Chesapeake Requiem

by Earl Swift

  Oysters could, in fact, harbor the disease, but the real culprit was more likely the growing settlement’s casual approach to sanitation. Cholera is caused by a microbe that lurks in raw sewage and, when swallowed, attaches itself to the walls of the small intestine. The consequences are grim: gushes of watery diarrhea that lead to potentially fatal dehydration and that can, in turn, infect those tending to the patient. Easily treated today, cholera killed millions worldwide in the nineteenth century, including former president James K. Polk.

  In 1866 Tangier’s households relied on privies, which were not set astride deep holes, as was the style on the mainland—the water table was too high for that—but over narrow “sewer ditches” that were theoretically flushed by the give and take of the tides. Never mind that these ditches emptied into larger canals that served as the island’s transportation grid. In those days, the roads were even narrower than they are today and suited only to foot traffic. To move cargo—wood for stoves, blocks of ice, furniture—islanders on the Main Ridge used small skiffs they’d “shove” with poles into the Big Gut, then turn up ditches they’d dug into their backyards, which effectively served as their driveways but also devolved quickly into open-air cesspools. Children routinely played in the waterways. Watermen invariably spent time in the same water, working on boats or rinsing off gear. It was all too easy to get an accidental mouthful of ditch water or to scoop drinking water from a cistern with unwashed hands. Or, yes, to eat an oyster exposed to sewage and infected with the microbe.

  “The people began to die very fast,” Sugar Tom recalled. “We did not know what it was until the physicians told us, and as many as six adults would die in twenty-four hours. I could hear the voice of weeping all night.” The outbreak apparently led to the island’s evacuation—Sugar Tom wrote that “nearly all the people left”—though how long they stayed away, how many decided to remain on the mainland, and how many succumbed have all been lost to memory.

  The wonder is that the disease didn’t return, for island homes continued to rely on privies and sewer ditches even as the population mushroomed. Most didn’t have indoor plumbing until after World War II, and even then it didn’t connect to a bona fide sewer system; indoor toilets flushed into septic tanks or, just as often, pipes that crossed the yards and emptied into open water. Bruce Gordy’s wife, Peggy, told me that none of her homes had indoor plumbing until she and Bruce rented a place in Meat Soup in the late sixties. Their modern toilet dumped directly into the main harbor.

  The situation wasn’t remedied until Tangier installed water and sewer lines in the early 1980s, meaning that everyone in the Situation Room has had experience with outhouses. “Where those toilets used to be, the marsh would be this high,” Jerry Frank Pruitt told me one afternoon, holding his hand over his head, “and everywhere else it would be this high.” He dropped his hand to waist level.

  “Yeah. Good fertilizer,” Ooker said. “It got high around the sewer ditches, too.”

  “These ditches,” I interrupted. “Did you guys go swimming there?”

  Ooker nodded. “You’d run into a floater every once in a while.” “Have to do a reverse dog paddle,” Allen Ray Crockett recalled. They both laughed. “Yeah,” Ooker said. “Exactly.”

  ON AN AFTERNOON four or five generations beyond the cholera, I climb into Carol Moore’s skiff to thud up the west side of Uppards to the ghost of Canaan. I’ve prepared for the trip by donning long pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and drenching myself in DEET. “I can smell your insect repellent from here,” Carol yells from the boat’s stern, where she’s guiding the tiller. “It won’t do any good. It won’t even slow them down.”

  At Canaan, several tombstones lie on their backs near the surf line, along with tiny, scattered relics of the village: bricks worn porous and smooth, rusted cogs and sprigs of iron that once made machines, slivers of ancient lumber, glass.

  “I’m going to walk this way.” Carol points to the east. “You want to hang around here and see what you find? Or you could walk down the west side.” As she speaks, flies home in on the fresh meat come ashore and orbit around us. “Look close, and you might find some arrowheads,” she says. “I’ll meet you back here.”

