by Earl Swift
At the time, the foundation wasn’t winning any popularity contests on Tangier, and Lonnie’s fellow crabbers were mystified by his decision. “It wasn’t like I wasn’t making a living on the water,” he says. But by then he and Carol had had a second child, a boy named Alex, born in 1988, and here was economic security—and he also saw the job as a platform for advocacy on behalf of watermen, as well as the bay and its wildlife.
Early on, during the two years he worked at Port Isobel and the dozen he spent managing the foundation’s island programs at the P’int, Smith Island, and Fox Island, it was exactly that. But the organization changed, Lonnie says: It grew slick, corporate and political, he believed, and less receptive to the bay’s commercial users. “CBF used to side with the watermen occasionally,” he says. “Now they always side with the fish, oysters, and crabs.” Even as overt hostility between the group and Tangier eased, Lonnie’s disenchantment deepened—until, halfway through his ten years as fleet senior manager, “I hated the job,” he says. “I hated going to work. We had people on staff I couldn’t trust. Carol kept telling me to quit.” And so he did, in 2014.
He sold the Loni Carol to the foundation and bought the Alona Rahab, which is named for his granddaughters and could fit inside his old boat. Because he’d been inactive as a crabber, the state restricted him to a “little” hard crab license, authorizing him to set only eighty-five pots—a number well shy of what he’d need to earn a living, even working by himself. He traded that license and $5,000 to another crabber for a “medium” hard crab license, good for 255 pots. Early in 2016, he traded that medium license and $12,000 for the biggest license issued in Virginia, for 425 pots, and spent another $3,000 for a peeler license to keep his options open. He’s thus invested $20,000 in paperwork.
Which grants him the privilege to venture onto the bay to attempt the near impossible.
BY 6:50 A.M. we’re on the second row, working south from the mouth of Onancock Creek under a leaden sky. My phone reports the temperature as seventy-six degrees, but it feels far cooler in the undiminished wind sweeping over the boat from the southwest. The sound is empty save for a single deadrise a half mile off to starboard. Lonnie identifies it with a glance as the Henrietta C., a fine wooden boat built by Jerry Frank and belonging to Ed Charnock.
Cameron and Isaiah have switched roles, so that Isaiah is now dumping the pots. Not that there’s much to dump: Over the next twenty minutes we top off a bushel of number ones and another of clean sooks, but the red moss is worse here than it was down south. One pot after another comes up slimed and empty. Lonnie, flummoxed, decides we’ll head back down to Pungoteague. “This is what I hate to do,” he mutters as we speed down the coast, “run from one end to the other and find it doesn’t work.”
We arrive at the south end of the 120-pot row. Through the mist I can see the Pungoteague Light standing at the mouth of its namesake creek. It’s a caisson-style tower built of iron and shaped like a spark plug, its bottom planted in the bay’s floor and weighted in place with concrete. The bay is home to several such lights, which have stood sentry over its shoals for more than a century. This one dates to 1908.
The years have not been kind. As we draw closer I see that the light has been sheared in half, its lantern destroyed, its mangled stump no aid to navigation, but a hazard. A marker planted nearby warns sailors away. I ask Lonnie what caused such vandalism. His answer: “Ice.”
Some winters freeze parts of the sounds east of Tangier, and on rare occasion the Chesapeake locks up from shore to shore. Ice halts the mailboat and the grocery store’s weekly runs, and when it lingers, it infuses the island with a frenetic claustrophobia. And freezes can last far longer than the bay’s temperate latitudes would suggest they might: The record, set in the winter of 1917–18, is fifty-two days. Another weeks-long siege in 1977 piled ice in immense blocks two stories high along the island’s west side, and it froze so thick that several young Tangiermen were able to walk more than two miles across the frozen bay to an old World War II Liberty ship sunk in the open water. Some even rode their bikes.
In the days before reliable Coast Guard icebreakers and rescue helicopters, such maroonings could usher real hardship. A break-bone freeze in January 1893 forced Tangier to pillage its larders and slaughter its livestock, and still the island suffered “great destitution,” as a news dispatch put it. A particularly harsh freeze in 1936 saw Maryland State Police attempt to replenish the island’s dwindling food supplies by trekking with sleds from Crisfield. Along the way, a state trooper broke through the ice and froze to death. Food eventually arrived by blimp.
