Chesapeake Requiem

by Earl Swift

  The schedule is but one reason I’d make a lousy waterman. I’m rarely hungry for breakfast at three. At what seems a reasonable hour to rise, the workday is half spent—the part on the water, at least—and I’m eating lunch when I’d otherwise be finishing my second cup of coffee. By noon, or soon after, we’re headed back to port. I spend the subsequent afternoons in a state akin to jet lag—physically drained, slow thinking, and disoriented by so many remaining hours of bright sunshine. My internal clock stays scrambled for days.

  All the year round, Tangier’s circadian rhythm is disrupted by this maritime take on a factory’s midnight shift. It’s dictated by necessity: An early start puts crabbers on the water at the coolest part of the day—not for their own comfort but for that of their catch, because crabs crammed into bushel baskets can’t long tolerate high temperatures. The other players in the bay’s seafood industry—buyers, picking houses, marine police—synchronize their workdays to the watermen’s schedule, and Tangier’s business hours skew early as well. One winter-only restaurant opens at three in the morning, to serve oystermen before they head out into the cold. Bait’s available around the clock. The grocery closes at five, and the biggest summer-only restaurant, Fisherman’s Corner, at seven—a late hour, as island suppers go. For generations the island’s school started and ended classes earlier than its mainland counterparts, the better to send children home at about the time their fathers returned to shore.

  The unnatural schedule poses a struggle even for those who know no other workday. One afternoon in the Situation Room, Ooker announced that he rose at two that morning, dozed off on his porch while tying his shoes—and remained sleeping, bent over double, until he was stirred by a passing scooter on West Ridge Road. “A whole hour, I was sitting there,” he said. “If that scooter hadn’t passed the house, I’d probably be there still.”

  Leon McMann nodded sympathetically. “When that clock goes off I’d like to take a bat and beat her to death sometimes.”

  It doesn’t take me long to discover that I can manage, at most, a day or two on the water per week. So most of my mornings begin hours later, when the sun breaks from behind the Eastern Shore and the rooster in the yard two doors down greets the light with fifteen minutes of crowing. The first time I woke to the rooster it came as a surprise, a discordant barnyard note in a marshy seagoing town. And the creature was loud: I slept with the windows open and with a set of French doors thrown open as well, and when the rooster let loose I was up in an instant.

  My quarters are the entire second floor of a Cape Cod situated at roughly the midpoint of the West Ridge, the island’s second-most populated upland. The house is owned by Cindy Parks, niece of a past Virginian-Pilot colleague. I have my own entrance via an outdoor staircase in back, which leads to a deck with expansive views of the island’s airstrip and the bay beyond. From there I can step through the French doors into my bedroom, where Cindy has converted a walk-in closet into a rudimentary kitchen equipped with a dorm fridge and microwave. A hallway off the room leads to a full bath.

  When taking up on an island you expect that water will play a dominant role in your sense of the place, and so it does on Tangier, insinuating itself into every vista, figuring in every aspect of daily life. But lacking trees, discernible elevation, or tall buildings to interrupt the view, this is a landscape defined by sky as well. The heavens are an immense, unbroken bowl. Thunderheads form towering piles visible forty miles off, and approaching fronts split the sky as cleanly as lines on a weather map. The island’s dim streetlights leave the night sky unsullied; even a half-moon casts shadows, and stars gleam with uncommon strength.

  From the deck I can quickly surmise what the coming day holds and how I might prepare for it. Most of the bay’s routine summer weather—meaning the stuff not part of a big storm system—comes from the west, and I can see it an hour or two before it arrives. No need to consult a forecast: I’ll know to pack a rain jacket. Is the wind blowing? This is a consideration on those days I’m headed off-island, especially if the wind is running against the tide to produce a hard, white-capped chop. But it also informs an important aspect of terrestrial life. Is it blowing hard enough—at ten miles an hour or better, say—to keep the flies away, especially the bloodthirsty deer flies, better known throughout the Chesapeake as greenheads? If not, I’d better baste myself in bug spray, especially if I plan to cover much ground on foot. Is the wind shifting to the east, which seems to bring out the smaller black flies, or ankle-biters, that can swarm a person by the score and seem to prefer the tender flesh of mainlanders? Again, it’s time to reach for the DEET. If it’s blowing hard from the east the flies will stay grounded, but the wind may push the tides up over the roads and into the yard. If it’s hard from the west, the tides will swing low, and the island’s tidal creeks will show their muddy bottoms.

