by Earl Swift
Switching gears, Lonnie announces that Cook Cannon, who’s been undergoing physical rehabilitation in Crisfield, is coming home tomorrow. Also, he says, he’s learned that Sam the Greek, a renowned Eastern Shore businessman, has died.
“Alcohol?” Leon asks.
“That’s what I heard,” Lonnie replies.
“Whiskey?” Leon asks.
Richard Pruitt, nodding: “Whiskey.”
Allen Ray: “He was as honest as the day is long.”
“That he was,” Jerry Frank says, then turns to me. “He had a lot of business and lost it all to alcohol, but he promised he’d pay back everybody he owed. He owed a lot of people.”
Lonnie explains further: “He was Greek, and come down to Crisfield, and built up a right big business. But drugs and alcohol ate into it.”
“And women,” Allen Ray adds.
“And women.” Lonnie nods. “Drugs, alcohol, and women. I don’t know what order it’d be in.”
“Well,” Ooker says, sitting down with a coffee. “I know I’d rather die of women than die of drugs or alcohol.”
The mayor’s in a mood for more politics. He says he was talking to Lisa Crockett, my next-door neighbor, and she told him that the island ought to vote for Hillary Clinton, because if the Democrat wins “the Lord will come back sooner.” This earns a laugh that retreats with several members of the group into the hallway and out the door. It’s four o’clock. Suppertime.
IN EARLY OCTOBER, Tangier begins to batten down for the winter. Mark Crockett’s boat to Onancock suspends operations until next May. Fisherman’s Corner closes its doors, along with all the other restaurants but Lorraine’s. The museum and gift shops close—on weekdays at first, but soon enough altogether. Hilda Crockett’s Chesapeake House stops taking guests, leaving the island with a single inn.
For the coming seven months, only a trickle of hardy outsiders will visit: adventurous weekenders, the odd journalist or wildlife photographer, and goose and duck hunters, whom a handful of islanders guide in the marsh islands above Uppards. The winds clock around to the northwest, and stiff breezes carry a chill that foretells the icy blasts to come.
Leon, Short Ed, and the island’s other scrapers lay up their barcats. Most potters will keep working through the month’s end, bundled against the deepening cold under their oilskins. Some trim the number of pots they deploy, and the harbor is crisscrossed by deadrises stacked high with traps being retired until the spring.
One Saturday I sit with Beth Thomas in the mailboat office, watching as watermen straggle in to pick up their checks from the Crisfield crab buyers. It’s the first stop in a weekly ritual: With checks in hand, the peeler crabbers will pay Beth what they owe in freight charges for shipping boxes of soft crabs on the mailboat, then head over to the oil dock to pay for the diesel or gas they’ve pumped into their workboats over the week, then make their way to Daley & Son to settle their accounts there.
This particular Saturday, they’re also saying good-bye. Leon enters the room and shuffles over. “I’m done,” he announces. “I’m finished.”
Another old-timer follows him in. “Thank you,” he says as Beth hands him a check. “That’s it. See you next season. See you next spring.”
“Yeah,” Beth replies. “See you.”
Out at Ooker’s shanty, the birds who’ve summered with him have taken off for warmer climes. The mayor builds a nest warmed by a spotlight for his four cats. But the approaching end of crabbing promises him no rest. On the water, he sets out eel traps in addition to his peeler pots. He soon has several tanks filled with the writhing brown creatures, which he ships live to New York. Fried, pickled, or served in tomato sauce, they’re a Christmas Eve staple in Italian and Italian American households. And right behind the eels and the last of the peelers comes the wintertime harvest.
In the nineteenth century, that meant oysters, and the bivalves continued to dominate the island’s cold-weather work on the water even as harvests declined precipitously in the first half of the twentieth. But by the 1930s, the rocks on which Tangiermen had most relied were scraped barren, and the state’s harvests were averaging only 10 percent of the peaks of fifty years before.
Then, in 1949, the already beleaguered oyster was set upon by a new and terrible scourge: a single-celled parasite, Perkinsus marinus, or “Dermo.” Initially misidentified as a fungus, it remains a mystery even today. But this much was quickly apparent: It proliferated in hot weather and salty water, killing mature oysters by the millions in the Chesapeake and its tributaries.
