Chesapeake Requiem

by Earl Swift

  Then, after thirty-six years—during which she taught first grade, raised two sons and a daughter, and divorced—friends on Tangier set her up with Ed Charnock, whose wife, Henrietta, had died in 2005. To hear Annette tell it, it was a tentative, almost tortured courtship, because Ed proved shy to the point of paralysis. But, evidently, she pulled him out of his shell: By their second or third face-to-face date, in December 2006, they were talking about marriage. “He said, ‘Well, you know, with my job, it’s got to be a certain time of the year,’” Annette recalled. “So we talked about the seasons. He said it could be after [winter] crab dredging and before spring crabbing, or we could wait until the end of the summer. And we both said we didn’t want to wait that long. So that’s what it was—we got married at the end of February.”

  Now I take a seat beside Ed and make conversation by asking him to identify islanders around the room. Ed’s pushing seventy, but despite a face lined by sun and salt, he comes off as younger. He’s a tall, powerful-looking character. His replies to my questions are friendly but minimalist, which brings to mind something Jerry Frank Pruitt told me in the Situation Room about Ed’s father, Vaughn Charnock. He’d launch into a story, “get halfway through, then stop and say, ‘There ain’t no need to talk any more about it.’ People would say, ‘Well, Vaughn, aren’t you going to finish your story?’ And he’d shake his head. ‘Ain’t no need to talk more.’”

  A disc jockey from the mainland has set up in the room’s northwest corner, in front of a freestanding display of flashing lights. As Coldplay thumps from his array of speakers, we queue up to go through the dinner buffet of lasagna, Caesar salad, bread, pudding, and sweet tea. It’s only when we’re nearing the food that I realize I’ve seated myself at the grandparents’ table—now, suddenly, I grasp that Erica is Ed Charnock’s granddaughter—and I see in the staring eyes of many in the room that I’ve coat-tailed my way to an early shot at the lasagna. I’m relieved to get back to the table and resume talking with Ed. He remains a man of few words, but he smiles readily and has a dry, self-deprecating sense of humor. Annette compensates for his bashfulness. The meal passes quickly.

  The speeches follow, all of them short and unabashedly sincere: “Me and Lance have been best friends all the way since kindergarten,” the bulky young best man tells us. “And I just want him and Erica to know that if they ever need anything, I’ll be there for them.” A groomsman catches the garter. A bridesmaid catches the bouquet. Lance dances with his grandmother. The bride and her father dance to Aerosmith. The cake, shaped like a ziggurat, is excavated from the top down.

  The DJ spins several dance tunes for the younger islanders before announcing that “we’re going to switch things around, generation-wise,” and “Mony Mony” by Tommy James and the Shondells blasts from the speakers. A squeal goes up, and a crowd of middle-aged island women materializes on the dance floor, Annette in its center and twisting with abandon. “Look at Netty!” someone hollers.

  I look over at Ed, who like every waterman in the room has kept his seat. He’s leaning back in his chair, face windburned red, watching his wife with an expression of incomprehension and delight.

  Part Two

  The Lord Tells the Water

  Ooker holds a soft crab, top, and the empty shed from which it has just emerged. When its new shell fills out and hardens, it will dwarf the old. (EARL SWIFT)

  Six

  LATE ONE STEAMY MORNING I STEP ONTO THE DECK TO FIND the heat wilting, the sun intense, and I’m thankful that I’m not aboard one of the deadrises I can see out on the bay, working their pots. While watching them I sense a movement out of the corner of my eye and focus my attention there—just in time to see a finned arc break the surface, and a moment later and a short distance away, another. It’s a pod of bottlenose dolphins, swimming at a languid pace up the island’s western shore.

  Dolphins are routine sights farther down the Chesapeake—when I lived on the beach in Norfolk in the 1990s, I saw them swimming just beyond the surf several times a week—but in recent years scientists have come to find that great numbers of the brainy, social creatures are spending time in the bay’s upper reaches, too. Pods have been sighted up the Potomac River, farther north on Maryland’s western shore at Solomons Island, even up near the Bay Bridge above Annapolis. One scientist figures there might be as many as a thousand entering the bay each summer. Another needed just two summers to identify (and name) five hundred individual dolphins from a boat in the Potomac’s mouth.

