Diesen Beitrag fand ich letzte Woche in der Washington Post. Er ist eine recht nette Ergänzung des März-Presseechos - allerdings nur auf Englisch (den Text zu übersetzen wäre wahrscheinlich selbst für Anglisten eine Herausforderung).
Fuß zum Gruß
beka

Ahh, Fresh Air and Foot Odor!
Annapolis Sailors Greet Spring With Annual Burning of the Socks
By Darragh Johnson
The Washington Post, 21.3.2002
Off go the topsiders. Off go the socks. With toes hairy and pale, these sailors have gathered around the bonfire, guzzling beer, shucking oysters and getting into the stinky swing of things. Here, it's all about a chance to breathe that first smell of spring: burning socks.
"Are they done yet?" bellows boat captain Don Hekler as he piles his pink argyles onto the fire.
"I've been saving these up all winter," shouts Caryl Weiss, an Annapolis musician who pokes her thumbs through the enormous holes in her tube socks before they, too, get thrown to the flames.
Behind these 35 sailors lies the Chesapeake Bay and its 4,000 miles of adventurous shoreline. To the north is the romantic span of the Bay Bridge. And in the early evening of the first day of spring - - in an oddball Annapolis tradition that has gone on for more than 25 years -- it is, as always, raining. The carousers are wet. And it is wintry enough outside to turn their bare toes purple.
But soon, they know, the weather will feel like spring, and the Wednesday night races will return. Soon, there will be the freedom of fast wind and billowing jibs.
Soon, in the words of veteran Greg Gildey, an Eastport sailor with a scruffy blond beard and a fraying blue slicker, they will once again indulge in a lifestyle that "is good for your soul."
"The fresh air clobbers you!" he says excitedly as he shucks a few oysters and fries them in beer batter. "It knocks you down, and then you're ready for a nap!"
The sock burners act on instinct, not intellect. And they don't pretend otherwise.
"It's really kind of dumb," chirps Ivon Paulin, organizer of another sock-burning a few blocks away, at the Eastport Yacht Club. "But I think life is better when you do dumb things."
This quirky custom got its start in the mid-1970s, in the working- class boatyards of Eastport, when a guy named Bob Turner finished work at 5 p.m. on the first day of spring and decided, "The heck with this. I'm taking these little dudes off and lighting them up."
He invited a few folks passing by to join in, "but they kept walking," he remembers. Yet a tradition was born, and by the mid- '80s, when Turner owned and managed the Annapolis Harbor Boatyard, he was encouraging his employees to stick around after work, split a case of Bud, light a fire in a paint tray and "toss in a pair of socks."
Turner now has a house on Ocracoke Island, N.C., but he's back in Eastport this year, living on Back Creek in a dark teal, 46-foot racing boat named Kiva and fielding sock-burning calls on a cell phone that works only part time -- his technological commentary on hustle-and-bustle nonsense.
A lot has changed in the years since Turner started his sock- burnings: Eastport has grown out of its blue-collar roots and into a more upscale universe of BMW-driving professionals who like to pose as salt-of-the-earth types. "It's the land of millionaires," groans a disapproving Gildey.
But the yuppies couldn't strip the eastern half of Annapolis of its wild side. Eastport is the little peninsula that could, and in 1998, when the drawbridge that separates it from the Colonial charm of downtown closed for repairs, Eastport seceded. Residents dubbed their neighborhood the Maritime Republic of Eastport, aka M.R.E., an abbreviation that "Eastportericans" (rhymes with "Puerto Rican") now flaunt on oval stickers on the bumpers of their SUVs.
One of the leaders of this loony revolution was Jeff Holland, a nautical Grizzly Adams who also bills himself as the Poet Laureate of Eastport -- an official proclamation he keeps in his wallet and calls his "poetic license." In 1995, he got so enthralled with the possibilities of rhyming "socks" with "equinox" that he wrote a five- verse "Ode to the Sock Burners."
In it, he waxes on about the foul rankness of the sailors' socks -- "Some think incineration is the only solution / 'Cause washin' 'em contributes to the Chesapeake's pollution" -- and the poem has achieved cult status in Eastport circles.
And last night, as his beachfront group was finishing piling onto the bonfire and ringing in spring, as the dogs raced into the water, and the oysters fried and the Yuengling beer bottles retired to the recycling pile, Holland wrapped up the official part of the revelry with a rousing rendition of his poem, which concludes:
So if you sail into the Harbor on the 20th of March,
And you smell a smell like Limburger mixed in with laundry starch,
You'll know you're downwind of the Eastport docks
Where they're burning their socks for the Equinox.
He finished, and sunset colored the sky and the barefoot sailors lifted another round of beers and roared. Spring was here.