Chesapeake Requiem

by Earl Swift

  I have borne mute witness to political debate on Tangier for six months, and have heard a lot of such talk—that Barack Obama and Democrats in general are enemies of Christian values and the American way. That Donald Trump, a man who’s boasted about the impunity with which he sexually abuses women, whose campaign has been energized by racial and cultural division, and who’s no stranger to deception, character assassination, adultery, and divorce, is nonetheless more godly than the comparatively straitlaced Hillary Clinton. Ooker’s reaction to the infamous Access Hollywood tape, which captured Trump making decidedly unchristian comments about women, was illustrative: “The Left, they’re acting all shocked at the language on that video,” he announced in the Situation Room a few days after the 2005 tape surfaced. “Well, they’re the ones that stand for a godless society.”

  To which Jerry Frank Pruitt replied: “So many people vote who don’t know what they’re voting for.”

  I’ve been mystified by it. Today, for once, I decide to correct the record. “President Obama’s a Christian and Hillary Clinton’s a Methodist,” I tell Cook. “And I was under the impression that Trump’s pretty much an atheist.”

  “He ain’t no atheist,” Cook replies.

  “That’s another media lie,” Brett says.

  “He’s a Christian,” Cook says. “He’s been saved.” He refers to reports that Paula White, a thrice-married millionaire televangelist who preaches the prosperity gospel, led the president-elect to Jesus.

  I turn to face Cook. “Have you ever seen a picture of Trump in church?”

  “That don’t mean nothin’,” Cook replies. “You don’t have to go to church to be a Christian. And just because you go to church doesn’t make you a Christian.”

  Not the kind of talk I’ve often heard from Tangiermen.

  But true enough.

  Part Five

  The Sea Is Come Up

  Matt Wheatley deploys a smoke while Lonnie Moore and Steve Watson keep their eyes peeled for other oystering boats on the Rappahannock River, November 2016. (EARL SWIFT)

  Twenty-One

  DUANE CROCKETT HAS SPENT THE BETTER PART OF A YEAR preaching on First Corinthians, guiding the New Testament flock through the book verse by verse. One Sunday morning he homes in on the gift of prophecy. “A story I always share around this time of the year,” he says, “is the story of Mr. Close and the oysters.”

  George “Buzzy” Close was Swain Memorial’s pastor from 1987 to 1992. “In the late eighties, anyone who was alive at that time will remember, nearly every oyster in the bay was dead or diseased,” Duane says. “Nearly every one of them was. It looked as if there would never be another oyster caught again, or that no one would ever be able to make their living off of the oyster industry, catching oysters, again. I remember that well, as you do.

  “And I remember Mr. Close, who was a man of great faith and believing in prayer. He requested that the men take him out all over the sound to pray over the oyster rocks.” Duane peers out over the congregation until he locks eyes with a waterman. “You were one of them, weren’t you, Larry?” The man nods. “Yeah,” Duane says. “And he prayed over every one of them. And he said that the Lord gave him a vision that one day the oyster business was going to come back full force, and people were going to be able to make a living off of the oyster business again.

  “There’s always those nags that want to put a stop to the works of God,” Duane says. “There were people who told him, ‘The Lord didn’t tell you that. He did not give you that vision. You come up on that on your own.’ They said it so much I believe Mr. Close even began to wonder if what he had been told was of the Lord . . .”

  “Was Mr. Close’s vision from the Lord?” Duane wonders. “Now, let’s ask some questions. Was he God’s child? Yes. Did what he said come to pass? Yes.

  “Who would have thought that the watermen of the sound would be able to make a living off of two oyster rocks? Who thought it?” he says. He looks around, letting the words sink in, before pressing on. “Was this prophecy glorifying to God? Ooker will say often—he said last night in his prayer—‘I thank God for the oysters.’ He says that a-many a time. So it was glorifying to God.

  “Was it edifying to the church? Well, I ask this: Have the needs of our people been met through the oysters? Have the missionaries been supported through oyster money? Have the needs of the church been met through the oyster money? Yes.

  “So,” Duane concludes, “through that, I have to say, it was a prophecy of the Lord that he gave Mr. Close almost thirty years ago.”