  Whether this is a new phenomenon or the product of increased human awareness remains a question, but some experts suspect the creatures have adopted the bay as a summering place, perhaps lured by its abundance of croakers and rockfish. Others hypothesize that the dolphins’ regular food stocks are moving in response to the bay’s warming—which it appears to be doing slowly but steadily, to the tune of more than 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1960—and the dolphins are following the food. Exciting as they are to see, in other words, the dolphins might signal little-understood shifts in the bay’s ecosystem, and those shifts are not likely to be for the better.

  Whatever the case, I follow the pod through binoculars for several minutes before deciding that I want a closer look. The best place to get one is the slab, a concrete wharf just beyond the dump. I jump on my bike and race up the West Ridge and around the runway. It’s been a while since the dump was picked up and barged away, and trash is piled high at the roadside: a washer, several discarded microwaves, and an old oil tank; empty propane canisters, a satellite TV dish, the skeleton of a motor scooter, and a stripped motorcycle frame; a couple of barbecue grills and several rusted lawn mowers, which on Tangier are invariably called grass-cutters; a queen-sized box spring; bald or lacerated tires of various size; played-out window air conditioners and space heaters; a house furnace, dented and gouged, and rolled and rusted chain-link fencing; pieces of toilets and bikes and golf carts; and a large cathode-ray tube from an old TV.

  Beyond, the slab is dominated by enormous dumpsters filled to overflowing with smaller junk, and the concrete is littered with discarded oil bottles, ruined crab pots, and the plastic floats and metal cages used in oyster farming, a fledgling Tangier business. The rusting steel bulkhead at the slab’s edge thus makes for an unsightly vantage point, but it offers a clear view west and north, and if the dolphins continue on their course they’re bound to pass close by.

  Unfortunately, there’s not much of a breeze, and it isn’t long before the greenheads find me. The Chesapeake’s summertime scourge is just a half inch long, but judging from its bite, most of it is teeth. “Bad as a German shepherd,” I’ve heard Leon McMann say, and, on another occasion, “Like a Doberman pinscher,” and for the misery the insect delivers, those are only mild exaggerations. Its yen for blood is so pronounced that after tearing a divot out of an arm, leg, or neck, it will remain feeding on the bite, looking you in the eye, even as your hand descends to kill it. A single greenhead is a formidable adversary. A swarm is hellish. And here they come—one, now three, suddenly five—until slapping, cursing, I lose all interest in the dolphins and pedal hell-for-leather back out past the dump and down the West Ridge, desperate to get behind a screen.

  WHEN I MENTION TO OOKER that I saw the dolphins, he tells me that he’s seen whales venture this far up the bay—he saw one, he says, down by the offshore Tangier Light, and watermen saw a couple of humpbacks this past spring while out tending their pots. And one summer, he adds, his son Woodpecker found a dolphin tangled in crab pot lines. “He freed him,” he says of the hard-charging waterman. “So he has a little bit of me in him. The rest of him is Leon.”

  We’re out at Ooker’s crab shanty after a long morning on the water. Animal rescue has figured in our conversation throughout the day: Hours ago, after dumping a pot onto the Sreedevi’s culling board, Ooker picked a jimmy from the tangle and announced it was blind. “See his eyes?” he asked me. “They’re black.” And so they were—the crab’s stalked eyes, normall
y the grayish hue of the animal’s belly, looked like burnt match heads. He waved a hand in front of its face. It didn’t react. “I always throw them back,” he said. “I figure if he’s struggled this long and made it this far, I’m going to give him a break.

  “My wife will hear that and say, ‘You did what?’” he continued. “James will tell me, ‘I don’t believe you.’ They throw a lot of terms at me. ‘Weird.’ ‘Unique.’ What’s ‘eccentric’—does that work, too?”

  “It does,” I said.

  “James, he’ll say, ‘How do you know they’re blind? I’ve never noticed a blind crab.’ I say, ‘Well, you’re catching them, too.’” Ooker chucked the crab over the side. “I’ll do it even with a big jimmy,” he said. “I’m gonna let him go.”