Nowadays a frozen sound, and even a completely iced-in bay, is more inconvenience than real danger: Thanks to the airstrip, islanders need not fret about starving. But worry they might when the ice starts to break up. Pushed by wind and tide, floes become battering rams that splinter all in their path. The Pungoteague Light’s ruins commemorate a spot ravaged not once, but twice by wind-driven ice. An earlier screwpile lighthouse—essentially a cottage atop a spidery tangle of steel legs screwed into the bay’s bottom—was toppled here in February 1856, in only its second winter of service.
A long roster of Chesapeake beacons has shared that fate. Floes crushed Maryland’s Hooper Strait Light in 1877, and four years later they swept the nearby Sharps Island Light off its base and carried it five miles down the bay with its keepers trapped inside. The Solomons Lump Light, just north of Smith Island, was heaved onto its side by piled ice in 1893 and destroyed by another attack of floes two years later. Ice smashed the Janes Island Light outside Crisfield in 1879, heavily damaged its replacement in 1893, and took down the repaired light for good in 1935.
Seeing as how floes can obliterate structures built to withstand hurricanes, they’ve had little trouble wreaking havoc on Tangier’s fragile shoreline. More than wind, more than waves, moving ice grinds away sandy beach, tears great bites from upland sod, bulldozes huge tumps of marsh into the bay. From the first days of settlement, Tangiermen walked out to their island’s edges to find that freezes had left behind startling change.
At such times, the islanders couldn’t help but notice that their home was shrinking, and not just at Canaan. The whole of the island, and especially its western shore, was succumbing to nature’s assaults. But well into the twentieth century, they didn’t have a measure of just how much was lost or at what rate. And during years when the water didn’t freeze and storms didn’t pound the shore, they put the matter out of their minds.
THERE WAS PLENTY MORE to think about, for change was coming to Tangier fast. In 1928, islanders rigged up a diesel generator on the Main Ridge to wires crisscrossing the island and created a primitive electrical utility. The system ran on direct current, which required special equipment if a householder were to use industry-standard lights, radios, or appliances, and its load capacity was so limited that it was fired up for only a few hours each evening, from about 5:00 to 10:30 P.M. Most Tangiermen chose to stick with their kerosene lamps. Still, the town acquired a smattering of dim streetlights, and its gathering places enjoyed safe, clean, reliable light through the long winters.
That same year, an Illinois-born waterman living in Harryhogan, a village on Virginia’s western shore, received a patent for the wire-mesh crab pot. Benjamin Franklin “Frank” Lewis was pushing seventy and had spent decades trotlining crabs, when he rebelled against its taxing labor and meager yields. One hot July day in the twenties, he abandoned his trotline in the Yeocomico River and, as his son, Harvey, later recounted, sat for several hours under a tree in his yard, so deep in thought that he “didn’t even hear Mom when she called him to dinner.
“Later he went to the shed and got his snips and told me to go to the store for some chicken wire,” Harvey said. “Then he began to cut out pieces and fuss with ’em. That’s all he did all that summer.” The result was an early version of the pot: a cube of wire mesh on a heavier wire frame, with a tapering funnel built into two sides and a cylinder fo
r bait in its bottom. Crabs entering the pot through the funnels had a hard time finding their way back out. Lewis patented the design in 1928, before he was fully satisfied with the invention, and for years fiddled with refinements.
The key improvement was based on the principle that if a crab feels itself trapped, it will usually respond by running downhill on the bottom or swimming upward. Lewis installed a wire-mesh wall dividing the pot into upper and lower rooms. He cut a mouth-shaped slit in its middle and curled the ends of the snipped wire upward, forming a one-way passage. A crab entered the trap through one of the funnels, or “throats,” then—finding itself trapped in the “downstairs”—swam up through the passage into the “parlor,” where escape was next to impossible.
