"It was bad," Art says. "I had to go down and check on my boat two, three times a day." Art's 1963 wooden-hulled Chris Craft, like every other boat anchored in the waters of the bay, was literally frozen in place on the water. Some were even buried, submerged partially or completely into a tomb of ice.

The wooden pier Art and his brother built for his mother on Back Creek was a shambles, having been heaved up out of its mooring by the ice. Battered docks and uprooted pilings were a common sight up and down the rivers and creeks that winter.

Art was standing on the dock at Back Creek when something drew his attention to the water. At first, he couldn't believe it, but there it was, a Volkswagen Beetle being driven down the middle of the creek.

By this time, the "Big Freeze," as people called it, had covered the waterways of the middle Chesapeake Bay with ice thick enough to walk on. But a Volkswagen Beetle? A car driving on the creek was a strange sight, but then again, this had been a strange winter.

From December of 1976 to March, 1977, the Chesapeake Bay was under the influence of a mass of Arctic air that bedeviled the Eastern Seaboard from Maine to the Florida coast. "It started getting cold," Art says, "and then it got colder and colder."

Temperatures began dropping below zero at night and barely made it into the 20s during the day. The frigid temperatures continued for weeks upon weeks upon months. "We always said the creeks and rivers around here froze up from November to April," Art says, "But not the bay. Not all the way across like that."

It was the biggest freeze since 1936. Eighty miles of the Chesapeake Bay, from its northernmost point to the Patuxent River, had iced over completely. "You could walk anywhere you wanted on the water," Art recalls.

People took shortcuts across the creeks. Kids played ice hockey. People rode bikes. Suddenly, skating was the big thing in town. Art remembers you couldn't buy a pair of ice skates anywhere. "Every store in town was sold out."

On the weekend, all the action in Annapolis was on the ice. "On Friday afternoons," Art says, "I'd get off work a little early and set up two big bonfires, one at the point at Spa Creek, and the other at the Eastport Bridge. We'd throw rubber tires on them so they'd last a couple of days, and everyone would come out and skate, day and night."

The ice was up to 3 feet thick in most places, which gave some folks the confidence to do crazy things. "People were walking from Eastport to Greenbury Point, up and down Ego Alley, all over the place," Art recalls.

His friend Lerner hitched up sleds behind his Kabota tractor and pulled kids across the bay in the shadow of the Bay Bridge. Sometimes, "He towed twenty, thirty kids behind him at one time."

While most Annapolitans found ways to enjoy the novelty of the frigid weather, there was a dark side to the Big Freeze.

Oystermen found themselves out of work for three months, frozen out of their oyster beds and fishing areas. Freighters became immobile, trapped in the shipping channels for weeks at a time. Ice mountains, some as tall as two stories high, began piling up around the lighthouses. The Coast Guard was called in to deal with the huge chunks of ice at Love Point Lighthouse which threatened to drift off and damage the footings of the Bay Bridge. Governor Marvin Mandel proclaimed a state of emergency.

And then, there was that Volkswagen Beetle.

Also during that winter, Art's son-in-law, Bill Crandall of Annapolis Pile Drivers, was putting in a boat lift at Arnie Gay's Boatyard on the east end of the Eastport Bridge, when he looked up and saw the Volkswagen Beetle driving down the center of Spa Creek.

This time it was in trouble. The tide had come in, raising the shoreline just enough for water to seep in at the edges. While the ice in the middle of Spa Creek was thick enough to hold the vehicle, the car would have to wait for the tide to go out and the river to freeze back over before it could make the crossing - a good six hours at best. Bill and his men got out the crane and hauled the Bug out of the water. It made the front pages of The Capital that night.

Art has seen a lot of seasons come and go in Annapolis. He remembers when the waters were crystal clear and when winters were so cold that you could see "The Northern Lights" at night - streaks of orange and purple and green glowing in the winter sky. He's loved all the seasons of the bay. As best he can remember, the creeks stopped freezing solid by the mid 1980s. And the skies over the bay no longer glow with color during the winter months. "A lifelong resident of Eastport," he notes that "a lot has changed." But in 77 years, Art Tuers' passion for life in this little corner of world hasn't grown cold one bit. There's a twinkle in his eye as he recalls growing up around the waters of the Chesapeake among the close-knit community of friends and family he still enjoys. "There was no better place to be."

Janice Gary is an award-winning writer of creative nonfiction. She teaches memoir at Annapolis Senior Center.

Do you have an Annapolis story? Contact jangary22@hotmail.com.