  THIS MUCH IS SURE: George Close delivered his prophecy at a point when the Chesapeake’s oysters were on the brink of extinction, and the island’s oystermen had little reason to hope they’d recover. Overfishing had decimated the bay’s stocks, and Dermo and MSX had all but finished them off. From 1980 to 1984, Virginia’s already-gutted oyster harvest fell by half. By 1990, even the catch on privately owned beds had collapsed. The state all but gave up on the oyster at that point. It slashed its spending for replenishing the bivalve and shied from investing serious money in the effort for twenty years.

  Scientists from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS), a division of the College of William and Mary, continued to monitor Dermo and MSX, however. The salt-loving, heat-reliant pathogens dwindled in years with heavy spring rains and stormed back when the weather turned hot and dry. In 1998, VIMS found that Dermo infected at least three in four oysters on the rocks nearest Tangier. In 2001, the infection rate was 96 percent or more. The surviving oysters were barely hanging on. As recently as 2006, the harvest in Virginia produced fewer than ten thousand bushels, a fragment of 1 percent of the nineteenth-century peak.

  In the face of this bleak reality, the federal government stepped in. It began devoting money and energy to replenishing the public rocks with fresh shells, which larval oysters require to settle and grow, and seeding the rocks with healthy wild and hatchery oysters. And by 2009, VIMS was noting that while “it has not been widely appreciated that resistance to disease is developing among oysters in Chesapeake Bay, or that such development is even possible,” long-term data suggested that just that was happening. The same rocks that had been ravaged by MSX now boasted hardy survivors that produced what appeared to be hardier offspring.

  Virginia officials gave the oysters a boost by establishing a rotational system on the state’s public rocks, mandating that each get a rest of one or two years between harvests. Although the bay’s oysters have neither licked the pathogens nor rebounded to anything approaching their past populations, their numbers have stabilized for the first time in decades. Since 2011, Tangier oystermen have enjoyed increasingly fruitful harvests.

  Which is what prompts me one Thursday in mid-November to drive three hours through the dark to Windmill Point, a marina at the tip of Virginia’s Northern Neck. There I find Lonnie Moore’s Alona Rahab tied up alongside a few other Tangier boats and twenty-odd deadrises from around the lower Chesapeake. All are getting a jump on the 2016 oyster season, which doesn’t open until December 1 in Tangier Sound but started weeks ago in the broad, tidal Rappahannock River. A big, healthy oyster rock waits in twenty-eight feet of water just inside the river’s mouth.

  Most Tangiermen don’t stray so far from home. Lonnie, however, brings to oystering the same far-ranging spirit he demonstrated all summer with crab-potting. He doesn’t mind camping four nights a week on the boat through Thanksgiving. His crew today consists of two licensed oystermen: the experienced Matt Wheatley of Tangier and Steve Watson, a newcomer who commutes two hours every day from Norfolk. All are eager to get started when I climb aboard, stepping with care past the dredging rig that occupies much of the Alona Rahab’s open deck.

  The VMRC carefully regulates the oyster harvest, and one of its hard-and-fast rules is that dredging starts at sunrise—which today comes at 6:48—and not a second sooner. Furthermore, the boats can’t leave the dock until exactly thirty minutes before then. At about 6:10,
engines start up and down the line, and the air fills with shouts and diesel smoke. At 6:15, crews throw off their lines. And at 6:18, two dozen boats pull from their slips and turn for the marina’s opening into the river.

  We strike south in a crowd five boats abreast and all racing flat out over foot-high swells, the boats up front creating heavy chop in their wakes. To run in such a flotilla in the predawn gloom is electrifying—there’s a swashbuckling Battle of Britain feel to it, as if we’re flying in tight formation. As we near the rock, three miles out, the squadron splits up, boats peeling away for favored spots. Reaching his own, Lonnie cuts the engine. “Okay, fellas,” he says. “Let’s gear up.”

  They step into their oilskins, tugging them over jeans and hooded sweatshirts, as Lonnie eyes the time on a GPS monitor bolted to the ceiling. A chill is brisking over the river from the west, and even bundled the men wait at their stations with clenched teeth—Lonnie at the aft steering console, Matt and Steve on opposite sides of a stainless steel culling board. The dredge hangs at eye level at the end of a rusty chain. It’s twenty-two inches wide, with a toothed mouth and a trailing bag of knotted rope, and is rusted well past flaking. It looks a hundred years old.