  Once, he told me, he was crabbing off the P’int and came across an injured sea turtle. “It had a big gash on its head. It was having a hard time staying on the surface—it kept going down, and I could see it was struggling to get its head back up out of the water. So I pulled it aboard the boat.” Once ashore, he called the Virginia Aquarium and Marine Science Center in Virginia Beach, which is home to a rescue lab. “They said, ‘Well, we’re going to have to call the feds,’” Ooker recalled. “‘It’s against federal law to be in possession of a sea turtle.’

  “They came and got the turtle, but I got a call from NOAA,” he said, referring to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “This guy tells me, ‘We’ll let you off this time.’ I said, ‘Oh, you’ll let me off, huh?’” He glared at me and rubbed at his mustache with his wrist. “Can you believe that? Like I’d done something wrong. If I hadn’t pulled that turtle aboard my boat, it’d be dead.

  “So anyway, he says, ‘Yes, this time. But if this ever happens again, you can’t touch the turtle. Just let us know where it is.’ I said, ‘If this ever happens again, you’ll not be hearing from me. I’m through with that. I don’t care if the turtle calls out, “Ooker! Ooker! Help me, Ooker!” I’m turning my head.’”

  I told him I doubted he’d really do that. He shrugged.

  We’re surrounded by animals at the shanty. A large seagull is eyeing us from its perch on top of a piling. “That fellow there, that’s Yellow Bill,” Ooker tells me. “He hangs around.” He points out a smaller laughing gull, which he’s named Summertime. Both have made a home at the shanty for several summers straight and often fly out to his boat while he’s crabbing. “Normally, Yellow Bill would eat right out of my hand,” he says, “but if he notices there’s somebody else here, he gets a little leery.”

  Two cats prowl the deck around us, another is balanced on the edge of a shedding tank, and a fourth animal is lounging inside the shed. Ooker rattled off their names on my first introduction to the creatures in May, adding, “They’re a conservative group.” Six weeks later, I know them well: Sam Alito, a fluffy smoke-gray cat, sturdily built and hungry for attention; big, thickset John Roberts, sheathed in glistening black fur; Condi Rice, also black, but slightly smaller and missing the tip of an ear; and Ann Coulter, runtish and starved looking, her black coat patchy.

  “They’ve been out here about twelve years,” Ooker says, shooing John Roberts from the tank. “There was a storm, a nasty one, and I was out here. There was a tree stump adrift with these kittens on it, so I went out and got them.” He fishes several discarded sheds from a tank with a small hand net and flicks them into the water below. I watch them fall. With a splash they join hundreds of empty exoskeletons on the harbor’s bottom. “My wife wouldn’t let me bring them home,” he says, “so they’ve been out here ever since. They’ve grown up with wood under their feet.”

  IT’S AT HIS shanty that Ooker demonstrates most impressively the deep knowledge and understanding of the blue crab that watermen gain over the span of their careers. Out back of the hut stretch three rows of tanks, plywood tubs four feet wide, eight long, and containing six inches of water pumped from the creek below and draining back into it. Ooker has eighteen tanks in all, though at this point in the season, he’s running only half.

  Years ago, before peeler crabbers took to using pumps to circulate water over their catch, their tanks were built with slatted sides and floated in the creek itself, and the natural action of the currents and tides kept the water moving within them. “Floats,” they were called then, and even today some older watermen hang on to the term. A crabber typically arranged his floats in a chain or an open square and bustered up his catch from a small boat. It was hard on the back, but there are some who say keeping the crabs overboard caused the animals less stress than modern tanks, and kept more of them from dying in captivity.

  I watch as Ooker sorts through the peelers he caught today, depositing them in tanks according to the time remaining before they’ll shed. He makes this judgment quickly, with an inspection of their swim fins. One edge of the limb changes color; it develops a whitish tinge at first, then turns pink, and, just before a crab molts, deepens into red. Or so he tells me. No matter how many crabs he shows me, I fail to detect the telltale red he insists is there and plain to see. Peering into the tanks, I cannot spot soft crabs among the peelers, either, something Ooker can do with a glance. “How do you do that?” I ask him. “What do you look for?”

  He thinks for a moment. “They have that soft crab look about them,” he says, but he’s unable to offer any specifics, except that their color is slightly off. Other Tangier crabbers have trouble explaining the process as well. One afternoon Ooker was showing a wedding party around the shanty. The groom, Allen Parks, born and bred on Tangier, was pointing out crabs at various stages of their molt to his guests, who were mainlanders—and unaccustomed to island pronunciations. “That one’s soft,” Allen said, pointing to a just-busted crab, “and that one’s howard.”

