Chesapeake Requiem

by Earl Swift

  “But we get along very well. We run out of fries, I get ’em from her. She runs out of something, she comes over here. That’s the way it’s always been, and God provides business for all of us.”

  The Chesapeake House, in business for nearly eighty years, was also founded by a woman, was operated for decades by her daughters, and is now managed principally by Glenna Crockett. She owns the place with her husband, Principal Denny. They employ an all-female staff.

  Walk into most of Tangier’s terrestrial workplaces, and you’ll likewise find few men on the payroll. The gift shops, which do a healthy summer trade in souvenir ball caps, T-shirts, and sweatshirts, along with handmade arts and crafts and imported kitsch, are the province of women. They dominate the tour buggy operations, offer the island’s only salon services, staff the museum’s front desk. The Bay View Inn, the only year-round bed-and-breakfast, is owned by a married couple but overseen day to day by just the female half: Maureen Gott, a come-here from New Jersey.

  Brett Thomas drives the mailboat, but it’s his mother, Beth, who runs the business end of the operation. Terry Daley Jr. manages the grocery store with his son, Lance, but he answers to the matriarch of the family—his mother, JoAnne, who’s owned the business since 1986.

  Leadership of the island’s public institutions is decidedly female, too. Since 2005, Nina Pruitt has served as principal at Tangier Combined School, where she oversees twelve teachers and nine staff. Only one, Duane Crockett, is a man. Inez Pruitt went to school on the mainland for five years, commuting on the mailboat for the first three and coming home only on weekends the last two, to earn her post as the island’s physician’s assistant. Her daughter, Anna Pruitt-Parks, a town council member since 2006, is emerging as one of the panel’s strongest voices—and is also Tangier’s always-on-call paramedic and the only full-time employee of the Tangier Volunteer Fire Department. The post office is run by women. And while Ooker is mayor, the details of administering the town’s business have long been the task of female town managers.

  With most of the island’s able-bodied men away in boats most days, it’s also left to Tangier women to disseminate information and conduct the social transactions that keep island life running smoothly. Their communications network is reliant on the landline telephones still present in almost all homes, and it’s lightning fast. When the rooftop siren at the Tangier firehouse wails—signaling serious injury, illness, or, worst of all, fire, and sounding exactly like the London air-raid warnings in old movies, which makes its air-driven warbling even more ominous—phone calls instantly flash among the ridges, buzzing with questions and guesses as to what’s going on. In minutes the entire island has the answer. Good news travels only a little slower.

  I experienced the network’s efficacy during my stay in 2000. I was quartered at the Bay View Inn, which at the time was run by Ed Charnock’s sister, Shirley. As I ate breakfast one morning, Shirley asked me what I had planned for the day. I replied that I was going to the Main Ridge to see a woman who’d agreed to give me her collection of recorded Swain Memorial sermons, preserved on cassette tapes. Both churches make such recordings for the island’s shut-ins; these days they’re on CD. The churches burn through a lot of discs.

  Shirley picked up the phone as I stepped outside. As I was going over on Wallace Road, I encountered an islander coming the other way, who said, “I hear you’re going to see Mrs. So-and-So to get her tapes.” As I reached King Street, another islander gave me directions to the woman’s house without my asking for them. By the time I got halfway down the Main Ridge, everyone on Tangier knew where I was going and why.

  I took a lesson from that. A visitor to Tangier had best assume he’s the object of almost anthropological study and conduct himself accordingly. The islanders might complain that tourists eye them a bit too closely, but it cuts both ways.

  Island men exchange information, certainly—at the Situation Room and in similar daily gatherings at the Tangier Oil Company, the combination fuel pier and marine hardware store known as the “oil dock.” But they spend most of their days alone or in the company of one or two men aboard their boats. Their networking, limited to periods around and between the obligations of work, lacks the immediacy of the women’s contacts. By the time the men get around to a subject, odds are good that it’s been hashed over thoroughly by their wives and that the island’s collective opinion on the topic has started to take shape.