Ten years later, another microscopic invader, Haplosporidium nelsoni, or “MSX,” was accidentally introduced into American waters with the importation of Asian oysters. Within a few years, MSX was slaughtering native oysters alongside Dermo, and the decimation of the species was at hand. A stretch of hot, dry weather in the mid-1980s nearly finished the job: The pathogens survived the warm winters and exploded in number over the summers, ravaging the surviving oysters. In 1985, Virginia had little choice but to shut down oystering in Tangier and Pocomoke sounds.
THE OYSTER’S DECLINE did not idle Tangier’s watermen. Many switched their energies to winter crab dredging, a fishery that a relatively small number of bay crabbers had pursued each December through March for generations. Dredgers pulled a bigger, heavier, toothed variation on a scrape, which bit into the bottom and uprooted crabs burrowed there. This was not work casually undertaken, for winter dredging was centered near the bay’s mouth, and required island men to work out of Hampton Roads or Cape Charles, down at the south end of the Eastern Shore, sometimes for weeks at a stretch. Still, it provided an income for crabbers who would otherwise have gone without.
When summer came, the bay’s hard-potters also redoubled their efforts to catch blue crabs, and before long that fishery was stressed. Scientists debated “as to the exact status of the blue crab stock,” a Virginia state task force reported in 2000. Its members could say with certainty, however, that even though more crabbers were putting more pots in the water, they weren’t catching any more crabs. Throughout the late 1990s, Virginia crabbers pulled a relatively constant number of crabs from the bay; at the same time, the number of hard pot licenses rose by 14 percent and the number of licensed peeler pots leaped by 82 percent.
For the catch to flatline while watermen’s efforts were at an all-time high strongly suggested that the overall crab population was slipping. The task force worried that the crabs were shrinking in size, too. A crab processor in Hampton told me that a pile of crabs that once yielded twelve or thirteen pounds of meat was, by 2000, producing just eight pounds.
So in the 1990s the Virginia Marine Resources Commission required crabbers to cut cull rings in the sides of their hard pots, enabling undersized crabs to escape. The agency trimmed the number of pots a crabber could put in the water. It declared a chunk of the lower bay a sanctuary to protect spawning sooks and their hatchlings and, later, placed a huge swath of the middle bay off-limits. Virginia began requiring watermen to buy a separate license for each kind of gear they used. Finally came the most drastic steps yet: a lockdown on new crabbing licenses and a ban on most license transfers, the measures many Tangier old-timers blame today for the departure of the island’s young men.
All of these fixes had their effects, but none adequately addressed one continuing issue, and it was a big one. The number of sooks was dropping fast, by roughly 70 percent in just six years beginning in 1994. And without those females, the crab population was doomed.
Of all the bay’s crabbers, winter dredgers had the most to fear from this development. Though accounting for only 13.5 percent of the total Virginia catch, dredgers aimed almost exclusively for adult females—96 percent of the crabs they plowed from the bay’s bottom were sooks. All of these females were waiting out the winter so they could fertilize their eggs and produce sponges. By targeting them, the dredgers were crippling the blue crab’s ability to reproduce—and cutting deep into their own prospects for succe
ss as crab potters in the summer.
So even with the new regulations of the 1990s, the species continued to struggle. Scientists reckoned that harvesting should not claim more than 46 percent of the bay’s crabs in any given year—an “exploitation fraction” that would enable crabs to produce sufficient young to replenish the loss by the following season. But the harvest regularly exceeded that threshold. Over the ten years beginning in 1998, crabbers caught an average of 62 percent of the bay’s total number of blue crabs, and some years a far greater share—71 percent in 2001, according to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, and 70 percent in 2004.
By 2007, the fishery was poised at the brink of collapse. The total population of blue crabs in the bay had plunged from 791 million in 1990 to 260 million. Of that 260 million, just 120 million were adult crabs capable of producing a new generation, well below the 200 million adults that experts deemed the rock bottom necessary to sustain the crab as a viable part of the Chesapeake ecosystem. That year, 2007, was the worst for crabbers since bay-wide record keeping began in 1945.
