Chesapeake Requiem

by Earl Swift

  But in 1820, when people had occupied the island for forty-two years, Tangier was home to only seventy-four of any name. And that number seemed destined to rise slowly, for island life demanded much. For example, in September 1821, “a fearful storm of wind and swelling of the tide” swamped and battered the place in what became known as the Great September Gust. “The wind blew a storm from the east and southeast” through the night, Sugar Tom reported, “when suddenly the wind changed to northwest and blew a perfect hurricane, and the tide being very high, the hurricane brought the salt water from the Chesapeake Bay over the Island until it covered the Island. Even the highest land had three feet of water over it.”

  That would be neither the last hurricane to smite Tangier nor the most destructive, but the fact that Sugar Tom wrote of it nearly seventy years later testifies that his forebears saw it as a memorable test. Tangiermen have long considered their island an anointed place, however, protected by the style of fervent prayer George II practiced, and they found that even the most daunting setbacks left them with the spirit to press on. So it was after the Great September Gust, when it seemed sure that the flood had poisoned their meager cropland with salt. They prayed, then “went to work covering their land with drift and sea ordure and every thing of the manure kind,” Sugar Tom wrote, and the following year “raised the best crop they had ever raised in all their lives.”

  The corn and potatoes they grew were essential, for they did not yet rely exclusively on the water for their living. They fished with increasing expertise and managed to sell some of their catch. They netted the odd crab for their own tables, too. But they faced long odds in attempting either harvest on a commercial scale; seafood—crabs in particular—was tough to get to market using the sailboats and wagons of the day.

  Oysters offered the best prospect for income. The waters around Tangier were studded with oyster rocks—millions of the creatures piled in huge mounds down on the bottom—but getting their catch aboard was backbreaking work. The islanders used tongs, which resembled posthole diggers fitted with rakes at their ends. Tangiermen favored tongs with handles sixteen to twenty feet long and fashioned from heavy timber, meaning they weighed plenty even without a load of oysters in the rakes. Imagine balancing at the edge of a small boat and shoving such a contraption to the bottom, working the handles to scoop up shells (only some of them housing oysters), and hoisting it hand over hand to the surface, taking care to keep the rakes closed all the while, then lifting it clear of the water and the gunwales to dump the load into the boat’s bottom. Imagine doing it in an icy northwest wind, the bay stirred into three-foot waves, the spray off their crests freezing on the tongs and the boat and chapping your face and hands—a realistic expectation, for oystering is a cold-weather undertaking. And imagine that after hours of such brutal work you end the day with a few bushels of oysters, each of which—were you able to sell it—would bring just a few cents apiece. All in all, working the land seemed a better bet.

  Then, around 1840, the outside world arrived in Tangier Sound in the form of oystermen from New York and New England, who’d already ransacked the oyster rocks of their home waters and came looking for a fresh supply. These Nordmen, as islanders called them, set to work on the Oak Hammock Rock, a giant oyster colony just a little northeast of Uppards. They tonged, same as the Tangiermen, but also had their sailboats rigged to pull iron dredges that scraped oysters off the bottom and lifted them aboard by the bushel. The strangers also paid good money to locals who brought oysters to them.

  The Yankee oystermen recast the island’s relationship to the bay. “As this branch of industry increased very fast, people immigrated to the Island,” Sugar Tom wrote. “The young men on the Island could now earn more money in three days than they could in a month before. They married and so did those who immigrated, which soon increased the population.”

  Indeed, it did. The census of 1850 reported the population of “Tangier Islands,” which included a few sparsely settled islets to the north, as 178. Ten years later, the number had leaped to 411. Working the water became even more profitable during the Civil War: American Methodists split on the question of slavery, and Tangier, aligned with the Northern splinter, found its sympathies lay with the Union. The island sat out the fighting that consumed the surrounding mainland and, according to tradition, attracted come-heres from both the North and South who wanted to do the same, some of Ooker’s forebears among them.

  And as the place grew crowded, and properties were carved into ever-smaller pieces to make room for the newcomers, the croplands that once occupied all of Black Dye and most of King Street and all of the West Ridge shrank, snip by snip, until only isolated farmlets remained. Tangier grew ever more dependent on the Chesapeake and ever better at harvesting its bounty.

