The Harbor that forgot its name

I remember Joppatowne not as it is, but as it was. The Wayfinder fed deeply here once, long before the streets were carved and the rivers were bridged, when the marsh still whispered secrets in the language of tides.

This place was born of water.
I first felt its pulse when the Gunpowder River still ruled these lands, a slow and coiling god of silt and salt. I rested in the riverbed then, half-buried in the muck, dreaming of storms. Above me, sails cut through the fog, carrying voices, cargo, and prayers to the colony that called itself Joppa.

Joppa. What a feast that word was.
It rang with ambition and the arrogance of beginnings. Merchants came with pockets full of hope, planters with hands full of earth, and ships with bellies full of rum and tobacco. I drank from it all: the laughter spilling from taverns, the creak of rope against mast, the faint weeping of those sold and shipped. This port, once second only to Baltimore, filled me with human hunger.

But history has a flavor that always sours.
The river grew jealous of the town it had birthed. Its currents thickened with mud, its mouth clogged with neglect. The harbor, once alive with trade, became sluggish, like a lung filling with smoke. I could taste the decay before the people did. The merchants left. The ships followed. The name Joppa sank beneath its own sediment.

Centuries passed, and I slept again, deep beneath the overgrown banks, wrapped in silence and soil. When I woke, the air was changed. They had built a new town above the ghost of the old, and they called it Joppatowne. It was a resurrection in syllables alone. The river still flows, but now it watches quietly, its memory diluted.

I wandered through the new streets, the ones built where warehouses once stood and where oaks now root in what was once the harbor’s edge. The Wayfinder tasted the faintest afterglow of its former glory. The phantom scent of salt and ambition still lingers like perfume on forgotten parchment.

I fed on what remained.
The echoes of sermons from St. John’s Church.
The faint laughter of long-vanished sailors.
The ache of a name that refuses to die.

Joppatowne lives, but it does not know the shape of its ancestor’s bones. I do. I carry them in me, silt and sorrow both.

When I left, the Gunpowder whispered a single word behind me: remember.
I always do.