Virginia officials recognized that only a profound reduction of the adult crab harvest would reverse the animal’s slide to oblivion, and that they had to act quickly. And so, in April 2008, they closed the wintertime dredge fishery. It has not reopened.
This did not have the drastic effect on Tangier that it would have just a few years before, because dredgers, like crabbers in general, had fallen in number with the island’s population decline, and some older watermen had retired from the harsh wintertime work even as they continued to set pots the rest of the year. That was true all around the bay: In 1994–95, the Chesapeake had been worked by 346 dredge boats, each manned by a captain and one or two mates. Just four years later, the number dropped to 192. The state task force of 2000 had recognized the trend and surmised that if the crabs could hold their own for a few more years, they’d outlast their pursuers. And indeed, by 2007 only fifty-three boats were still at it, just a dozen from Tangier. For those few crews, the fishery’s closure was a hardship, just the same, especially because it coincided with a national economic crisis. The island weathered some lean years.
But this is an anointed place, as Tangiermen will tell you, and they cite more than merciful weather as evidence. Even as dredging ended, the last survivors of the Chesapeake’s once-boundless oyster population continued their struggle against microscopic predators and human abuse—and against all odds, the creatures began a tentative recovery.
So, after they’ve caught the last of 2016’s crabs, and after Ooker has trapped his eels, the mayor and at least fifty other Tangiermen are readying to go to work as oystermen.
THE ATLANTIC HURRICANE SEASON runs from June 1 to November 30 and thus overlaps much of each year’s crab-potting season. Tangier’s closest brushes with cyclones have come in the middle of that six-month stretch, in August and September; among those were the Great September Gust of 1821, the August storm of 1933, and 2003’s Hurricane Isabel, the three most destructive blows that wind and water have landed on the island.
But the fall’s cooling temperatures don’t signal an end to the danger, as I’m reminded when Tracy Moore, Lonnie’s brother, opens the September 25 evening service at New Testament by taking prayer requests, then asks Carlene Shores, Ooker’s sister-in-law, to say a prayer to lift them up. “I thank you, Lord God, for the seawall you’re going to be providing and the sand you’ll provide,” she responds. “This is hurricane season, Lord God. Protect us. Put your protection around us, as you have so often in the past, Lord God.”
As she speaks, a storm born as a knot of thunderstorms off the West African coast speeds across the Atlantic. Within three days it has tightened into the telltale bull’s-eye of a tropical storm. Then, as it cruises west along the coasts of Venezuela and Colombia, it swells into a ferocious category 5 hurricane. No sooner has Tangier shut down for the winter than Hurricane Matthew turns its way.
It smashes into southwest Haiti with winds of 150 miles per hour, and twelve hours later it scours eastern Cuba. It weakens as it spins north, then muscles back up as it rakes the Bahamas. At that point, the forecast tracks for the storm include arcs over the Chesapeake and smack into Tangier. With Matthew still more than a thousand miles to the south, the island’s tides go haywire, and water jumps the guts to flood the roads.
But by the time Swain Memorial’s faithful convene for the evening service on Wednesday, October 5, most forecasts call for the hurricane to make landfall in Florida or South Carolina, then turn into the open ocean. “Did anyone have to tread water to get here this evening?” Pastor Flood says by way of a greeting. “I’ve been told that there will be a time of prayer at the school tomorrow at eight o’clock, around the flagpole, about the storm. I think the Lord has already answered prayers. From what I understand, we’re going to get a little bit of rain out of it.”
His sermon centers on a passage from the first book of Peter: “But the end of all things is at hand; therefore, be serious and watchful in your prayers.” It strikes me as an ominous choice.
“How many’s been praying for the storm to turn?” he asks. He gets a near-unanimous show of hands. “How many have been praying for Haiti, for eastern Cuba, for the people of Florida—all of those in harm’s way?” Most of the congregation again responds. The pastor nods. “Prayer is a serious thing. We should be diligent in how we pray for others, as if we were praying for ourselves.”