  ALL THESE YEARS later, generations removed from the experiences of those early settlers, a certain stubbornness pervades life on the island. For what makes Tangier dear to its people, what makes their concept of home so meaningful, is that it is still not an easy place—that it can, in fact, be frightfully hard.

  Or at least uncomfortable. The weather is muggy, and the Situation Room has grown sweaty and close. “Getting warm in here,” Bruce Gordy observes.

  “It is that,” Leon agrees. “It’s warm.”

  “We ought to put that air conditioner in the window,” suggests Allen Ray Crockett, a semiretired waterman who, though soon to turn eighty, still has a full head of thick black hair.

  “Yeah,” Bruce says. “It’s about time.”

  Our surroundings are decrepit. The old birthing room is sheathed in pale green tile that climbs four feet up the walls, a fair percentage of it missing, broken, or cracked. Higher up, on peeling wallpaper, members have tacked or taped unframed pictures: A photograph, printed on typing paper, of Bruce Gordy cradling a twenty-inch rockfish; a large Northrop Grumman publicity photo of the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman under way; black-and-white photos of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig as teammates and of Ruth delivering his retirement speech at Yankee Stadium’s home plate; a color photo of half-naked African babies, evidently snapped by a missionary; and a 1940s image of Tangier’s county dock and harbor. The coffee maker rests on an old medical cabinet in a back corner. Fruit flies circle a trash can stuffed with discarded foam coffee cups.

  The men take up the subject of a Tangierman who’s lost his crabbing license for violating the state’s fisheries laws. It’s unstated what his offense was, but it’s his third, and the VMRC has suspended him for the rest of the year. Leon is scandalized by the development. “That man can’t work!” he gasps. “What’s he going to do? They’ve taken away his living!

  “What’s the difference between that and getting three tickets from driving, and the judge says, ‘You can’t go to work no more’? It’s the same thing,” he says, building up a head of steam. “There’s something wrong with that part of the law. What am I going to do if I can’t work on the water? What am I gonna do? I ain’t got a Colonel Sanders fried chicken place I can go to for a job.” It’s a rule, he says, made up “by young people down in Newport News,” where the commission is based, who know nothing about the water. Reminds him of a regulation the state considered a few years ago, citing concern about overfishing. It called for a halt to peeler scraping but left peeler potting untouched. Leon shakes his head in disgust. The scrapers “all had licenses for peeler pots that would catch four times as many crabs,” he says.

  “That’s the truth, ain’t it?” George “Cook” Cannon says. He’s an in-law of Carol Moore’s—his wife, Jody, is Lonnie Moore’s older sister—and he lives on the West Ridge near the presumed site of Joshua Thomas’s homestead. “At least four times as many.”

  Leon, wide-eyed: “It’s like putting me and four or five others in here in charge of farming. It don’t make no sense, none at all. What do I know about farming?”

  Bruce: “Just because you’re a marine biologist doesn’t mean you know anything about the water.”


  Leon: “But that’s what they look at, what letters they got after their names.” He pauses to take a breath. “The whole problem is the people making the rules don’t know what they’re doing.”

  Bruce takes a drag off his e-cigarette. “All they need to do is pick the brains of the people here. Has anyone here ever been interviewed by those people?” Everyone in the room shakes his head.

  Jerry Frank Pruitt, sitting nearest the door, speaks up. “The bottom line is that they want the Chesapeake Bay for recreation.”

  “No,” Bruce says, “they want it to be for ‘future generations’”—implication being the present generation doesn’t count for much.

  Jerry Frank brings the conversation back to the waterman who lost his license. It’s his understanding, he says, that the fellow flouted the regulations. He was summoned to appear before the commission but decided not to show up.

  “Oh, well,” Leon says, “you can’t do that.”

  “No, you can’t,” Jerry Frank says. “You can’t do that. It’s disrespecting them.” He speaks slowly and quietly, as if debating each word. He owns a boatyard up by the dump. It’s largely dormant these days, a victim of Tangier’s shrinking population and an attendant decline in available boats to work on, but for forty years, Jerry Frank hand-built wooden deadrises said to be among the finest on the bay. He’s accustomed to measuring twice before cutting.

