seniors in our country are missing all of their natural teeth. Over 40% of children in America have tooth decay by the time they reach kindergarten.”

Research and surveys by Kaiser Family Foundation show that half of U.S. adults have difficulty paying for health care and, in recent years, 60% of Americans said they put off getting the services they need. Dental care, Kaiser reported, is the service most likely to be delayed due to costs.

Sanders again: “The situation has become so absurd, that each and every year hundreds of thousands of Americans travel to countries like Mexico, Costa Rica, India, Thailand and Hungary where it is much less expensive to get the dental care they need even after paying for round-trip airfare and hotel stays.”

In Maryland, some people wait until they hear about a free dental clinic.

There’s a big one scheduled for Friday, Sept. 13, and Saturday, Sept. 14, at the Wicomico Youth & Civic Center in Salisbury. It’s called the Eastern Shore Mission of Mercy, and when it was last held, in 2019, more than 1,100 men and women showed up for help with their teeth.

This year’s event will be the first large one since the pandemic — smaller missions are held around the state at different times — and organizers expect more than 100 dentists, hygienists and dental assistants to volunteer.

“It’s very rewarding, but it’s also very exhausting because there is so much need,” says Dr. Celeste Ziara, the president-elect of the Maryland State Dental Association who has been volunteering for the missions for several years. “About four or five hours into it, you’re exhausted, but you keep going because the line never stops.”

The doors open each day at 7 a.m. for hundreds of adults who either have no insurance or have no provider willing to take patients on Medicaid.

Each patient goes through a medical assessment and dental triage, including an X-ray, before being escorted to one of the rented dental chairs on the floor of the civic center. Some people just need a cavity filled or a tooth extracted. Others have a whole mouthful of problems, but can only have one issue, the most urgent, treated at the mission. Usually that’s all there is time for.

“Sometimes patients will come in and say, ‘This front tooth is broken, it really bothers me, I don’t like the way it looks,’” says Judy Forse, a hygienist based in Salisbury. “But they might have a bombed-out tooth with an active infection. They’re worried about that front tooth when in actuality we should be concerned about the tooth that’s infected.”

Forse expects each day of the clinic to run nonstop for 10 to 12 hours. She says she could use more volunteers to work in shifts so that fewer patients are turned away.

“Many of them will get there very early in the morning, and they are waiting all day long to get a tooth extracted,” says Forse. “The goal is to make sure they don’t have any type of infection in their mouth, anything that could send them to the hospital. That’s the priority.”

It’s humbling, Forse says, to see so many people in need, but hugely rewarding to see so many grateful for dental care they thought was out of reach.

I’m of two minds about this — appreciative that dental professionals in our state are willing to stage a free clinic for those in need, but also bothered that dental care must come to some like this. To quote Sanders one more time: “Dental care is health care and health care must be considered a human right, not a privilege.”

The shadows excited him.

“I like what I’m seeing,” Harris called out. “This looks very encouraging!”

Dressed for work in khakis and a T-shirt, Harris stepped down from where we had just parked — on River Road in Grantsville, Garrett County — and he craned his neck into the five-foot tubes to assess the progress of trees he and the Amish lads had planted.

The shadows had been those of green leaves.

“Lots of leaves!” Harris called out, expressing the glee of a young farmer seeing his hard work sprout through soil.

Though Harris is not a farmer, his job puts him in contact with them and other landowners in Maryland’s westernmost county. He manages Trout Unlimited’s project to improve habitat and water quality for native brook trout — a beautiful fish that has managed to survive 300 years of human invasion, from colonial settlements through coal mining, suburbanization and now the climate crisis.

Our remaining native brook trout populations are primarily in Garrett County and in the Gunpowder Falls watershed northwest of Baltimore. They have been imperiled by the loss of habitat and by the centuries-long degradation of the little veins of water that flowed through dense forest before farmers cleared land for crops.

The big concern now is the effect of climate change on water temperatures. Brook trout need cold water. They need to be able to migrate to it during the hottest times of the year. They need to be able to spawn without abnormal flooding blowing out their redds.

About 40% of Maryland’s brook trout waters are on privately owned land. So Harris’ duties include convincing people to plant more trees along the creeks, licks and runs that flow through their properties. A healthy and full tree canopy can help offset Code Red temperatures.

