by Earl Swift
Assuming she lives to spawn, a sook can fertilize another batch of eggs with the leftover sperm inside her, which remains viable as long as she does. If she lives long enough, she can theoretically spawn three, four, even five times with the fruits of her single mating. Few sooks survive in the Chesapeake Bay to produce more than two sponges, however, and on another early morning at sea, I keep company with one of the reasons.
Ooker Eskridge guides the Sreedevi to a pot off the spit’s east side, wondering, as he is wont to do, what’s happened to the doubler runs of old. “They’ve moved off into deep water,” he has theorized. “Used to be two crab runs every spring, with the females. Then it got to be that you only got one run in the spring. Then it got to be that we didn’t even get that, hardly, except up near Smith Island.
“The crabs are shedding, but we didn’t have any doubler run that we could find. It must have been off in deep water where you couldn’t see it.”
Two hours after daybreak, the water is slick calm, the air breezeless and leaden with humidity. The stillness feels weirdly ominous, for off to the south, twenty miles away, a curtain of black descends to the water and strobes with lightning. He leans for a buoy with his hook, pulls a pot aboard, and shakes its contents loose. Alongside several crabs, which Ooker plucks from the culling tray and tosses into their respective baskets, writhes a seahorse. He hands the creature to me. It’s sheathed in a muddy slime and jackknifes in my palm. I admire it for several seconds, stroking its thorny skin with a fingertip, then lob it overboard.
Ooker’s own courtship followed the course of many island pairings, which are only slightly less predictable than the blue crab’s. He’d already dated a couple of mainland girls who visited in summer when, in the tenth grade, he turned his attention to Judith Irene McMann, a ninth grader. Neither was much of a mystery—they’d known each other their entire lives. She was quiet and pretty, with bright eyes and a dazzling smile. He was garrulous and long-haired; his eleventh-grade yearbook photo brings to mind a surfer, and his crinkle-eyed smile has the whiff of a stoner about it, but in reality he was a straight arrow. (“I’ve never smoked marijuana,” he told me. “Never been drunk, either. Not even tipsy.”) They were distant cousins—her great-great-great-grandparents were Ooker’s great-great-grandparents. On Tangier, however, courting a relative is close to inevitable, and their family ties were looser than many.
They danced, cruised around in skiffs, visited the beach. They hung around with other teens at a couple of places with jukeboxes and pool tables, long since closed. They’d visit with each other in a “dating room” at the front of her house in Meat Soup. They’d go on long walks, taking care not to linger on the Heistin’ Bridge, where—as many older Tangiermen will tell you—a girl’s likely to “get a bad name.”
He was eighteen when he married Irene in April 1977, two months before she finished high school. “A light comes on, and you just get the feeling, ‘I think this is the one,’” he tells me, unable to further explain how the romance bloomed. “Irene played hard to get for a while. I tell her now, ‘I know you wanted me. It was hard for you to do that.’ And she’ll say, ‘Right.’”
By then, he was skippering his own boat—a wooden round-stern deadrise, the Judith Irene, powered by an inboard diesel engine. A deadrise is the classic Chesapeake Bay workboat, from thirty to fifty feet long with a broad beam and a simple, small cabin positioned up near the bow. That it had a round stern set the Judith Irene apart. Then, as now, most Tangier workboats had squared-off tails, or box sterns. But all deadrises share features suited to hauling pots aboard: a long, open weather deck aft of the cabin, stretching two-thirds of the boat’s length and giving the crabber room for his catch; a steering console in the cabin and a second outside, on the starboard side, from which a man can control the boat while he leans over the side to tend the pots; and a swooping profile that culminates in a low freeboard at the stern, meaning that the sides of the hull drop to within a foot or two of the waterline, minimizing the vertical distance he’ll have to lift his catch.