  “I know one thing,” says Ernest Ed Parks, retired from a career skippering oceangoing tugs and pulling barges. “I’ll put in with anybody aboard of a boat.”

  That’s all well and good, Jerry Frank replies, but a man can have the best intentions, and strive to do right in his life and work, and still be in the wrong now and then. A while back, he says, he put a road through the marsh up by his boatyard. Intended no harm by it. “But I got a very threatening letter from the Corps [of Engineers] in Norfolk, telling me I was in big trouble and what all.”

  He wrote a letter in reply to the colonel in charge. “I dictated it. I’m not an educated man, schooled only through the eighth grade, and so I dictated this letter saying how sorry I was, saying that I had not realized I was breaking the law and that I knew that ignorance of the law was no excuse, but that I apologized and promised I would never do it again. And I asked for his forgiveness.

  “That’s what you have to do,” Jerry Frank says. “You have to. Because the rules are the rules, and it’s their job to hold you to them, and if you don’t hold to them—well, whose fault is that?”

  We sit silent, digesting his words. They make good sense to me, though I know they might not reflect the views of everyone in the room, given Tangier’s long, fractious history with rules and officialdom.

  Leon shifts in his seat. “It gets much hotter than this, we won’t be able to sit in here,” he says.

  “Well,” Cook Cannon says, “why don’t we put in the air conditioner?”

  “That’s a good idea,” Bruce says.

  No one moves or speaks for several seconds.

  “Where is it?” Cook asks. “Where’s the air conditioner?”

  “Out there,” several members say, pointing toward the darkened hall beyond the door. Cook, who sports a feral gray beard, leaps to his feet with a crazed gleam in his eye. “It’s time we got the air conditioner in here,” he declares. He disappears into the hall and reappears half a minute later with a window unit in his arms.

  “We talk about it,” Bruce says. “He just does.”

  Cook grunts the unit across the room as Bruce forces the window open. Cook slides the appliance into position, pulls down the sash to hold it in place, unfolds the accordion seals on either side, and plugs in the cord. Chilled air washes into the room.

  “Look at that,” Bruce says. “Four and a half minutes, it took him.”

  Gravestones, bricks, and other relics of a vanished hamlet litter the beach at Canaan, June 2016. (EARL SWIFT)

  Seven

  FIFTY YARDS BEYOND UPPARDS, COOK CANNON LEANS THE Noel C. to starboard and we arc into the shimmering, flat strait between the Canaan shore and Goose Island, a junction of latitude and longitude that was once solid ground. Water has replaced the finger of land that once jutted northward from Tangier—a thin vestige of which survived on a government map from 1917 but had vanished when it was updated twenty-six years later. Off to port, Goose—formerly all but attached to that finger—survives as a wafer of marsh barely clearing the water.

  We’re headed to Crisfield, where Cook has to pick up some building supplies. Because he parks the Noel C. toward the west end of the boat channel, it’s his habit to forsake the shorter but molasses-slow putter through the harbor in favor of cutting west into the bay and howling around Uppards at speeds that call to mind life’s frailty. The diesel roars beneath the deck, so conversation means shouting. But it’s a cloudless early morning, the air is crisp and refreshing, and the bay to our south is dotted with deadrises gleaming bright white in the low-angled light. It’s a fine time to be out in a boat with an old salt who’s navigated these waters for most of his seventy-two years.

  Cook nods to his left. “That’s Goose Harbor,” he yells, using a term that historically applied to the water just east of the island, but which Tangiermen sometimes use for the island itself. “When I was a boy, this gap between there and Uppards was about three hundred yards across.” I peer across an expanse of water more than four times as wide. Our movement shifts our perspective on the island, which I now see has been split in two and whittled to splinters. “Used to go over there all the time,” Cook tells me. “And you could wade across this gap. I used to wade across it in knee boots, not waders.”

  “You could walk there?” I ask. It seems a tall tale.