The Amish farmer on River Road, along the Casselman River, was glad to get what Harris offered — hundreds of maple trees for his maple sugar operation, fencing to keep his cows off a small creek, and more trees in the lower part of his property near the river. All Harris had to do was guarantee that the trees were privately funded — from the local chapter of Trout Unlimited and other organizations — and not in any direct way connected to government. (While they pay taxes, the Amish prefer not to receive benefits from government programs.)

The farmer’s two sons helped Harris do the spring plantings. The tubes protect the trees from deer. Some of the landowners he’s approached find the tubes unsightly, Harris says, but, if all goes well, they can usually be removed after three years.

The trees on the Amish property will reforest a section of land where a small creek flows to the Casselman. The creek provides summer passage for the brook trout to areas upstream where they find cool water from springs. (Brook trout survival typically requires water temperatures below 68 degrees.)

Planting trees has a huge effect on just about everything.

“It’s good for the birds,” Harris says. “It’s good for bugs, good for fish, good for water temperature. There’s all kinds of things that trees do that nothing else does. … The best thing you can do, from a habitat standpoint, is plant trees.”

And there are funds available for that, Harris says.

Even so, as he and volunteers with the Upper Gunpowder Falls Watershed Brook Trout Conservation Partnership have learned, some landowners prefer big lawns or open fields mowed right up to the banks of a stream.

Driving through Carroll County, I came across the South Branch of the Gunpowder Falls and could not believe what I was seeing — a property that looked like a golf course, except it wasn’t a golf course. It was a vast field without a single tree. The South Branch coursed through the property, completely exposed to the summer sun.

Some people find this sort of landscape beautiful. I think it’s an awful waste, a lost opportunity to improve water quality and habitat for the brook trout. It also represents hundreds of gallons of fossil fuels burned to keep the place mowed.

You can’t force people into being good stewards of their land. But you can at least try to convince them of the value of planting trees. That’s what volunteers with the Upper Gunpowder project have been doing for several years because the basin north and west of Prettyboy Reservoir supports the second-highest number of brook trout in the state, about 25% of the Maryland population.

River Valley Ranch, the summer youth camp and retreat in Carroll County, got into the act with a grant from the state in 2019. The Gunpowder flows right through the place and Muddy Creek meets it there. The project resulted in plantings along the stream banks to reduce erosion and improve habitat for brook trout.

But there’s a lot more to be done throughout the vast Gunpowder watershed. A lot of landowners need to plant trees. Autumn is a good time for that. Plant trees, save the brookies, save the planet. I think I just wrote the bumper sticker.

The Rite Aid bankruptcy happened.

And that’s no small thing. The Walbrook Rite Aid closed, leaving a huge empty space in the shopping center and a hole, for now, in Richardson’s ambition to grow wealth among Black families through what he calls “inclusive ownership.”

I first reported on Richardson’s big idea three years ago, when TREND, the Chicago-based social enterprise that he leads, set about looking for investors in Walbrook Junction. For as little as $1,000, anyone over the age of 18 could become a part owner of a shopping center that had tenants, including Rite Aid and Save A Lot, but needed an upgrade.

“When was the last time that lower and middle-income Baltimore residents, intentionally Black residents, were given an opportunity to own a shopping center?” Richardson said in 2021. “What if [neighbors] owned it and made the shopping center better over time? They will take pride in it, protect it and patronize the shopping center in a way maybe they wouldn’t if they didn’t have an ownership in it.”

Richardson’s goal is the same as that of Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate for president, in her advocacy of tax incentives for homebuilders and government grants for first-time homebuyers. “For people all across our nation,” Harris said, “a home represents financial security, the opportunity to build wealth and equity, and a foundation for a better future…”

Why not a stake in a shopping center?

TREND, established with grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and Chicago Community Trust, started acting on Richardson’s big idea a while ago. It purchased two shopping centers in the Chicago area, both in neighborhoods where at least half of the residents were Black.

The events of 2020 got Richardson to step up TREND’s efforts at growing wealth among people of color. He called it “a year of pandemic, protest and political pandemonium,” with the civil unrest sparked by the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, along with the destruction of retail businesses.

Paul Brophy, a veteran urban planner and former president of the Enterprise Foundation, got Richardson thinking about Baltimore. He looked at 10 shopping centers before he made an offer on Walbrook, lined up capital and arranged financing.

He then launched a crowdfunding page, offering stakes in the 47,070-square-foot shopping center. The offering closed at $332,000 from 130 investors. About half of them were Marylanders, according to Richardson, and mostly from Baltimore or the Baltimore area.