  The clock hits 6:48. The dredge goes over the side, its chain spooling from a hydraulic winch with a puff of atomized rust. It rattles and jounces as it plays out, tightens to quiet creaks when it hits bottom. Lonnie steers hard to starboard, into a curving lick, as the boats around us carve their own tight circles: The Mariah Taylor out of Tangier is a few feet to our right; Lonnie cuts across its stern. A twenty-foot Carolina Skiff off our port stern does the same to Lonnie. Other boats in wider orbit around us jockey for position, drawing closer as we clock in an ever-tightening circle. It feels like a dogfight.

  After ninety seconds the winch kicks on, the chain winds back in, and the dredge breaks the surface and rises, dripping, alongside the boat—empty. After another ninety seconds on the bottom, it contains only bright orange sponges. A third time, more sponges. On the fourth lick, however, the bag comes up drooping with oysters. Matt and Steve grab it, pull it aboard, and dump the load onto the tray, then shove the dredge back over the side. The chain unwinds with a deafening clatter.

  They cull the lick, shoving half shells aside, giving closed shells a rap to determine whether they’re oysters or empty “boxes,” using hammers fashioned from rebar to break away barnacles and bits of shell, or “wings,” cemented to the creatures. The choreography of boats around us grows crazier. Lonnie holds the Alona Rahab in a sweeping right turn as One More Set, out of Saxis, cuts left to right across our stern, then is itself forced off course by another boat encroaching into its path. They miss each other by five feet. A little skiff that looks overwhelmed by its dredge rig plants itself just off our starboard beam. “He’s gonna be in our way all day,” Steve hollers. Lonnie solves the problem by yanking hard to starboard, gunning the diesel, and crossing four feet behind the interloper. The dredge rises again, heavy with shells slimed in mud and garlanded with sea grapes.

  The low sun spins from port side to stern to starboard to bow as the Alona Rahab screws itself into the river. I glance into the cabin, to the GPS monitor recording our track, and see that it consists of loops piled atop one another in a thick black tangle. We gain fast on a twenty-foot open boat steered by a white-bearded Eastern Shoreman, who waves at Lonnie to get off his tail. Lonnie signals him to move aside. “He thinks I’m in his way. I think he’s in my way,” Lonnie yells over the chain’s rattle. “Everybody’s in everybody’s way.”

  Again the chain winds in, spraying water that catches the early saffron light, and another load of shell hits the tray. The first bushel fills.

  I look at my watch. Seven o’clock. We’ve been at it for twelve minutes.

  THE CONTAINERS into which the Alona Rahab’s crew dumps its catch are not the wooden bushel baskets used for crabbing. Virginia tubs, as they’re called, are built of molded orange plastic and closely resemble something you’d use to haul laundry. They’re also slightly larger than the crab basket. Across the state line, oystermen use a Maryland tub, which is smaller than a Virginia tub but, again, larger than a crab bushel. Tangier watermen seem mystified but not particularly concerned by this variance in what should be a standard measure. “A bushel basket’s a bushel,” Leon told me. “A Maryland tub’s a bushel. And a Virginia tub’s a bushel. They’re all different sizes. Now, something ain’t a bushel. They’re calling them bushels, but there ain’t that many bushels.”

  Virginia law permits a licensed oysterman to take eight Virginia tubs of oysters per day. The boats on the Rappahannock all have a captain and one or two crew aboard, entitling some to a total of sixteen bushels and others, like the Alona Rahab, to twenty-four. In theory, the day should be half again as long for Lonnie and company than for some of the smaller boats circling near us.

  Except that Matt and Steve are speedy cullers. They attack each load with sharp eyes and efficient movement to get oysters into the tubs and sweep the empty shells and detritus, or cinder, back overboard. On top of that, Lonnie’s a tough boss: He takes no breaks and gives none. So by eight o’clock, seventy-two minutes into the day, we have six bushels filled—a rate of five tubs an hour. Matt never has time to single-task a smoke, so he keeps a Marlboro clenched between his lips as he works.

  The westerly breezes up. The river grows spiky. In one lick, an old shell comes up with ten or more tiny oysters attached in a bunch. “All them struck on one shell,” Matt says, showing off the cluster. “In a couple years, they’ll be a right good size.” The next lick brings up an old beer bottle, barnacles crowded tight on its brown glass—but only six oysters.