  “Yes, you could,” he says. “Look now. Lot of water here. And deep water, all the way up to the bank.” He turns the boat toward shore, and we hug Uppards’s crumbling peat edge. On his depth gauge, I see that the bottom is ten feet down.

  Later, I’ll examine a navigation chart published by the U.S. Coast Survey in 1863 and find that as unlikely as Cook’s assertion seems, it was once possible to walk a much greater distance—from Tangier north to Smith Island, six miles away across the state line—without encountering water more than a foot deep. That chart, shaded to reflect the water’s depth, clearly shows the ghostly remains of the long peninsula that once contained both Tangier and Smith.

  Cook steers the boat to the northeast, and we cross water that on the old maps was studded with an archipelago of small islets, holdouts of that sunken peninsula. Few remain. We pass Queen’s Ridge, just east of Goose, which was home to at least one extended family back in Joseph Crockett’s day. Now it has barely enough ground for a campsite. We cruise past a point marked on old maps as long and skinny Little Piney Island but find nothing there but water. The same goes for Reach Hammock, just above Little Piney: vanished. Farther north was a little square of land labeled Herring Island, which Tangiermen called Hearn. Ooker has told me he recalls stepping ashore there as a youngster. “Weren’t very big, but you could walk around,” he said. “My dad used to talk about the days when there was a store on it.” Tangiermen still use Hearn as a reference point, but it’s a phantom conjured from memory. There’s nothing there.

  What all these islands lacked in common, Cook hollers, was sand: Sand protects a shoreline. “Sand makes the water go up and over the bank. When the sand’s gone and the water comes in, what it does instead is this.” He smacks his fist into his palm. “What it does is undermine the shore, and it breaks off in big chunks.”

  Sand used to line Tangier’s west side, he tells me. In his youth, the islanders didn’t hike down to the spit to play on a beach; they made the far shorter journey to the point where West Ridge Road meets Hog Ridge today. Taking a lane that cut to the west, they walked past several houses and through marsh and high grass to a place they called Cow’s Hole. “We used to play cowboys down there,” Cook says. “There was that tall grass, that good-to-lie-down-in grass, and it
was a good walk through there. I’d say as much as half a mile.” The hike ended at a lovely beach. Whatever protection its sand provided to Tangier didn’t last, for the beach itself proved no match for the bay. It washed away, the sand drifting south to the spit—until the bay dislodged it there, too, and carried it away from the island for good.

  Cook steers us up along Smith’s eastern flank. Smith is not one island but a cluster and, not counting the wildlife refuge that occupies the biggest of them, it’s at least four times the size of Tangier. From its underside, three tentacles of land dangle southward, their tips crossing into Virginia. One used to have an island off its end called Shanks. It was settled in the eighteenth century and occupied through much of the nineteenth; Joseph Crockett’s daughter Molly spent much of her life there. Nothing remains of it but its name, preserved in Shanks Creek, a tidal inlet to the east of where the island once lay.

  We race past a crabbing area called the Peach Orchard, named for a point of land that once occupied the spot. Rooftops peaking over the marsh advertise Tylerton, one of Smith’s three villages. Unconnected by road to the other two, it can be reached only by boat. The “yarnies” there, which is what Tangiermen call Smith Islanders, have much in common with their neighbors—a life sequestered from the mainstream, nearly indecipherable accents, and a home that has steadily shrunk over generations.

  We cross the state line, marked by a widely spaced chain of white buoys. Up ahead Crisfield looms, its water tower and several big waterfront condo buildings glowing against the sky. Cook steers the Noel C. into the mouth of the Little Annemessex River, so wide that it seems we’re entering a bay rather than a short creek. Off to port stretches a white sand beach, and on it stands a tall brick chimney. It’s all that remains of a fish-processing plant that burned in 1932 and now serves as an aid to mariners as surely as a lighthouse. A good piece away on our other side is the river’s low, marshy, and crumbling south bank. “When I was a boy, we had to stay to the left here, almost all the way to that chimney, to get into Crisfield,” Cook tells me. “This over here”—he nods across the two hundred yards of water to our right—“was all land. It was really big, and now all of it has washed away. Just since I was a boy.”