  She strolls away. A fly smacks into my cheek, but it doesn’t land. Others buzz within an inch of my ears, but the DEET, for the moment, appears to be working. I wander over to the stones and stop at the tall, worn slab of marble dedicated to Polly J. Parks, who died on December 4, 1913. Canaan was a busy village then, home to more than one hundred people. Its docks jutted from a waterfront now submerged under the strait that Cook and I traversed in his boat. In Polly Parks’s day, the long finger of land linking Uppards to Goose Island, withered but intact, still guarded the Canaan shoreline from westerlies.

  I brush sand away from her stone, which is cracked across its middle. Above the crack are the dates bookending her life. The inscription below the crack reads:

  Here in the silent graveyard,

  ’Neath the sod and dew;

  Never one moment forgotten

  In sorrow we think of you.

  What the stone does not reveal: That friends and family called her Dollie. That she was born a Pruitt and was directly descended from George Pruitt II, Joshua Thomas’s stepbrother, and Leah Evans, Joseph Crockett’s granddaughter. That she grew up in a crowded house, one of twelve children. That she married Harry Parks, a direct descendant of Job Parks and Leah’s sister, Rhoda, the first settlers at Canaan. That her kin survive: Polly’s great-great-nephew is Jerry Frank Pruitt, and her grandson Stewart married Jerry Frank’s sister Connie. That after Polly’s death, Harry remarried and outlived her by thirty-nine years.

  Now her headstone lies broken and overwashed by the tide. The place where she raised her seven children, who would go on to seed much of Tangier’s living population, has been swallowed by the rising bay, leaving behind nothing but shards. A palpable melancholy hangs over Canaan, not only because it offers such scant evidence of the generations who lived here, but because it offers a glimpse of what may come.

  Carol returns, having found little in her wanderings. It’s a lovely, windless afternoon, and the sun remains high in the sky, so we elect to cross the strait to Goose Island. We pick our way through the shallows around its edges, running aground time and again, Carol reversing course to keep the outboard’s propeller from chewing too deep into the bottom, and finally make landfall on the islet’s southeast tip. As small as Goose appeared from Cook’s boat, it seems even less substantial as we tread its edges. It rises to a foot, maybe two, above the bay. Wild petunias sprout from the low dunes. The island’s interior is a bog of stagnant tidal pools, surfaces veneered in scum, minnows busy below.

  We prog the water’s edge for a few minutes as shorebirds circle and swoop overhead, calling and crying. Then, having searched what little ground Goose has to offer, we push off for Queen’s Ridge, a few yards to the east. This once-inhabited place is now little more than a narrow tuft of marsh grass. No point in searching for remnants of its past. There’s nowhere left to look.

  Ooker fishing up his peeler pots, June 2016. (EARL SWIFT)

  Eight

  TANGIER FOUND ITSELF BETTER CONNECTED TO THE WORLD in the decades following the Civil War. In 1867, steamboats began scheduled service around the Chesapeake, and in 1884 the island became a regular stop. Before long, four ships a week called there with passengers and goods. The harbor didn’t exist at the time—the waters off Meat Soup were too shallow for anything bigger than a skiff, and the creek between Canton and the P’int was just inches deep at low tide. So the steamboats pulled into the haven formed by the curling spit—a pocket of deep, protected water that quickly earned the name Steamboat Harbor—and dropped anchor. Tangiermen poled and sailed small boats out to meet them.

  In time, the steamship company built a wooden wharf in the harbor’s middle, which made loading and unloading a little easier. But just a little. For more than thirty years, anyone or anything steaming into
Tangier had to be ferried ashore. Still, for the first time islanders had easy access to mainland newspapers and groceries, and drummers could bring samples of dry goods and patent medicines to a population hungry for big-city merchandise.

  They had the money to pay for it. The oystering boom showed no signs of letting up. The business became so big, and competition so fierce, that it wasn’t long before friction developed between Virginia and Maryland as to exactly where their shared border crossed the Chesapeake. The line was well established on the bay’s west side, where it hugged the south shore of the Potomac River, so that the river itself lay in Maryland. It was more or less settled on the Eastern Shore, too. But on the water in between, it got murky—a situation that the bay’s people had not much worried about for two hundred years, because they’d never had a reason to.