Ooker kept the Judith Irene for seven years, then traded it for the smaller, simpler Sreedevi, twenty feet long and cabinless—essentially a fiberglass tub with a point at one end and a ninety-horse outboard on the other. Unassuming though it is, it’s Tangier’s most photographed vessel. Thanks to Ooker’s twenty-plus years as the island’s mouthpiece, the little boat and its signature details—a Jesus fish and a Star of David hand-drawn in permanent marker on its steering console—have appeared in newspapers, magazines, and documentaries around the world.
WE’RE HALFWAY THROUGH a lucrative workday, with several bushels of hard crabs and a half bushel of peelers aboard. This, despite the appearance in the water of what Ooker calls “red moss,” a feathery pink-brown algae that for the past several summers has clotted the water of Tangier and Pocomoke sounds. It fouls many a crab pot, its long strands snagging in the hexagonal mesh and sometimes forming a tangled mass so thick that the pot might as well be solid.
“It gets long, like brown hair,” he tells me. He pulls up a pot bearded with the algae. “Growing fast,” he murmurs. “The older the pot, it seems like, the easier it attaches. I made that pot, I’d guess, three years ago.” Fashioning his own pots distinguishes Ooker from most Tangier watermen, who buy them ready-made. Of the 210 he has in the water, more than a third are replacements he made over the winter. He buys the heavy wire frame that forms each pot’s base and sides and fashions the rest of the cube with a galvanized mesh that’s sold as “saltwater netting.” The effort costs about half as much as a store-bought model.
As we proceed down the row, even newer pots seem to have attracted the algae. All seem to be fast approaching the point where crabs will avoid them: A little red moss does no harm, Ooker tells me, but a lot will scare them off. Plus, he says, the algae adds to a pot’s weight and increases its resistance as he pulls it through the water—and when you’re pulling a couple hundred aboard by hand every day, that’s an issue.
What’s prompted the red moss’s appearance? Well, add that to everything else watermen don’t know. “Something in the water’s causing it to grow,” Ooker guesses, shrugging. That hypothesis, vague though it is, is shared by John Bull, who heads the Virginia Marine Resources Commission (VMRC), the state agency that regulates the bay’s commercial crab, fish, and oyster harvests: “It seems to be a water quality issue,” he told me.
Ooker pulls up another pot. Its line is draped with the stuff. “If it gets much worse, I’ll pull a row and set them on the beach for a day or two,” he says. “Put them in the oven.” Inside the pot, a small perch lies gulping on its side, surrounded by hard crabs. Ooker dumps the load and picks up the fish, studying its belly, rubbing a gloved finger over it. “Lots of eggs,” he says. “Lot of roe in him.” He throws the fish back. In the next pot, a soft crab crouches among hard crabs. Ooker picks it out of the trap before dumping the others onto the tray. “He lucked out,” he says, carrying the softshell to a live well filled with water at the bow and dropping it in. He adds: “I guess.”
As he’s culling a big jimmy, a sook grabs it and hangs on. Ooker gives the jimmy a firm shake. The sook loses the claw and drops to the tray, her dismembered limb clattering down beside her. Its pincers open and close of their own accord. “Look at that!” I cry.
“Oh, yeah, they’ll keep moving,” Ooker says. He picks up the claw, which continues to grab at the air. “Still got some bite in ’em.”
We near the end of a row and draw within hailing distance of Leon McMann’s boat. Leon, wolfing down his lunch in his tiny cabin, looks our way and waves. The Betty Jane II is small, as workboats go—a design called a barcat, which shares a deadrise’s graceful profile but is far less substantial a craft, with a snug open deck that rides much closer to the water. This is a boat made for protected shallows, rather than open seas—and not for potting but for crab-scraping, a method of catching peelers that has fallen out of fashion over the past twenty years. On
a line off the stern, it pulls a device reminiscent of a lawn mower bag: a steel frame with a rope net trailing behind. Running slowly, at just two or three knots, Leon drags the scrape over the bottom, scooping anything resting there into the net. Every few minutes he hauls in the line, lifts the full scrape out of the water, and dumps the load onto a culling board.