  Matt is dumping oysters into our ninth bushel when the big, high-sided Julie Ann swings past our port side, so close that Steve pauses to glare at its skipper. The Mariah Taylor slides near us to starboard, and Lonnie heels the boat over hard to stay out of its way. We pass a mainland boat with a two-person crew, and I’m surprised to see that the mate is a woman. “There are at least five boats out here with women on ’em,” Lonnie tells me. He need not add that none is from Tangier.

  The Mama Say passes close by. Its stern advertises its home port as FALLIN AND CRAWLIN, VIRGINIA, but the boat itself is a Tangier product, built by Jerry Frank Pruitt. “Heeeeey,” Lonnie yells to its captain.

  “Heeeeey,” comes the reply.

  We near an old round-stern wooden boat, Grace. “Woman on this boat, too,” Lonnie says, pointing to its mate, busily culling, her sweatshirt’s hood cinched tight around her face. The boats around us draw close, Mama Say just a few feet behind, Grace alongside. Lonnie waits for his moment, then turns hard right, and we pass just aft of the Grace’s dredge line and across the stern of the Julie Ann.

  Steve is assessing the last cull, which produced just two oysters. “Ain’t much here, Lonnie,” he yells over his shoulder.

  “No,” Lonnie agrees. “We’ll have to find another spot.”

  We break out of the circle and shoot one hundred yards upriver, where the next lick brings up a mess of oysters. Before the cull’s finished, the Julie Ann slides up on our port side. “They’re in the way,” Matt growls.

  “More in the way than anybody else out here,” Lonnie fumes. “He don’t know what he’s doing.” Inside of two minutes, we’re again in a crowd—Mama Say, Mariah Taylor, and the Eastern Shore skiff have joined us. The Julie Ann is glued to our stern. “I can’t shake him,” Lonnie complains. “Everywhere I go, he comes.”

  Ten o’clock. Sixteen bushels on deck. The Julie Ann hangs close, with its dredge line stretched thirty feet off its side—far too much line, and a barrier to other boats trying to pass on its right side. I watch its mates cull. It takes them four times as long as it does Matt and Steve. “We’ll be gone before that boy gets ten bushels,” Steve says.

  Lonnie glares at the other boat. “He keeps cutting in on us.”

  “You want to pull alongside him?” Steve asks. “I know you
don’t like cussing, but I don’t have a problem with it.”

  Lonnie breaks away from our pursuer and bolts upriver. The next lick brings up a pile of shell and fourteen oysters slimed in gray mud. “There we are!” Steve bellows.

  At eleven the Mariah Taylor heads for shore. Its skipper has just one mate aboard, and they’ve reached their sixteen-bushel limit. Just a few minutes later we have twenty-three tubs stacked at the stern and the last fills quickly: twenty-seven oysters in one lick, twenty-three in the next. “I think we’ve got it!” Steve hollers, and as the mates secure the dredge, Lonnie opens the throttle and we bounce back to Windmill Point.

  A few days later, back at Tangier, I find Lonnie on the Alona Rahab, tied up at his dock. He’s shucking a small pile of oysters that his crew caught just hours before. I climb aboard as he forces one open, then passes it to me. I slurp the oyster from its shell. It’s fat, firm, salty. I have never had better, and I’ve certainly not tasted fresher.

  “Good?” he asks.

  I nod, my mouth full.

  He shucks another and hands it over.

  BY THE TIME the season opens in Tangier Sound, the deepening cold has transformed oystering into a potentially deadly enterprise. Mid-December, daytime temperatures hang in the low forties on the island and dip considerably lower in the northerlies that breeze over the open water. A white-capped chop is normal. Heavier seas build quickly. Spray soaks through the cotton that watermen invariably wear under their oilskins and turns to ice on a boat’s deck and dredge rig. A pursuit with little tolerance for mistakes thus becomes even more unforgiving: To go overboard is to confront hopelessness. In water so cold, a waterman has only fifteen to thirty minutes before he loses more heat than he can keep, and hypothermia sets in. His energy drains away. His limbs quit working. And if he isn’t pulled from the water, dried off, and warmed, he dies.