  No matter the weather, I’ll pull on a ball cap before leaving the house, not only because the mostly shadeless island broils at midday, but because to go hatless—or to opt for any hat but a ball cap—would identify me as a tourist. Said cap, preferably advertising a college or pro team, tugboat company, or Tangier itself, should be sun-bleached and salt-encrusted and blackened with sweat. Born-here authenticity further requires that its brim be misshapen and frayed and stained with slime from a thousand crabs’ backs.

  MY FIRST DAYS ON TANGIER, and most after, start with a bike ride over the marsh to the Main Ridge, a journey termed “going over” or “crossing over” by the natives, and notable for the wildlife one encounters en route: blue herons, snowy egrets, osprey, several species of gull, and the occasional water snake or muskrat—and, especially, a superabundance of feral cats. They roam the ridges in all weather, huddling under parked golf carts, colonizing yards and porches, and lounging in gangs on the roadsides, where they display little fear of approaching traffic. Cats often outnumber people on the Main Ridge, for Tangier’s central spine can seem curiously deserted on a weekday morning. Minutes might pass between golf carts trundling by, on their way to the grocery or post office. Few souls walk the streets before the tour boats arrive at midday. Quiet prevails, save for birdsong and rustling marsh grass. The growl of a lawn mower engine is distinct and intrusive from a half mile away.

  Indeed, much of Tangier is missing. Seventy-two islanders, all men, are out in their workboats. Another forty-one men work on tugboats and live half of their days (or more) off the island, working two weeks on and two off, in most cases, muscling barges up and down the East Coast. Four men are boat captains, meaning they hold master’s licenses to carry passengers; they include the mailboat’s skipper, Brett Thomas, and the islanders who run the afternoon boat to Crisfield and the warm-weather ferry to Onancock. And two island men are employed by the state as marine police officers, spending long hours on the bay enforcing Virginia’s crabbing and oystering laws—a duty that can put them at odds with watermen, which often as not means family.

  In sum, about half the adult male population is elsewhere. So as I pedal my bicycle up the Main Ridge one late May morning, the few people I encounter are women—white women, because Tangier is that rare southern community without a single racial minority. Among them is Carol Moore, who’s standing inside the low fence ringing the house she shares with her husband, Alonza J. Moore III, a.k.a. Lonnie, who like his fellow crabbers is out on the water. I brake to ask her what’s going on, assuming she’d know: The Moores live on Main Ridge Road in Meat Soup, across from the Daley & Son Grocery, and their place borders a smaller east–west lane that ventures across four hundred yards of marsh and a fat snake of dark water to the West Ridge. She has a commanding view of the busiest crossroads in town.

  Carol replies that a funeral is scheduled for the coming weekend. Henrietta Wheatley, at ninety-one the oldest woman on the island, died two days ago. Her passing came little more than a week after that of a ninety-year-old man, one of Tangier’s two remaining veterans of World War II. It’s been a bad month, she says, and there are bound to be
worse to come. On this day in May 2016 the island is home to 481, a number that includes young people in college and the military who keep Tangier as their legal address, but don’t actually live here and aren’t likely to return. Cross them off and the head count drops to 470. Of that resident population, 108—nearly one in four—are past retirement age, and a fair share of those are decades past. Carol’s uncle, Jack Thorne, is now the sole surviving World War II vet. He’s ninety-two and the oldest of seven siblings, three of whom are close behind him in age; one, Ginny Marshall, just turned eighty-nine and, according to Carol, “can remember when God said, ‘Let there be light.’” At eighty-three, Carol’s mother, Grace, is among the younger Thorne children. “When one goes, they’ll all go,” she tells me. “Like flies. It’ll be fast.”