With some additional government funding, TREND was able to give the shopping center a facelift, a new roof and a community-minded theme: “We Own This.”

But then, the parent company of one of its major tenants, Rite Aid, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and closed 154 stores in 15 states. Several Baltimore-area stores, including the big one in Walbrook Junction, shut its doors.

“We were just about to celebrate full occupancy,” Richardson says. “We renovated the shopping center. We found a new Black entrepreneur to open a first-class laundry facility…”

And Richardson hoped to hear that Rite Aid would renovate its store.

Instead, he got the bankruptcy news.

“This was going to be the year that we would celebrate the fact that we could make a distribution to investors,” Richardson says. “But with the Rite Aid space being vacant, you know, we’re not going to have the cash flow to be able to do that.”

Rite Aid left the store full of equipment and shelving. “We had to pay to get that out,” Richardson says.

Now the hunt is on for a new tenant, maybe one that will take all 10,000 square feet that the pharmacy left behind. Maybe it will be another pharmacy. There’s still a need for one in the area, Richardson says.

“Our primary objective is to get what we call community serving tenants,” he says. “We don’t want to get another Dollar Store or a check cashing place. Is there a health care provider, a non profit … that might do senior services or workforce development?”

Richardson knows he might have to divide up the space previously occupied by Rite Aid to accommodate smaller businesses — a hair or nail salon, maybe a small pharmacy or a bank branch. TREND was able to get the state’s support for a grant to retrofit the space for new tenants.

The hope, he says, is to get the Rite Aid space filled so that his investors might start seeing returns next year.

“The center looks better,” he says. “It’s got a new roof. It’s got a new parking lot. It’s got a facade. There’s still work to be done. There’s still active drug dealing in and around the shopping center. So, even though we’ve invested in security cameras and security patrols, there’s still some operating challenges. But our objective is to make it a community asset so that it doesn’t become a liability for the community.”

TREND is also redeveloping, with the same investment strategy and the help of about 200 investors, the long-neglected Edmondson Village Shopping Center, also on the west side of the city. Richardson expects to have some news about that place soon. “Stay tuned,” he says.

As a 34-year-old pitcher having a surprisingly strong season for the young Orioles, he is finally, and consistently, demonstrating the skill a scout saw in Suárez 18 years ago in his native Venezuela.

On Sunday, when the Orioles beat the Red Sox at Camden Yards, Suárez pitched six scoreless innings for his third scoreless start in a row and his eighth overall. His performance is even more impressive when you consider the circumstances; he came out of nowhere to become a steady starter after injuries knocked Baltimore’s best out of the pitching rotation, three of them for the season.

So Suárez is a good story right now because he’s doing well and blooming late, after a long Hobbsian Journey.

That’s my term for the life journey of a player — or, really, anyone — who starts out bound for glory, doesn’t meet expectations for all kinds of reasons, but through grit and determination ultimately finds success, even stardom. The talent they demonstrate in youth could be striking or subtle; either way, the potential is clear. But things happen.

I take the name from a fictional baseball player, Roy Hobbs, the protagonist of “The Natural,” Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel made 32 years later into an excellent film starring Robert Redford.

As a teenager, Hobbs is blessed with extravagant talents, but his journey to the big leagues is cut tragically short. Sixteen years later, he returns to baseball and finally gets a chance to prove himself. When Hobbs shows up, at age 35, with a contract to play for the New York Knights, the manager, Pop Fisher, says: “Fella, you don’t start playing ball at your age, you retire.”

But, of course, Hobbs shocks Pop and everyone else with his batting skills and completes his heroic journey.

Albert Suárez’s journey — 10 years in the minor leagues before getting his first Major League start, contracts with four clubs before leaving the U.S. to pitch for teams in Japan and Korea — would have prompted most players to take a job at Home Depot. To stay on track and complete a Hobbsian Journey, a man or woman must have a strong heart and deep veins of confidence. They need odyssean commitment to the long game. They must believe in themselves when others no longer do.

Jim Henneman, the longtime Baltimore sportswriter, reminded me of two other Orioles whose journeys to the majors required a high degree of grit.

Hoyt Wilhelm’s professional career had just started when he was drafted into World War II. He served with the Army in Europe, received a Purple Heart after being wounded during the Battle of the Bulge, came home, and spent six years in the minor leagues before making his Major League debut at age 29.

Wilhelm had a 20-year career as a knuckleball pitcher with 10 teams, including the Orioles. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1985. He became a member of the Orioles Hall of Fame in 2002.