  That point bears repeating: Tangier women shepherd the island’s thinking. More often than not, they’re the catalysts for action as well. If money is needed to meet a need at school or church, it’s the women who raise it. When islanders decided to send a video about Tangier to every member of Congress, it was Anna Pruitt-Parks who planned and led the campaign. Some veterans’ graves lacked flagpoles, which islanders thought a shame—until Carol Moore spearheaded a drive to buy and erect them.

  Bottom line: In just about every aspect of island life but two, working the water and running the churches, women are in charge. And the churches are only ostensibly ruled by men. Influence within the congregations is largely wielded by women.

  When I ran this observation past Devi Eskridge, she was quick to confirm it. “People will say it’s men who are boss,” she said. “But it’s women. If Mom died tomorrow, my dad wouldn’t know where his socks are.”

  The dependence goes beyond questions of wardrobe. Soon after Annette Charnock married Ed, she learned that he knew nothing of running a household or managing his finances. He’d never so much as written a check; his late wife, Henrietta, had overseen virtually every land-based aspect of their daily life, and his daughters had assumed the duty after she died. “I remember one day I was cooking dinner,” Annette recalled, “and I said, ‘Ed, would you mind running to the mail? I don’t want to leave this.’ And he said, ‘I don’t know how.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, you don’t know how?’ He said, ‘I’ve never done it.’

  “I said, ‘You mean to tell me that you’ve never been to the post office, put a key in the mailbox and turned it, and taken the mail out?’ He said, ‘No.’ And I said, ‘Well, I think it’s time for a lesson,’ and we went on a field trip.

  “He said, ‘I feel like a child.’ I said, ‘Well.’”

  Back at Fisherman’s Corner, I take a seat in the now-bustling dining room. Ooker sits across the table from me. “Who’s boss on Tangier?” I ask him. “The men or the women? Who’s the real boss?”

  Five or six feet from our table, well within earshot, Irene is bent over paperwork behind the register. “Well,” Ooker says in an unusually loud and authoritative tone, “I’d say that the women have their input.” He half glances over his shoulder. Irene does not look up from her work.

  “You receive that input,” Ooker continues, at a slightly higher volume. “You consider the source.” He throws another quick glance her way. “Some of it, after you consider the source, it don’t go no further than that.” He hazards another look.

  Irene isn’t listening to a word he says.

  The shifting moods of Leon McMann, June 2017. (EARL SWIFT)

  Ten

  COME THE END OF JUNE SUMMER HAS SETTLED HEAVY OVER Tangier. Temperatures soar well into the nineties most afternoons, the humidity rising in tandem, poaching the shadeless island. Absent a breeze, the flies launch from the marsh and come hunting for blood. The roads empty.

  The sticky heat can be even less bearable out in the boats, where the labor of pulling scrapes and pots, combined with the sun’s rays reflecting off the water, can render a man woozy and half blind. But the effort pays well this time of the year, for the Chesapeake has warmed as well, prompting the crabs to move from deep water to the shallows and, with some encouragement, into the watermen’s bushel baskets. Hard-potters are catching their limits. Peelers abound.

  A crabber has to keep his eyes on the forecast, however, because with the heat comes instability. A morning might be kyowking, as Ooker put it, and that very afternoon, dead calm. A wind mig
ht blow hard out of the southwest for days straight and build seas that make for rough going off the island’s western shore and in the harbor, too. A persistent nor’wester might drive the tides down. A southeasterly might push them up.

  To a point, Tangiermen treat wind as a nuisance, rather than a threat. If they know to expect it, they’ll usually be able to work in it—and they’re inclined to do so, for the crabbing season doesn’t include makeup days. One Sunday evening, having made plans to join Ooker on his boat the next morning, I approach him after a New Testament service to ask when and where he wants to meet. He holds up a hand. “It speaks of wind in the morning,” he says.

  “It speaks of wind,” I echo.

  “Yes,” he says. “It speaks of wind.”

  “So, are you going to go out?” I ask.

  “Yeah, I’ll go,” he replies. “But you might want to hold off. If the wind’s up, I don’t think you’re going to be too comfortable in the boat.”

  “Well, if you’re going, I think I might like to tough it out,” I tell him, “as long as it’s not shouting of wind.”