We watch Leon finish his meal and shuffle back to the stern. He completes a lick, or run with the scrape deployed, and pulls up the line hand over hand. The bag is loaded with mud, seaweed, broken eelgrass, and a bundle of crabs. Almost everything goes back over the side: Unlike a potter, a scraper can’t keep a by-catch—he’s bound by law to return everything but peelers to the water—so most days, scraping doesn’t net as big an overall catch.
But it can yield plenty enough peelers. Small as it is, a barcat can get into waters too shallow for a deadrise, so scrapers have some territory to themselves. And if the day isn’t going well in one location, they need only pull their scrapes aboard and motor off to a new spot—which, compared with the daunting logistics of moving pots around, gives them an enviable agility. Scraping offers other advantages: It’s cheaper to take up, as a couple of scrapes are far smaller investments than hundreds of pots. Its pace is less frenzied than potting. Scrapers have a few minutes during licks to breathe deep and look around. Plenty of time to cull carefully. And because they hug the shore, they’re usually less exposed to disagreeable weather. On a pretty day, the work can seem almost relaxing.
Plus, there’s the allure of a scavenger hunt about it, because there’s no telling what might come up in a scrape: sharks, stingrays, terrapin, shrimp, and other creatures that won’t venture into a pot; relics of bygone days, such as crockery and bricks, cutlery, pieces of boat and machinery, and, on one occasion, an unexploded bomb—which Leon, who caught it, recognized as “right dangerous.” And every now and then a catch too big to lift, as I heard him describe in the Situation Room. “I caught a big ol’ pole,” he announced that afternoon. “It was probably this big around”—he spread his hands ten inches apart—“and ten feet long. There are all these big, strong bucks out there could pull that up easier than me, but I’m the one that got it.”
“That must have been heavy,” Bruce Gordy said.
“Heavy? It was like it was pulling back,” Leon said. “A big pole. I believe it was laying on the bottom 150 year.”
Now we watch Leon finish his cull as his scrape makes another curving lick along the bottom. “Not many doing it anymore, but I’ve always liked scraping,” Ooker says. “I try to do it for a couple of weeks late in the summer. I like having all the gear you need right there on the boat. I like that you can go wherever you please. And you don’t get as tired, because just standing up will wear you out, when you’re potting—the water’s rougher, and the boat moves around so much.
“The big disadvantage to it,” he says, “is with scraping you’re not catching anything until you throw the scrape overboard. With pots, you’re catching crabs while you’re at home, sleeping.”
The row completed, we wave good-bye to Leon and head for Ooker’s pots on the island’s bay side. Rather than cut through the harbor, he opens the throttle and we skim north around Uppards, the boat’s nose high, the flatwater smooth under the hull. On the island’s far side, the first of his pots waits about two hundred yards from the boat channel’s western entrance. As Ooker pulls it aboard, I see that it’s draped in red moss, and ask whether he thinks the algae scares off crabs because it helps them recognize a pot for a pot. “They are clever,” he answers. “They’re good at figuring something out.” He dumps the pot, which contains a handful of hard crabs, including a big jimmy. Tangiermen have an expression about large crabs like him: “Don’t take many to make a dozen.”
“They’re smarter than most fish,” he says. Their canniness, combined with good eyesight, makes them formidable. Many a crabber has learned that using a holey glove will bring him pain, because a crab will soon recognize and exploit the weakness. “There can be a small hole in your crab pot, but the crabs will find it. They’ll search and search and search until they find a way.”
I notice a movement in the water off to starboard. Callinectes sapidus translates to “beautiful, savory swimmer,” and now I see that the crab earns every part of the moniker: A jimmy, with a doubler clutched to its belly, is swimming sideways past the boat a few inches below the surface. Propelled solely by the jimmy’s rear legs, the pair moves with surprising speed and grace.
COMES A THURSDAY in mid-June when much of the island again crowds into Swain Memorial, this time for the wedding of Lance Daley, scion of the family that owns the grocery store, to island native Erica Parks. In the week since graduation I’ve encountered Annette Charnock at church, at Daley & Son, and on the road in Meat Soup, prompting her to comment, usually with a cackle, that she can’t seem to get away from me. As I approach Swain’s porch, here she comes again, smiling and moving fast on the arm of an urbane-looking fellow in a sharp gray suit, expensive-looking tie, and dress shoes. It isn’t until Annette introduces him as her husband that I recognize him as the waterman I interviewed sixteen years ago.