This weekend, Terry Crowley will receive the same honor from the Orioles. He was known as Crow and had a couple of different stints with the Birds in the 1970s. He was best known as a pinch hitter.

One spring, Crowley didn’t make the cut for the opening day roster. He was 30 years old and considered retirement. Instead, Crowley signed a contract and reported to the Orioles’ top farm team at the time, the Rochester Red Wings.

“I’m going [to Rochester], hit .300 with 30 home runs and prove I can play this game,’” he told Henneman.

And in 108 games with the Red Wings, Crowley hit .308 with 30 home runs.

“He finished the year in Baltimore,” Henneman says, “and stayed five more before being released.”

That’s a good story though it doesn’t quite match, in duration and drama, Albert Suárez’s Hobbsian Journey. He was way out there — in Tokyo with the Yakult Swallows, in Daegu with the Samsung Lions — before returning to the U.S. and the Orioles.

A long journey and a late bloom happen elsewhere in life. I recently met a man who left a career in law enforcement to pursue his dream of stage acting. (More on that in a future column.) There are movie stars who did not get leading roles or reach stardom until they were in their 40s or even 50s: Ian McKellen, Morgan Freeman, Judi Dench, Samuel L. Jackson, Viola Davis.

Last fall at the Country Music Awards, Jelly Roll, the singer born Jason DeFord in 1984, received an award that usually goes to younger artists. His acceptance speech, filled with the passion you hear in his songs, was one for the ages:

“There’s something poetic about a 39-year-old man winning New Artist of the Year. I don’t know where you’re at in your life, or what you’re going through. But I want to tell you to keep goin, baby! I want to tell you that success is on the other side! I want to tell you that everything’s gonna be okay! The windshield is bigger than the rearview for a reason! And what’s in front of you is much more important than what’s behind you!”

Current estimates for a third bay bridge — the painful idea of former Gov. Larry “The Road Warrior” Hogan — run as high as $9 billion. No one knows what the final cost will be if that bridge is ever built.

One way to reduce traffic congestion at the Sandy Point-Kent Island pinch point — where the two bridges currently stand and the third is being proposed — is to provide the public with several alternative crossings.

The study just released by a five-county tourism consortium shows ferry routes to points on the Eastern Shore, such as Cambridge, Crisfield, Oxford and Easton.

The idea is to get more Marylanders to visit those towns without having to drive there.

All good. The state should get behind that plan.

But it should go much further.

The bay needs a transportation master plan that includes electric-powered ferries — not as a novelty, but as part of sustainable infrastructure.

Imagine this: You live in Fallston, Harford County, and you want to go to Ocean City for a week. You dread the drive — either to the bay bridge 50 miles away or north to Delaware, then south to Rehoboth Beach and Ocean City. Maybe you have kids. Maybe they’d like to take a ride on a boat. So you drive 25 miles to Sparrows Point and park on a ferry that delivers you and your family to Kent Island. You burn less gas. You avoid some wear-and-tear on your brain. Your kids have a little thrill, and they see that there’s another way to get across the water besides the big, scary bridge.

And they think it’s absolutely cool that the ferry runs on electricity.

A ferry from Sparrows Point, in Baltimore County, or Port Covington, in Baltimore, would be even more convenient for city dwellers or families driving from points west — from Reisterstown or Sykesville, from Howard County or Frederick County.

If Ocean City isn’t your destination, you could spend part of a day in Rock Hall or Annapolis, and you wouldn’t need your car.

As for people who commute daily on the bay bridges, why not a ferry from Kent Island to Annapolis or Baltimore?

A system of ferries across and up and down the bay — “Hey, let’s take our bikes to St. Mary’s City for a day!” — would boost business for bars and restaurants (some of them established because of the ferries), bring more visitors to events like the Crisfield Heritage Festival or Oxford Day, and generally get people who presently have no access to boats on the water.

It will inspire a greater appreciation of the bay.

It will prompt the state and municipalities to provide more reliable ground transportation — shuttle buses, scooters, bikes, rickshaws.

Of course, this won’t be for everybody.

There are people who want no transportation other than the one parked in their driveway. I have heard from them — such kvetchers and doomers — ever since I first suggested that a fleet of electric-powered ferries, like those in operation in Europe, be used to take pressure off the bridges.

These are the same people who hate public transportation without ever having used it. Or maybe they tried Light Rail to get to an Orioles game, experienced a delay or other problem, and decided they’d never use it again.