  He suggests that we talk in the morning, in case I change my mind. When my alarm goes off at four, the wind is buffeting the darkened house, and the chimes hanging from the underside of my deck are banging around crazily. I step outside. A blow’s coming steady out of the west at what must be thirty miles an hour. I can’t see the water, but I can hear its hiss, along with the thumps of breakers hitting the shore beyond the airstrip. There’s no way, I decide, that I’m spending the day in an open boat in water I can hear. I leave a message for Ooker telling him so, and go back to bed. When I wake again the sun’s shining bright, but the wind is blowing as hard as ever. I step back outside. The bay is stippled in whitecaps. In their midst are several deadrises, their captains fishing their pots. Later, conversation in the Situation Room centers on how hard it “blowed” out there, but no one seems much put out by it.

  No, it’s the weather they don’t see coming that can get a waterman in trouble, and the Chesapeake serves up plenty. A few days later, after a quick trip home to cut the grass and answer mail, I’m headed back to the island aboard Mark Crockett’s Joyce Marie II, the summertime passenger ferry linking Tangier to Onancock, the nearest Virginia port. It’s a sixteen-mile passage across both Pocomoke and Tangier sounds, and it can get rough with wind from pretty near any direction. Mark, regarded as an especially gifted boat handler on an island of experts, keeps a close eye on the forecast.

  The outlook for today was calm and hot, and so it is. But as we near Watts Island, dividing the sounds, Mark calls my attention to a thunderhead towering over the western shore. It’s the color of slate, thousands of feet high, takes the classic anvil form that advertises trouble—and it wasn’t there a few minutes ago. We watch as it slides down the shore and over the water far to our south, moving at highway speed.

  Storms like that, moving so fast they’re on you before you know they’re coming, are not infrequent on the Chesapeake. Some hot summers they sweep over the bay almost every afternoon, and though they pass quickly, often lasting just a few minutes, they can spawn blasts of hurricane-force wind, deadly cloud-to-ground lightning, and near-biblical rain. The morning after I ride over with Mark, a squall races across the bay north of Tangier and slams into Crisfield with winds estimated at eighty miles an hour—some reports even claim one hundred—and wrecks boats, topples trees, and snaps the stern line of the Steven Thomas, a big Tangier tour boat tied up at the waterfront. The line in question is an inch and a quarter in diameter.

  “A squall can blow five miles an hour or can blow a hundred,” as Leon advised in the Situation Room. “You never know what it’ll do.”

  “I know one thing,” Allen Ray said. “When I see one of ’em coming, I respect it.”

  Leon nodded sagely. “You have to.”

  “Just have to bring that bow around into the wind,” Allen Ray said, “and try to hold it. And that’s a job.”

  “It is that,” Leon agreed. “And the trouble is it gets to blowing so hard you can’t tell what direction it’s a-goin’.”

  Some violent storms, especially in the spring, can sprout dark tentacles that pack a more selective punch. Ooker’s told me that even a small waterspout, about shoulders’ width across, can spin a forty-foot workboat, and anything larger would lay waste to it. One morning in 2015, Tangier witnessed a procession of thunderheads chug up the bay. Islanders counted nine waterspouts hanging from the clouds at once, and before the storm passed, nearly forty all told. On another occasion, Ooker said, a waterspout touched down in the creek not far from his crab shanty and moved ashore behind the grocery store. He was north of the school and saw that it was headed toward his house on the West Ridge, so he started that way. En route he passed a weeping willow, all of its branches standing straight up.

  Full of water, the twister took its time. “It went across Wallace’s Bridge and picked up a dinghy there,” Ooker said, then lifted off the ground and ghosted over an aboveground pool he had in the yard. “We had some swim rings—some orange swim rings—in the pool, and it picked those rings up. Before I could get in the house it passed directly over me, and I could look up into it, and I saw crab boxes, baskets, a lot of stuff in it. Then it moved over the water, and I could still see those orange swim rings in it.” He paused. “I didn’t get those back.”

  I CAN ATTEST TO THE POWER of a summer squall and to just how frightening one can be. In the summer of 1994, I convinced my editors at the newspaper to buy a sea kayak and let me paddle it in a five-hundred-mile circle around the Chesapeake, filing stories and pictures as I went. I pushed off from Norfolk, paddled twenty-odd miles across the Chesapeake’s mouth to the southern tip of the Eastern Shore, and started north from there, my boat loaded with food and camping gear.