  They had one now. By law, oystermen could work only the waters of their own states, making the line’s precise location a matter worth millions of dollars. The description of the line dated to a seventeenth-century land grant, which used points of reference that each state interpreted to its own advantage. Commissioners from both met to settle the question. They failed to reach an agreement, and the border wound up in arbitration.

  The arbitrators, from Pennsylvania and Georgia, had their work cut out for them. They had to rely on centuries-old documents and John Smith’s map of the Chesapeake, the only full depiction of the bay at the time the border was initially established. “Not only the names, but the places themselves have been much changed,” they wrote. “Considerable islands are believed to have been washed away or divided by the force of the waters. Headlands which stretched far out into the bay have disappeared, and the shore is deeply indented where in former times the water line was straight, or curved in the other direction.” But in a pragmatic 1877 decision, the panel established a zigzagging line that clipped the southernmost mile of Smith Island from Maryland, and granted Virginia dominion over the productive oyster rocks there and at various other points claimed by its neighbor.

  The oyster industry was near its peak at that point. In 1884, Chesapeake watermen pulled fifteen million bushels of oysters from the bay, a level of pillage that boggles the modern mind. Even some of those watermen, an eternally hopeful lot, had to wonder how long the bay could keep giving.

  That worry, quickly realized, explains why the peace ushered by the border agreement was short-lived. After the 1884 peak the catch began to slump. Oystermen responded by seeking their quarry with increased recklessness, and within a few years Virginians were disregarding the state line. Angry Marylanders met the poachers with gunfire, though not long after, they were sneaking across the line themselves. Both states created “oyster navies” to patrol the border, and their officers were soon fighting all-out sea battles with outlaw watermen. One day in the mid-1890s, Virginia oyster police found themselves in a desperate gunfight with Maryland watermen, who outnumbered them thirty boats to two. The following month, one of the Virginia boats came under fire from a small army of Marylanders hunkered behind breastworks on Smith Island. By then, the decline in annual harvests was pronounced.

  Tangier had been transformed by the oyster. In December 1890 it was bigger, healthier, and better off than ever before, with nearly nine hundred residents, four schools, two hotels, seven stores, three fish factories, and fifty-two dredging boats tied up at the waterfront. Its people had no intention of surrendering this newfound wealth. So as it became obvious that the oyster business was on the wane, they turned their attention to a new fishery, abundant and familiar but largely untapped: the blue crab. By June 1903, the New York Times could report, “There is no slack time with the Tangier Islanders, for oysters take the place of crabs and crabs take the place of oysters, and there is no season when something worth having is not to be taken from Tangier or Pocomoke Sound, or the waters north or south.

  “The Tangier Islander is in an almost ideal position to get the most in a simple material way out of life. He draws his living from the sea, and the shore affords him only occasional standing room and a place to sleep.”

  AN HOUR BEFORE ONE JUNE SUNUP I hitch a ride out to Ooker’s crab shanty with Donald Thorne Jr., a.k.a. Thornie, first cousin to Carol Moore. I find the mayor packing soft crabs for market while listening to an Eastern Shore farm report on the radio. A crabber’s life resembles a farmer’s in manifold ways, he tells me. His livelihood is dependent on the weather, for one thing, and on other natural forces beyond his control: the bay’s temperature and salinity, the health of its underwater grasses, the preponderance or dearth of fish that prey on juvenile crabs. His income, like a farmer’s, turns on whatever price the market sets for his product, and he doesn’t have much say in that, either. Prices typically start high in the spring, when crabs are fresh from the mud and just starting their migration, and drop steadily as their numbers increase after Memorial Day, reaching a seasonal low in late July or August, when the animals are at their greatest abundance. Beyond that general rule, however, a Tangierman cannot count on much. “You find out what the price is when you come in with your catch,” Ooker says. “Sometimes they won’t even put a price on your ticket—they’ll just tell you it will be higher or lower than the day before.”

  This is a reality that frustrates pretty near every waterman on the island. Few are as vocal on the subject as Leon McMann, who’s had seventy-one years of full-time work on the water to stew about it. “They pay what they want,” he told me. “Ever since we been an island, we’ve never known what we were getting paid until after we caught it.”