Many of the people who sneer at public transportation think the climate crisis is a bunch of hooey and support Donald “Fossil Fuels Forever” Trump. They’re stuck in the 20th century.

Hey, if you don’t like electric cars, don’t buy one.

If you don’t like solar panels, don’t install them.

If you don’t like electric ferries, don’t use them.

The rest of us should support big-picture politicians who recognize the climate threat and legislate for a greener future that includes more environmentally friendly transportation options.

It will take some doing, even for tree huggers. All of us are, to some extent, spoiled; we expect to go everywhere by car and for there to be ample parking when we arrive. Part of that comes from our resignation that mass transit will forever be limited and unable to meet our needs.

That explains some of the great unsettledness or malaise among Americans, a sense that we’re stuck, running in place. We need moon-shot ambitions to keep us believing that we have the power to fix things, that we’re not doomed.

That’s exactly why I suggest the Great Chesapeake Bay Ferry Revival — yes, before the bridges, we had ferries — as a part of an important push to instill higher expectations for public transportation, especially among kids and future kids. They have the most to lose if we don’t do everything humanly possible to reduce carbon emissions.

Looks like I have allies. The study for the ferry consortium included a survey of people from 15 Maryland communities. Nearly 70% had “a high level of interest” in a Chesapeake ferry system, and 50% said “they would be more interested in the service if it was provided by an electric ferry.” That’s a great starting point for a potentially great project.

I don’t care if the bartender who handed me a Guinness the other day speaks English with a South Asian accent; he poured the draft perfectly and served it with a smile. I don’t care what his immigration status is.

Nor that of the women cooking meals in the restaurant’s kitchen.

I assume, as many Americans do, that the nation benefits from the immigrants in our midst. That includes an estimated 11 million who, over decades, entered the country the hard way, through an unauthorized border crossing, often because they were desperate.

I could cite numerous economists who say what should be obvious to anyone who pays attention: Immigrants, documented or not, make our society work; they are part of the reason it grows and thrives. Many have made billions in Social Security contributions for benefits they will never receive.

Forty years ago this summer, when President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, ran for reelection, he said: “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though sometime back they may have entered illegally.” His offer of amnesty pulled 2.7 million people out of the shadows and gave them an opportunity to become citizens.

Now, as Republican Donald Trump runs a third time for president, he proposes the absolute opposite. He has made deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants a centerpiece of his campaign. Never mind that it will require a massive roundup of people who have been living here peaceably for years. Never mind that it will hurt the economy. Never mind that it would erase any sense of official American empathy for the poor and oppressed who have filled the immigrant ranks for generations.

Ali Velshi, the MSNBC host, visited Baltimore in the spring to promote his book, “Small Acts of Courage,” about the migrations of his family going back to India in the 19th century. Velshi’s book left me with an even greater feeling of awe and respect for those who make the decision to leave their homelands.

Being a migrant is incredibly hard. Even for the desperate, it takes courage to move into a new culture, learn a new language and find work while enduring animosity, even violence, just because you are different. Velshi’s family history is an odyssey that runs from the time of the British Raj in India to South Africa during apartheid, then to Kenya to Canada and to the U.S. It’s a remarkable story about a daring and enterprising family.

What’s impressive is Velshi’s journalistic labors to flesh out family legend and lore, to understand what made his ancestors move. “Why Does Anyone Leave Anywhere?” is the title of a chapter in the book.

“I had heard a lot of the stories,” Velshi said in a recent telephone interview. “I knew the facts, but not the why…why those stories came to be, what the motivations were. I wanted to understand what the goal was, whether it was my great grandfather jumping off a ship…”

Jumping off a ship into shark-infested waters in order to reach the coast of what was then Portuguese East Africa, now Mozambique. From there, Velshi’s paternal great grandfather, Velshi Keshavjee, hoped to travel to Pretoria, South Africa. What motivated him to take that risk in 1901 was the same thing that motivates migrants today — an escape from poverty and oppression and the hope of a better life.

I appreciate Velshi’s dig into his roots. Intentionally or unintentionally, as time goes by, a lot of first- and second-generation Americans lose interest in their immigrant ancestry and how it relates to immigrants today.

“I’m of a split view on this,” Velshi said. “On one hand, I think we need to change how we think about immigrants and immigration and be a little more grateful to these people who are keeping our work base going and our economy going. There’s all sorts of studies that indicate that, even in the next 10 years, our growth — that will exceed the growth of other similar countries — will be based on immigration. So there’s the economic argument.