  Three days into the voyage I pulled into a wide break in the shoreline at the mouth of Mattawoman Creek and beached for the night on tiny Honeymoon Island, a lump of sand in the creek’s middle sprouted with beach grass and a few water bushes. I set up my tent, broke out my stove, and cooked dinner. Then, as darkness approached, I crawled into my sleeping bag to read by headlamp before turning in. I was immersed in a book when, at about nine, I heard a low, long rumble of distant thunder. I paid it little heed. Not three minutes later I heard another snarl—this one much louder, and deeper, and closer. And just seconds after that a gale blasted the tent with sudden, extreme force, ripping up the stakes and prying up the floor and rolling the shelter onto its side before I had time to scream. I threw myself to the tent’s windward side and stretched to pin down the corners with hands and feet, while from outside came the sounds of my cook set skittering away and the kayak sliding on the sand. I heard that for only a moment, though, because now came a deluge pounding the tent, and lightning in a flurry, bolts striking by the score, so close that the ground bounced under me, their blue-white strobes blinding through the tent’s two layers of nylon, and the sound of this hellstorm—the roar of the wind and rain, the concussions of the thunder—blotting out my every thought except that I was about to die.

  My tent had an aluminum frame. I was trapped in a cage of conductive metal that stood tallest of anything for a quarter mile in any direction. I was certain the lightning would find me. As fast and close as it came, it seemed impossible that it wouldn’t. For twenty-five minutes I crouched inside the tent, wrestling the wind to keep its floor down, listening to the sky make sounds I’d never heard and haven’t since—like great sheets of fabric ripping and fighter jets buzzing just overhead. And layered on top, the cacophony of the strikes. And then, as suddenly as it started, it stopped. After a few retreating rumbles, the creek fell quiet.

  The floor of my weatherproof tent was under an inch of water. My sleeping bag was sodden and all my gear soaked. I was so spent that I hardly noticed: I have probably been more frightened in my life, just for a moment or two, but never have I been so terrified for so long. I bailed out the water as best as I coul
d, collapsed on my wet bag, and slept like a boulder.

  Mind you, I was on land. I can’t imagine what it would be like to encounter such a storm on open water in a small boat. I hope to never find out.

  HEAVY WEATHER ON THE BAY is not relegated to the warm months. Fierce storms crop up in the dead of winter, too, and can likewise come out of nowhere. Among Tangier’s most storied tragedies took place in January 1896, when a squall out of the northwest pounced on William Henry Harrison Crockett, great-grandfather of Ooker and great-great-grandfather of Carol Moore, as he sailed home after delivering a load of oysters to Washington, D.C. Wind hit the captain’s two-masted schooner with such force that the vessel keeled over, tossing Crockett and his three crewmen into the icy Tangier Sound. One of those three was Crockett’s son-in-law, Tubman B. Pruitt, also Carol’s great-grandfather and Ooker’s great-uncle.

  “She sank at once . . .” an Eastern Shore newspaper reported. “Captain Murphy of the police boat did not get half way to the sinking boat before it went down, and when he reached the scene of the disaster nothing was to be seen but the wild waste of roaring waters.”

  Tangier felt “its loss most keenly,” as Swain’s church board put it in a resolution a few days later. Especially that of Crockett, who was an exhorter and Sunday school superintendent. “In these men, it has lost highly esteemed and very worthy neighbors and citizens, whose places will be hard to fill, whose presence will be sadly missed and whose memory will be long cherished.” Long cherished it has been: The men are still talked about more than 120 years later.

  Another hard loss came in February 1914, when William Asbury Crockett, assistant keeper of the offshore Tangier lighthouse, encountered a sudden and powerful blast of wind in the midst of a larger winter storm. Crockett, who was Jerry Frank Pruitt’s great-grandfather, was returning to the light from his daily run to the island for mail and groceries when the gust took him by surprise. Depending on who’s telling the story, it either capsized the boat or jibed his sail, knocking Crockett overboard. Either way, he drowned.