Matthew crawls up Florida’s Atlantic coast, never veering closer than twenty miles to land, but drenching the state with rain and storm-borne tides. When it makes landfall near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, on Saturday morning, it has weakened to a category 1 hurricane—dangerous, to be sure, but no longer packing cataclysmic winds. It bends back offshore, bounces up North Carolina’s barrier islands, and, in the predawn of Sunday morning, makes its predicted seaward turn at Cape Hatteras.
Still, this is a big cyclone, and Tangier is only about 170 miles from the cape. Matthew’s outer bands slug the island with fifty-mile-an-hour winds. Windows rattle, and wooden walls shudder and sigh. A disabled airplane out beside the runway, parked there for more than two months, flips onto its back. When I step onto the deck shortly after daybreak, waves pounding the seawall are throwing great blooms of water skyward, and the bay beyond is white with foam.
I pull on my rain jacket and set off on my bike for the ten o’clock service at New Testament. West Ridge Road is under several inches of water, and the north wind fires a stinging rain into my eyes. When I make the turn onto Wallace Road to cross the marsh, I can only guess where the asphalt is—the path is completely overwashed—and I have to lean ten degrees to my left to counter the wind. It catches at my jacket’s hood, twisting it sideways over my face, and its gusts throw me so off-balance that I’m forced to dismount halfway over and splash the rest of the way to the Main Ridge.
The New Testament parking lot is empty of golf carts. The door is locked. The service has been canceled. Rather than attempt to retrace my journey, I pedal against the wind to Swain Memorial to wait for its eleven o’clock service. I find the church unlocked, but the congregation doesn’t show up. The island’s landline telephone network no doubt did its usual efficient work in getting the word out. Unfortunately, I have no landline.
Soaked through, I decide I might as well have a longer look around. I head north through Meat Soup, encountering no one. The storm has caused no visible mayhem to the business district: Tangier had plenty of time to prepare, and I see nothing out of place. I cross over the Long Bridge and, with a gale-force tail wind, travel the length of the West Ridge without turning a pedal.
Down on the spit, the beach is invisible under incoming breakers, and the dunes have been carved into high vertical bluffs. The air is filled with spray and blowing froth, and the cymbals and timpani of bay hammering shore. Foam leaps from the surf to cartwheel into the saw grass at my feet, and a small twister forms for a moment over the sand, spinning furiously before blowing itself
apart.
But except for damage to the dunes, Matthew leaves Tangier unscathed—and with further evidence that it is protected by the Almighty, that the faith and prayer of its people have anointed the place. That evening at New Testament, Tracy Moore asks for prayer requests to open the service. Carlene Shores utters the obvious: “Thank the Lord for sparing us again.”
THE FIRST SUNDAY of November: Pastor Flood advises his Methodists that sitting out the election is not a good idea. “It’s up to the Christians,” he says. “It is our duty.” He asks Chuck Parks, a Tangier-born minister visiting from the Eastern Shore, to offer a prayer.
“We are at an anxious time in our country politically,” the Reverend Parks says. “Lord, we pray for the upcoming election, and we pray that you put in the candidate who would best put in what you have in mind for this nation.” Judgment, he says, “is so close.”
Two mornings later, I bike to the school, where the voting machines wait. On the way I encounter Ooker parking his beach cruiser outside his house. “I voted a couple of times this morning,” he tells me. “I’ll wait awhile, then go over and vote again.” He glances my way and, detecting skepticism, adds, “Actually, I forgot my wallet. They asked to see a photo ID, so I had to come back here to get it.”
I pedal onward, taking a meandering route via the Main Ridge. It bristles with Trump signs. Citizens have supplemented the usual “Make America Great Again” fare with homemade tributes, scrawled in permanent marker on painted wood. I see no signs for Hillary Clinton. At the school, I watch a steady procession of voters arrive by golf cart. By the end of the day, 221 Tangiermen have cast their ballots for Trump—more than 87 percent of the island’s 253 votes.
That Friday, three days after the election, I take the mailboat to Crisfield. I share the wheelhouse with Brett Thomas and Cook Cannon, who’s headed ashore for a doctor’s visit and is sprawled out on a low bench behind the helm. We’re approaching the red bell buoy that marks the halfway point when Cook speak-shouts how happy he is, after these past eight years, that America is again going to have a Christian president.