“I’ve leaned away from the sentimental argument. But the bottom line is, it’s both. People tell me, ‘These people are only coming here for money, for economic reasons.’ And I’m like, ‘Why did your great grandparents come here exactly?’ They leave for the same reasons — either they’re being oppressed or they’re fleeing conflict or [for] more money, greater prosperity. And you should count our blessings that you live in a place that they want to come to.”

On MSNBC and in his book, Velshi can seem overly optimistic about the prospects for American democracy. That’s a condition he came by honestly. He descends from a long line of men and women who, once oppressed under colonialism, became politically active and valued democracy above all other systems. Whoever claimed immigrants respected our system more than a lot of native-born Americans was not off the mark.

As Velshi puts it: “Cynicism about politics is actually a luxury of those who have never had to experience life without it, and if those people ever truly lost their ability to participate in the system, they’d never take it for granted again.”

Maybe researchers for the National Center for Health Statistics allowed for exaggeration when, in 2022, they interviewed people across the country about how often they took a walk. I checked the survey’s methodology and found that “linear and quadratic trends by age group, family income and education were evaluated using orthogonal polynomials,” but still could not tell if self-delusion was taken into account.

Pardon my skepticism, but I found the results of the walking survey recently reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hard to believe.

It said nearly 60% of Americans claimed to have taken a leisurely walk within the previous week.

Why do I find this hard to believe? Call it skepticism based on daily observation of my fellow Americans; we have a tendency to drive everywhere and watch a lot of television. Many of us live in suburban communities that do not even have sidewalks.

According to the survey, “walking for leisure” could mean walking “for fun, relaxation, exercise, or to walk the dog.”

That’s a wide range of reasons, and only one would constitute what your doctor might call a “health walk,” which is what I thought this survey was all about, seeing how it came from our national public health agency.

But, even if the survey was about walking in general, and not just “health walking,” I remain skeptical.

Six out of 10 Americans take a walk each week — and not just to the cars in their driveways?

Hey, if it’s true, it’s great.

It could mean that something sustainably healthy came out of the pandemic, when homebound and restless Americans took up walking like crazy.

I asked Shima Hamidi what she made of the survey results. She’s an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University who studies how transportation and urban-suburban planning affect our lives. The first thing that came up in our conversation was all that pandemic walking we did.

“The survey is not exactly for the time of the [pandemic] lockdown, it’s for a few months after that, but still people kept the habit,” Hamidi said. “With jobs now remote, people have more time and they are at home. They tend to walk more for leisure. So the number is higher than what you would expect. That could explain the situation.”

About 16% of the people in the survey said they primarily walked to get to transportation, a bus or subway. “Black adults had a lower likelihood of leisure walking than Asian, White, multiple-race and Hispanic adults,” the survey found. “White and Hispanic adults were less likely to walk for transportation than multiple-race, Asian and Black adults. The percentage of adults who walked for leisure increased as levels of family income and education increased. Walking for transportation was highest for adults with the lowest family incomes.”

Where people live figures into how much walking they do, says Hamidi.

“If you are living in a neighborhood where you have access to parks, green spaces, and a nice trail that you see in suburban areas, you are more likely to walk for leisure,” she says. “If you live in a neighborhood that doesn’t have those amenities but has good access to daily destinations, like coffee shops, restaurants and grocery stores, and access to a transit stop that connects you to jobs, then you are more likely to walk for transportation, which happens in city neighborhoods.”

Without those things, either suburban or urban, walking falls off, along with health.

Hamidi’s research covers suburban sprawl and smart-growth planning. Both are related to health.

She noted that two of the leading causes of death in the U.S., accidents and obesity, were related to suburban life. According to the CDC, heart disease continues to be the nation’s leading cause of death, and the number of cardiac deaths related to obesity tripled between 1999 and 2022. Accidents were the third leading cause of death in 2022, according to the CDC.

“In sprawling areas, compared to more compact neighborhoods, you are three times more likely to be involved in a fatal car crash,” she says. “In a sprawl area, you drive more. You spend more time in traffic congestion. If you spend more time traveling for work, you have less opportunities for physical activity, less access to healthy food, and more likely to have fast food options around you.

“If you look at all of this together, you will see that it makes a huge difference, on average, of three and a half years in life expectancy. It is not something that most people think about. But I’ve spent years looking at sprawl and health impacts, and it’s truly significant. If you add all of them up together, you will see that it makes a difference in terms of the life expectancy but also the quality of life.”