Lewis received a patent for the refined device in 1938, and it wasn’t long before Tangier watermen first encountered one. Elmer Crockett, the island crabber saved from electrocution by Half-Ass Buck, described the moment in journalist Larry Chowning’s book Barcat Skipper: While trotlining in Mobjack Bay on the western shore, Crockett saw a pair of crabbers each bring in ten barrels of crabs—something like thirty-three bushels—on a day when he’d had rotten luck. “I could see they didn’t have a trotline rig in their boats,” he said, so early one morning he followed one who “went out a short distance into the Mobjack and started pulling on a rope tied to an oyster stake that was marking oyster grounds. By golly, he pulled up a wire cage that was solid full of crabs.” Later, Crockett approached the potter, who cheerfully “showed me one and let me use one for a sample so I could make my own. It was the first crab pot I’d ever seen.”
Crockett made thirteen pots in the space of two days, and his “partners soon saw I was making all the money. They also went and got some wire, and I showed them how to make the pots.” Not long after, “the boys and I decided to take the pots home to Tangier and see how they would do over there. We were the first to bring the crab pot to Tangier.”
The invention was transformative. Trotlining quickly fell out of favor in Virginia and survives today only in those shallow Maryland waters where pots have been outlawed as hazards to boat traffic. The pots Lonnie uses are little changed from Lewis’s 1938 design, save for two additional throats, giving the pot one in each side, and cull rings—holes 2⅜ inches wide—cut into the pot’s parlor, enabling undersized crabs to escape.
Another big change came to the island not long after Elmer Crockett and his buddies encountered that first pot, and it resulted from ice and the hardships it brought: In October 1940, the Federal Communications Commission authorized the creation of a radiotelephone link between Tangier and the mainland, citing freeze-ups through the thirties that had cut off the island from the outside world. Four telephones were installed on Tangier: one at the electric plant, two in stores, and one in the home of a prominent member of the Swain congregation. Picking up the receiver connected the caller by radio with an operator in Crisfield, who spliced the call into the mainland telephone system. Receiving a call was a little more complicated. If the recipient didn’t know the call was coming, it might take a while for someone to round him up.
Over the next twenty-six years, the four telephones became fifteen coin-operated phone booths. But they still relied on the radio circuit, still worked best for outgoing calls, and were party lines—meaning an islander might not be able to make a call until a neighbor in another booth finished his.
But then, Tangiermen were inured to the limitations of technology. In 1944 their jury-rigged electric generator gave up the ghost, after sixteen years of service. The island lacked the money to replace it, so everyone went back to using kerosene.
BACK ON THE ALONA RAHAB, it’s eight A.M. and we’re nearing the north end of the row. Each pot rises from the bottom more tangled with red moss than the last. Most contain only a crab or two, and few of any size; in several, I see small crabs desperately trying to squeeze through the cull rings. “Yeah, there’s more moss,” Lonnie says, sighing as we motor east to his third row. “I’m hoping this south wind will carry it all above us tomorrow.”
We start south. The wind comes up, and over the next half hour the seas build. A brief eruption of hard rain spatters the deck and the crew. Between pots, and over the noise of the puller, Lonnie and I attempt an oft-interrupted conversation—about the hazards that attend work on the water, the precautions one can take to improve his odds of returning to port, the sometimes harsh hand of fate. Lonnie spends a lot of money keeping the Alona Rahab in good condition. He’s near fanatical about preventative maintenance. But sometimes things happen, he says, that you can’t prepare for: chains of misfortunes that happen just so, small accidents that occur at precisely the worst moment.
He speaks from experience. On April 19, 1991, he was alone aboard the Loni Carol and under way at a good clip up near the red bell buoy that marks the approximate halfway point between Tangier and Crisfield, when he went aft to check something at the stern. He tripped as he walked and plunged headfirst off the end of the boat.
The water temperature was fifty-five degrees. Wind was out of the northeast at thirty miles per hour, and the seas were heavy—so much so that Tangier’s watermen had stayed in that day—so the prospects for rescue were slim as Lonnie watched the Loni Carol motor away.
The tide was outbound. Together with the winds, it propelled him southward, and he had no choice but to go with it. Numbed and confused by the cold, losing strength by the minute, he bobbed along for two hours. “I was hallucinating,” he says. “I didn’t have five minutes left. I was just floating. I couldn’t move my arms to swim anymore. I was gone.”