  “Well, there’s a happy thought,” I say.

  “That’s how it happens around here,” she says. “Which will mean more houses will sit empty, which we don’t need.”

  “How many empty houses can there be?” I ask. When I put out word that I was looking for a place to stay on the island, I received nary a response for weeks before Cindy Parks stepped up. And besides, the island doesn’t seem to have enough of anything, let alone houses, to qualify as a surplus.

  “A lot of them,” she says. “You have time to take a tour?”

  We climb into her golf cart and strike west on Long Bridge Road, the northernmost of four lanes linking the Main Ridge with the West. Eight feet across at its widest, it runs from Carol’s house past eight compact and closely spaced cottages, most well maintained, two of them unoccupied. We stop in front of one. Its abandonment is not obvious: Weeds sprout around its foundation and the siding needs a scrubbing, but those blemishes don’t set it apart from many island homes. “These people from the mainland bought it,” Carol tells me. “They came and gutted it—they borrowed some of our tools.” She purses her lips. “I don’t know what happened, but they haven’t been back in years.”

  Out past the houses we glide across the marsh and thump over the wood-decked Long Bridge. Beneath it curves the Big Gut, a tidal creek that loops and curls between the Main and West ridges and technically makes separate islands of them. The bridge earns its name—it’s twice the length of the next biggest span on Tangier, as the Big Gut here is at one of its widest points, a good one hundred feet across. From the bridge one gets a sense of the island’s snug dimensions and its fragile relationship with the surrounding Chesapeake. The marsh extends an unvaryingly flat, treeless mile to the south, its willowy grasses turning from their wintertime bronze to pale greens and hissing in a light breeze from the southwest. It is equal parts water and earth—flooding to the road’s edge at high tide, its exposed black mud emitting a gassy stink at low, and laced with rivulets, small ponds, and straight ditches dug in generations past. Ibises and egrets high-step in its shallows. It’s even quieter than the Main Ridge. The whir of the cart’s electric motor, the crunch of its small tires on the road, and the music of the marsh grass are the only sounds.

  A few yards beyond the bridge we come to the West Ridge, which is longer than the Main, at just over a mile from end to end, but so slender that for most of its course, houses line only its west side. To turn right here, heading north, would take us past a few houses and single-wide trailers, as well as the airport’s parking apron and a prefabricated steel recreation center, its three-story sides painted a dingy beige.

  Carol instead turns left on West Ridge Road, and we roll past single-and double-wides and houses ranging from small ramblers to large, century-old Victorians and colonials. Most are set behind deep front yards that aren’t much to look at; susceptible to flooding and slow to drain, the lawns are sodden for most of the year, and salt water has killed all but a few of the ridge’s trees and large shrubs. As the houses slide by to our right, we come, on the left, to three other roads connecting the Main and West ridges like rungs on a ladder. The first sidles up close to the island’s largest building, Tangier Combined School, its elementary classrooms in one wing, high school in the other, the whole of its great wood-framed mass suspended five feet over the ground on piers of heavy timber.

  Roughly two hundred yards farther on comes Wallace Road, so skinny that passing carts must veer off the blacktop to squeeze by. It meets the Main Ridge roughly halfway between Swain Memorial and the New Testament Church, and is the crossing I’ll most often use to go over. We pass Ooker’s house, a mobile home to which he’s made additions over the years, and three doors farther along, my place.

  Down at the end of West Ridge Road we come to the southernmost crossing, which spans the Big Gut on a bridge that rises at its turtle-backed crest to more than five feet above the tide. The Hoistin’ Bridge, it’s called—a reference to an earlier span fitted with a deck that was slotted to make way for masted boats. Tangiermen pronounce it Heistin’ and often drop its surname, as in “I was down to the Heistin’.”