That might explain why there’s more walking going on — a conscious effort to counter, in the simplest way, the negative aspects of modern life.

In case you’re wondering: The CDC recommends at least 150 minutes a week of “moderate-intensity aerobic activity,” achievable with 22 minutes of brisk walking a day, no matter where you live.

I’ll start with the beaver.

William Prestwich, strolling north on Falls Road in Mount Washington the other day, looked down into the Jones Falls, where it passes under Smith Avenue. He spotted a great blue heron, a bird that is commonly seen in the valley.

But then Prestwich saw something else in the water. At first he thought it might be a rat. It turned out to be a much bigger rodent, unmistakably a beaver, and he snapped a couple of pictures.

A beaver is not something a Baltimorean expects to see within the city limits, though urban wildlife sightings have become more common in recent years.

Last fall, artist Jordan Tierney came out of Whole Foods, just upstream of where Prestwich saw the beaver, and walked across the parking lot to the Jones Falls. While sipping on a kombucha she spotted two young otters cavorting in the river.

Again, that’s not something a Baltimorean expects to see. We assume that urbanization has destroyed habitat for wildlife when, in fact, there are many greenways and waterways that provide various critters with passage within the city. The waters of the Jones Falls might have improved enough to trigger otters to return to an ancestral area. The beaver might have sensed the same.

On Monday, I received another entry in the category of things we didn’t expect to see: A 23-foot version of “Male/Female,” the amazing 51-foot statue that stands outside Baltimore’s Penn Station.

Paula Fargo, during a weekend trip to Grand Rapids, visited the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park. Suddenly, she says, she was “gobsmacked” to see the same strange, silvery statue she’s seen a million times back in Baltimore.

Jonathan Borofsky’s metal depiction of the intersection of male and female forms is in its 20th year at Penn Station. It was once derided as oversized and out of place, but by now seems generally accepted as an appropriately bizarre Baltimore landmark. Turns out, Borofsky made three smaller versions of “Male/Female.” There’s one in Japan, one in Germany and one in Grand Rapids.

I started thinking about the uncanny unexpected. I started asking around for more examples of things people did not see coming.

Kurt Kolaja, an old friend and coworker from my WBAL-TV days, lives on the Eastern Shore. One day, he says, he was driving along Route 544 in Queen Anne’s County when he came upon a woman butchering a male deer by the side of the road. She was a mom from a van, intent on harvesting some road-kill venison. “Obviously, she had planned for such a lucky day as she was packing a meat saw,” Kurt says. “She played that saw like Yo-Yo Ma plays the cello while her kids waited in the van.”

Also unexpected: Within the past week or so, tarpon have been spotted in the Chesapeake Bay. That’s a big, silvery fish associated with tropical waters; they are popular targets for sport anglers in Florida. While tarpon have occasionally been seen in Virginia waters, around here they are rare. Capt. Tom Weaver, a veteran fishing guide, reported seeing several of them last week near Hoopers Island Lighthouse in the middle of the bay, and he estimated them to be between 80 and 100 pounds each. Weaver said “my brain took a few minutes to process” seeing in the Chesapeake a fish he had previously only seen in the Florida Keys.

This got me thinking about other unexpected things.

Marsupial Mystery: About 12 years ago, alerted by my vigilant beagle Rocky to odd sounds and movement in the basement of my house, I found three baby possums hanging out on pipes. No one has yet explained how they got there.

Arboreal Appliance: One summer day several years ago, during a raft trip on the North Branch of the Potomac River, we looked up to see a white washing machine lodged in a tree in a tangle of debris a good 12 feet above the riverbank. My fishing companion, who lived in the area, was certain it had been placed there by a flood. I took a moment to imagine what a wild and powerful event that must have been, and was glad to have missed it.

That Time in Times Square: Somebody once said, “If you stand in Times Square long enough, everybody you know will pass by.” I’ve also heard it put this way: “Stand in Times Square for 20 minutes and you’ll see someone you know.” Both statements were old-school boasts about New York City being the center of the universe, and I never gave the claim a thought until the unexpected happened.

I grew up in a small Massachusetts town, population 8,500. One of the ushers in our church was a mild-mannered fellow named Jimmy McNamara. Several years after I left that town, I went to New York City for the first time. I got off the subway at 42d Street, walked through Times Square to a theater, and at the entrance of the theater, Jimmy McNamara called out to me. He had a ticket for the same show. Time from subway to uncanny encounter with Jimmy McNamara: Less than 20 minutes.