  How can you tell that’s Howard? a wedding guest asked.

  Just by looking at it, Allen told her.

  But what about him tells you it’s Howard?

  The way it looks, Allen replied.

  Do you give names to all the crabs? she asked.

  What? No, no, Allen said. It’s howard.

  One rule of thumb, only so reliable, is that the soft crabs tend to be bigger. Peelers are far smaller than the hard crabs Ooker finds in his pots; the state requires that they be just 31/4 or 31/2 inches wide, depending on the time of year, versus the 5-inch minimum for hard jimmies and sooks. It’s not until they’ve molted, and filled out their new and still-soft shell, that they achieve a respectable size. “People who don’t know what they’re talking about will say, ‘Well, why do you catch such small crabs, those peelers?’” Ooker says. “It’s because you have to catch a small peeler to get a large soft crab.”

  If a peeler’s already big, it’s almost surely a male. After mating, jimmies continue to molt, getting bigger all the while. Sooks can but rarely do, Ooker says: In all his years on the water, he’s caught only eight or nine already-adult female peelers. As doublers, they’re thus often said to be approaching their “terminal” molt.

  The tanks closest to the shanty are reserved for busters, those crabs in the process of actually backing out of their old shells. It’s a delicate stage: In the wild, Ooker tells me, a molting crab rarely “hangs up” in its discarded exoskeleton, but it happens regularly in the tanks, and it can kill the crab. He scoops soft crabs out of the tank and carries them inside, to the big cooler, where he drops them in a bucket. On the radio, an Eastern Shore seafood store is offering number twos for twenty-one dollars a dozen. “Listen to that,” Ooker says. “They’re charging twenty-one a dozen, and we’re getting forty a bushel for the same crabs.”

  Therein lies one of the benefits of going after peelers. “A male crab, I can sell him as a number two for forty dollars a bushel, or I can sell him as a soft crab for forty dollars a dozen,” he says. “I’d rather do that.” Yes, his workday is longer—he has to monitor his catch into the night—and yes, he has to pay someone to buster up his tanks while he’s on the water. Still, he doesn’t
have to catch nearly as many crabs to make a living.

  This raises a question that I put to Ooker: Seeing as how soft crabs are worth so much more, why doesn’t he catch a whole pile of hard crabs—forty-seven bushels a day, like the hard crabbers with the biggest licenses are allowed to do—put them in the tanks, and simply wait for them to shed? A couple of crabbers could join forces, one going out to fish up the pots each day, the other to buster up the collected thousands of crabs, and they’d make a mint.

  Alas, it wouldn’t work. “Being confined, it changes the crabs,” he says. “Peelers will slow down their molt once they’re in a tank. If you bring them in too early, they won’t shed at all. You can’t raise crabs from when they’re small like you can with fish.”

  Even with rank peelers within hours of molting, “the process slows down,” he says. “You put a peeler in the shedding tank, and it might take four days to shed, when if it was out in the bay it’d take a day or a day and a half.”

  SUCH EXPERTISE DIDN’T come to Tangiermen quickly. It developed over generations, with crabbers talking among themselves and handing their collected knowledge down to their sons. The island’s been studying the blue crab for two full centuries.

  Among its early crab researchers was Joshua Thomas’s stepbrother, George Pruitt II, who in 1818 bought property at Uppards with his wife, Leah, another of Joseph Crockett’s granddaughters. George II was said to be as different from his dissolute father as a man could be. “It was said that he prayed more than any man that ever lived on the Island,” Sugar Tom advised in his history. “He was an old man when I was a boy, and I have seen him in his canoe crabbing or getting oysters or fishing many times, and I do not remember ever seeing him alone without being engaged in prayer.”

  Another family was already living on the island’s north shore when the Pruitts settled nearby—a fellow named Job Parks and his wife, Rhoda, who was Leah’s sister. From those households began the long lines of Pruitts and Parkses on Tangier, surnames that today outnumber that of the founding family. Eighty-one current Tangiermen are named Parks, and sixty-five, Pruitt. Crocketts number fifty.