  Just past the intersection, West Ridge Road does a short jog to the right, and narrows as it continues southward for a couple hundred yards, lined on both sides by tightly bunched houses and mobile homes. This is Hog Ridge, and though its old-timers don’t care for the name, at least it has an explanation: Farmers once raised pigs there. At its southern end, the asphalt gives way to a rutted sand path into the marsh. It crosses a small gut on a rickety wooden bridge, then bursts from a thicket of tall reeds onto the beach. The sand is fine and white, and refreshing breezes encourage walks to the spit’s end, but not many Tangiermen take those walks. The beach is usually empty.

  We’re now at the far southwestern tip of the island’s road system and halfway through a counterclockwise circumnavigation of the town. Carol has pointed out unoccupied West Ridge dwellings as we’ve rolled along, and as we turn around I tally them: five houses and six trailers, plus two buildings that are uninhabitable—a large inn on Hog Ridge, closed for years and ruined since by vandals, the elements, and spraying cats; and a house near my place that burned three or four years back. It stands blackened and gaping, its interior a soggy heap of broken furniture, ripped paneling, and fiberglass insulation—an eyesore, but undemolished because it’s covered in asbestos shingle, and no one’s figured out how to dismantle the wreck without breaking the law or the bank.

  We roll back through Hog Ridge and turn east across the marsh, rattle over the Heistin’ Bridge, and swing north on Main Ridge Road. The firehouse, low and modern, waits a short distance up on the left, an ambulance and small pumper visible behind glass-paned garage doors. The all-volunteer fire department was thinking strategically when it built here: Of the bridges to the West Ridge, only the Heistin’ is stout enough to accommodate the emergency rigs, so it made sense to situate the station near the crossing; the most distant home on the West Ridge, up by the rec center, is thus only a minute or two farther away than the northernmost home in Meat Soup.

  The station is also just yards from the main drag’s intersection with Canton Road, which drills eastward across another four hundred yards of marsh and two guts to the smallest of Tangier’s three inhabited ridges. Twenty-seven homes are clustered there, the largest with their backs to Canton’s rapidly eroding eastern shoreline. For most of Tangier’s history, Carol tells me, erosion targeted its western shore, but over the past few years, it seems to have shifted its aim. Ooker’s brother William, who has the monument to his lost twin in his front yard, lives in one of the waterfront homes, and out back of his place the bay is getting uncomfortably close.

  We return to the Main Ridge, having counted six empty houses on Canton, and resume our northward journey through Black Dye and into King Street. The road here is lined with low chain-link and white picket fences, guarding tiny front yards shaded by Tangier’s largest and densest cluster of trees—a mix of hardwoods and cedars, a few tall pines. Years ago, Carol tells me, island boys trapped a couple of squirrels on the mainland and released them in Tangier’s meager woods; one soon vanished, but the other survived for years. “So,” Carol says, “
when people here told you, ‘I saw the squirrel today,’ they meant they saw the squirrel. People were obsessed with that squirrel.” When at last the squirrel sightings stopped, Carol’s husband, Lonnie, brought another pair to the island. The rodents had babies in 2015, which the cats dispatched, but the adults endure. Maybe. Carol says she hasn’t seen them for a while.

  Also rising from a few front yards, and discussed with wearying predictability by generations of travel writers, are headstones. So much has been made of the graves that Tangiermen have grown thin-skinned about them, and react poorly to tourists training cameras at the markers. The graves date to a time when the population was larger and the ridges more crowded, and open ground suited to burials was in even shorter supply than it is today.

  Here, in a small cottage in King Street, is where Carol was born in 1962. Here she lived until she married at eighteen, and for much of that childhood she did not stray far. Until recently, Tangier youngsters stuck to their own neighborhoods and viewed the other ridges, and even other parts of their own ridge, as foreign turf. From King Street, Carol came to know Meat Soup as “up the road,” Black Dye as “down the road,” the West Ridge as “over the road,” and Canton as too remote and seldom visited to think about. “When we were children we didn’t go to West Ridge, and I didn’t go down the road,” she tells me. “Lord, going down the road was taking a long trip, and going to Canton was like going to an amusement park. We didn’t go out and rove. I’ve heard West Ridgers say they didn’t go over the road until they were nine or ten.”