  Unlike some farmers, a crabber isn’t eligible for a government subsidy. He won’t get a check from Washington to sit out the season in order to stabilize the commodity’s price. And he can’t stockpile his catch until the market favors a sale. “The stuff we catch, you got to get rid of it,” Leon pointed out. “If you got live crabs and you got a boatful of ’em, what are you going to do with ’em if you ain’t gonna sell to the man?”

  So this morning Ooker is preparing a shipment of soft crabs to New York City’s New Fulton Fish Market, which is offering a higher price than the crab house in Crisfield with which most of Tangier’s peeler crabbers do business. The decision has its drawbacks: He has to buy heavy cardboard shipping boxes, which cost ten dollars apiece. He has to pay the cost of shipping his softshells from Tangier to the Eastern Shore, then 260-odd miles by truck to New York City. And packing them for the journey requires a surfeit of labels and paperwork, which can be burdensome to a man who already spends eighteen hours a day on the job.

  But New York prices more than make up for it most days, and the people up there offer another incentive: They’ll defer to Ooker’s expertise in grading his softshells, which the Crisfield buyers will not do. Like hard crabs, soft crabs are priced by size. The biggest of them, bona fide monsters that measure more than five and a half inches across and singly fill a dinner plate, are called whales. Those just a touch smaller are jumbos. Next come primes, then hotels—a name that not even Leon can explain—and, finally, mediums.

  Ooker walks to an industrial cooler that occupies the shanty’s middle and extracts a yellow plastic bucket containing the crabs that molted overnight. The first one he pulls from the container measures a full eight inches across. “That’s a nice soft crab,” he says. “They’ll like him in New York.” It’s a whale of a whale, without question. Sizing most specimens is not nearly so obvious, however. “Crisfield, they grade the crabs, and they grade them smaller and usually pay less for them,” Ooker says. “Crisfield, too, sometimes they care about how many legs are on the crab. Of course, you have to have a reasonable amount, but they’ll get picky if you have a couple of legs missing.” He knows that most diners won’t open a soft-shell crab sandwich to ensure that the deep-fried creature within has all ten appendages; the legs yield crunch but little meat anyway, so a soft crab shy of one or two shouldn’t be much of a worry. Unless it is.

  Ooker is packing mostly whales and jumbos this morn
ing. On the shanty’s worn plywood floor sit several new shipping boxes, each of which accommodates three stacking cardboard trays. How many crabs fit in a tray follows a standard based on their grade: two dozen whales, three dozen jumbos, three or four dozen primes. He starts a tray of jumbos by dipping a page from an old edition of USA Today in a bucket of water, folding it to fit the tray, then plucking a crab from the yellow bucket and nestling it on the wet newsprint. The crab sits motionless, claws folded neatly under its chin, bubbles forming around its mouth. This is not a sign that the animal is in distress: Kept cool and damp, a crab can live for days out of the water. Ooker fishes for a second and sets it just behind the first, so that its face and claws rest on the first crab’s back. A third crab is likewise positioned slightly overlapping the second, and so on—until nine crabs are arranged in a column comprising a quarter of the tray’s width. He starts a second row.

  The crabs lie still. In contrast to their feistiness as hard-shells, they’re weak and keenly aware of their vulnerability and looking to avoid trouble. Ooker moves quickly, taking no more than a couple of seconds to grab a crab, grade it with a glance, and pack it into the appropriate tray. When he’s filled one, he soaks another newspaper page and spreads it over the crabs within, then stacks the tray with others of the same grade.

  “It used to be that you had to use dead seagrass to set the crabs in,” he tells me. “Even for the local markets, you had to pack them in grass and paper and keep ice on them even in the shanty.” That was before the island’s crabbers got the big coolers and freezers they rely on today—a technological upgrade that didn’t reach the shanties until the seventies. “Now they accept this,” he says. “I guess the crabs look better in seagrass, but you’re not going to fool with it if you don’t have to. The newspaper keeps ’em wet, which is all you need.”