Once inside we split up, and I find my regular seat in a rear pew. A prerecorded rendition of Pachelbel’s Canon in D issues from the speakers. Pastor John Flood and Duane Crockett, the New Testament elder, take up positions at the altar, along with the groom. Lance Daley wears a gray tux that contrasts with his deep tan. His neck is tattooed with linked hearts, one labeled “J.W.” for Jordan Wesley, the unborn member of the class of 2016, who would have been his little brother, and the other, “Mom,” for Stephanie Crockett Daley, who died with her baby.
The bride crosses the church in a sequined, spaghetti-strapped ivory gown, hair piled high. Pastor Flood greets those gathered, then turns over the service to Duane, who teaches history at the school. He’s also the groom’s uncle—Stephanie Crockett Daley was his sister. Duane reads from the fifth chapter of Ephesians: “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church.
“In our society today, these Scriptures are not very popular,” Duane allows. “It seems that we cannot get past that wives are to submit to their husbands. We get an image of a slave owner bossing someone around without regard to their feelings and desires.” In his island delivery, “regard” comes out regoward and “desires” as dizoyers.
“Our world sees no problem in parents being responsible for their children or employees being loyal to their employer,” the unmarried Duane says, “but the notion of a wife submitting to her husband seems archaic and ancient.
“These verses are not suggesting for a woman to become a doormat to anyone,” he argues. “As I read and study these verses of Scripture, the bulk of the responsibility is placed on the man. He is told to love his wife as Jesus loved the church and gave his life for the church.
“Whenever a woman sees a man love her like that, I don’t think she will have any problem in submitting—to her husband loving her so much that he is willing to die for her.”
Pastor Flood announces that the two have written their own vows, and we all strain to hear them exchanged. I catch only a few words of Lance’s: “Erica, you are the most amazing woman I’ve met,” he tells his bride. “I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with you.” The pastor calls for the rings, oversees their exchange, declares the couple legally bound. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he says, opening his arms wide, “it is my pleasure to present to you Lance and Erica Daley, husband and wife.” The church erupts in whoops and applause.
The reception is in the school’s combination cafeteria and auditorium, fifty feet square with a high, exposed-truss ceiling and a cage over a big wall clock near the door. The room’s edges are draped in a gauzy white fabric, through which white Christmas lights blink. A banquet table offers appetizers: tortilla chips and cheese sauce, a chocolate fountain and little cubes of pound cake, a
veggie tray. I ladle myself a glass of nonalcoholic punch, the only liquid on hand. Everyday life can be challenging on a dry island, I reflect, but it’s an entirely more rigorous test to get through a dry wedding. As I retreat from the table I again encounter Annette and Ed, who are sitting at an otherwise empty round table near the stage. “Mind if I sit with you guys?” I ask.
“You come sit right here,” she answers.
Annette’s own first wedding is well remembered on Tangier—first, because she was due some happiness after suffering a teenage tragedy. She’d been sweethearts with Warren Eskridge, and they planned to marry when he returned from Vietnam. “Warren had a scooter, a green Cushman,” she’s told me. “He put my initials on it when we started going steady: MAP, for Mary Annette Pruitt, on the gas tank. I thought I had arrived.
“I thought I was destined to spend my life on Tangier,” she said. “I was going to get married and stay here, and I was very contented about that. And then he died at the end of my junior year.”
Instead of staying put, Annette left in 1970 for what’s now James Madison University, in Harrisonburg, Virginia. She met the first man she’d marry there, which brings up a second reason her wedding is firmly planted in the collective memory: The ceremony occurred while a photographer for National Geographic was on the island. The magazine’s November 1973 issue featured a splashy image of her in her gown, mobbed by friends and family outside Swain. She was home from college at the time, and settled in the Shenandoah Valley with her husband after graduation.