They drank Deer Park’s spring water — later bottled for the masses — and engaged in an array of activities, all arranged by the owner of the exclusive resort, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.

The elite of Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and Washington also sojourned at Deer Park. In June 1886, President Grover Cleveland, the only chief executive to be married in the White House, honeymooned there with his bride, Frances Folsom. (She was 21, he was 49; they had five children.)

Those who could afford it savored relief at the Deer Park compound every summer.

It must have been great while it lasted.

Waves of history — the invention of the automobile, war in Europe, a pandemic, the stock market crash and the Great Depression — washed the Deer Park wonderland away.

In time, Deep Creek Lake became Garrett County’s main destination for vacationers. The B&O’s hotel burned in 1944 and was demolished. Today, there are two remaining Deer Park cottages, one of them built in the late 19th century by a Baltimore architect named Josias Pennington. (He was the designer of the B&O Warehouse at Camden Yards, among other buildings.)

At some point, the Pennington Cottage became the Deer Park Inn, and that’s where we found ourselves one evening last week — just off the old hotel road, in a woodsy section of town. Only about 300 people live in Deer Park now, and that includes the owners of the inn, Sandy and Pascal Fontaine.

We sat at a linen-covered table on the old porch, waiting for dinner to arrive. In those minutes, I was struck by the near-perfect silence. I counted only three sounds: the song of a wren, the light buzz of a hummingbird drawn to hanging flower baskets and soft music whispering through the inn’s open front door.

I looked down, across the lawn to the narrow road, and imagined black buggies of the 19th century, then the first Fords of the 20th century, carrying the long-gone lucky to their summer quarters. The moment seemed a little ghostly.

And then, when the meal started to arrive — a rich corn chowder, followed by monkfish on one plate, beef tenderloin on the other, surrounded by fresh vegetables — I had to wonder how such a thing happened.

How did such an accomplished French chef end up in this remote place?

Pascal, who turns 69 this month, worked in kitchens in Europe, the Middle East and Florida before landing with his wife and two sons in rural Maryland.

He grew up in the Loire Valley, trained in culinary arts in Paris and was a cook by age 17. After moving through numerous jobs — in France, Germany, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia and Bermuda — he took a position as head chef of a restaurant in Coral Gables, near Miami.

After that, he became executive chef of a hotel in Washington. He was there for 13 years, in charge of 30 cooks.

His sous chef, Cristeta Comerford, went on to become executive chef at the White House in 1995.

Around that same time, Pascal and Sandy Fontaine decided to leave Washington and buy the shuttered Deer Park Inn.

“I was spending too much time out of the house,” he says. “So we say, you know, maybe it’s time for me to do something with the family. …We were visiting this area and the (inn) was closed. We made an appointment and we made an offer and before we know it, we’ve been here 28 years.”

For Pascal, the move meant a return to the daily cooking-from-scratch that happens well below the rank of executive chef. He built a menu of classic French cuisine with American accents.

One of the first challenges was adjusting the menu for the seasons and finding good ingredients.

He decided early on that the best source for bread was his own kitchen; he’s been baking multigrain loaves each day for years. Getting good, fresh seafood requires frequent trips to a market in Washington. But Pascal buys his produce, some meats and cheeses from local farmers, many of them Amish and Mennonite. He travels about 30 miles to Springs, Pennsylvania, for more.

“There’s a produce auction in Springs,” he says, “and this time of year, right now, it’s like being in a candy store.”

Leeks are a big part of French cuisine, but not Garrett County farming. So, for a time, Pascal convinced an Amish family to grow them for his kitchen. He’s also harvested, cooked and pickled wild ramps, the small leek-like plant primarily found in the eastern Appalachians each spring.

The Fontaines make preserves from local fruits and berries; the inn’s entrance hallway is stocked with jars of jams from strawberries, peaches, pears and blackberries.

Pascal creates his own pastries, too, and the standard menu includes his dark chocolate pâté.

The inn’s prime season is Memorial Day to Labor Day. It’s open only on weekends the rest of the year. All the entrees come with “special occasion prices,” something that made sense once we ate and found Pascal’s dishes superb, once we understood the primarily summer business model and appreciated the need for maintenance of the old inn.

And, of course, there’s the peaceful atmosphere of the porch, the sense of history, the hummingbird softly buzzing by.