Then, in an occurrence that defied almost impossible odds, two Tangiermen headed to the mainland on a beer run happened to notice something afloat in all that rough water and swung around for a closer look. He remembers being hoisted aboard, then waking up in an ambulance. Most, if not all, Tangier watermen have fallen overboard at some point. Few have been so unlucky as to face the combination of circumstances that nearly killed Lonnie. Fewer still have benefitted from the kind of blind, stupid luck that saved him.
The bad run he’s experienced today is minor in comparison, but it persists. We encounter more red moss on the last row and run out of bait before we’ve finished it. Lonnie steers the boat for home with the day’s efforts inked in red.
The wind persists as well. A few days later I reach the Situation Room ahead of everyone but Leon, who readies a pot of coffee and, while it drips, sits staring at me over his glasses. “Rough this morning,” he says. “It blowed hard.”
Jerry Frank Pruitt enters. “Did you go today?” Leon asks him.
“Yeah,” Jerry Frank says. “It was blowing today. Blowing right good.”
“Blowed hard there, this morning,” Leon agrees. “Came right around to the southeast.”
“Yeah, it was blowing hard, all right,” Jerry Frank says. “I wasn’t sure that I wouldn’t have to come in, but I was able to stay out, and right after the sun come up, it settled down.”
A lengthy discussion of wind ensues. Ooker bursts in the room. “Somebody let me know,” he hollers. “Is it going to blow a gale every morning?”
So it seems. A few days later, a squall packing sixty-knot winds tears over the island, toppling stacked crab pots off their docks and into the harbor, scattering boating gear and yard furniture, swamping skiffs. A few evenings on, still another gale broadsides the island from the west. It shoves the water in Onancock Creek upstream and over the banks, flooding the town wharf. Salt water swirls two feet deep around my parked car, rendering it a total loss.
Between blows, the island broils in a wave of Burmese heat. One Sunday morning, a big, burly tugboat crewman named Paulie McCready opens the service at New Testament Church with: “Good morning—this beautiful, hot morning.” The congregation murmurs its weary assent. “It’s all right,” Paulie reassures his neighbors. “Ice will be here before long.”
One of three crosses Ooker has erected in Tangier’s marshes, this o
ne just below the Heistin’ Bridge. (EARL SWIFT)
Twelve
THE FIRST SUNDAY IN JULY FINDS DUANE CROCKETT PREACHING to a New Testament congregation augmented by former islanders visiting for the holiday weekend. “I thank the Lord for the United States,” he tells the crowded church. “We could have been born anywhere, but I’m thankful that we were born in America. And more than that, I could have been born anywhere in America, but I was born on Tangier Island, and that was a wonderful thing.”
Nods all around. I’m in my usual seat in the right rear of the church, a pew in front of Richard Pruitt of the Situation Room and his wife, Margaretta. Leon is three pews ahead of me, seated with the oldest of his four children, daughter Carlene. Ooker and Irene are up in the front pew. Carol and Lonnie are on the room’s far side.
Our setting is far humbler than the soaring sanctuary at Swain Memorial. No stained glass warms this room: Here a sallow light, more office than church, is supplied by recessed fluorescent strips. The low acoustic tile ceiling is supported by six intrusive steel columns, painted to more or less mimic wood. Imitation wood paneling sheaths the walls, and burgundy shag carpet, the floor.
Up front, Duane’s on a patriotic roll. “According to the Gallup Poll, 77 percent of Americans claim to be Christians,” he tells us. “We know that isn’t so. If 77 percent of Americans were, in fact, Christians, schools would still begin each morning with prayer and Bible reading.” He looks up from his notes and scans the room. “Godless and heathen organizations such as the ACLU would not have any influence on the politics of the United States.”
I look around. The remark causes no stir in his audience, at least none that I detect. I’m reminded of another distinction between the island’s churches. New Testament has no pastor—it’s led by a handful of male elders who rotate preaching duties. All are island natives. None is formally schooled in theology, and all hew more or less to the style of worship Joshua Thomas introduced to Tangier. It is plainspoken, rife with over-the-left phrasing, and studded with lessons taken from island life. It can be self-effacing and humorous, swing from bold to contrite to teary. Evidently, it can also trash the First Amendment.