by Earl Swift
The conversation turns to his radio call for help. What are the odds, someone wonders, that a VHF call could cover so much distance, in conditions so foul? Jason says he didn’t realize where Billy Brown was when he made the call. “I hollered to him one time and didn’t get anything back,” he tells us. “I had no time to call for anybody else. If he hadn’t answered, then I’d have been drownded. Nobody would have known where we were, and we were always one of the last ones to come in anyway. They wouldn’t know we were missing, even.”
Annette is in constant motion, checking with her guests to ensure that their needs are met, soothing their grief as much as they’re attending to hers. I’m talking with her sons when, about an hour after my arrival, Ooker appears at the door with a friend, a private pilot from Suffolk, Virginia, named Kenny Carpenter. The mayor tells Annette they’re going up in Kenny’s Cessna 172 to look for Ed. There’s room for a second spotter on the plane, and I volunteer to join them. Thirty minutes later, after unloading a pile of stale hamburger buns that Kenny’s brought Ooker to use as bird food, we take off and circle to gain altitude.
A thousand feet up in Kenny’s airplane, the view is revelatory. Tangier appears so tiny, so fragile, so water-rasped and ponded, so utterly insubstantial, that even after a year of studying the island’s vulnerabilities I’m surprised by how conspicuously it is losing its fight with the sea. The ridges look even more slender and defenseless than they do on the ground. The south end of Tangier proper, where the Big Gut empties, is dissolving. Uppards is a loose macramé of marshy strands enclosing great tidal pools, and the breach most emphatically splits the island in two.
Minutes later we pass over a yellow can buoy, and Ooker announces we’re getting close. Kenny extends the flaps, and slowing, we drop to four hundred feet. The water is furrowed by a light breeze and dotted with crab pot markers. “Can see a lot of buoys out here,” Kenny says. “If you can see buoys, we should be able to see a body.”
“Oh, yeah,” Ooker replies, and as he says it a red nun buoy appears—the corn buoy. “Okay, that’s it,” he says. “Jason said that after the boat went down they drifted to the southwest, so over here.” He points off to our left, and as we bank that way, Ooker and I commence our duty as lookouts, he peering off to starboard, I to port. It’s a lovely, sunny spring day, and the bay glitters benignly. “On a day like today,” Ooker says, “it’s hard to imagine a boat going down.”
In a widening circle we fly, over dark green water that seems incalculably vast. Perspective is elusive: I’m not sure how large a body would be from this height or whether I’d be able to make out the colors of Ed’s clothes, so I look for anything: any anomaly in the surface, any odd breaker, any discordant patch of bright or dark. We search, with few words exchanged, for forty minutes, seeing nothing, until Kenny suggests that we fly to the mainland to get fuel. Ooker notes that one piece of wreckage—the lid to the Henrietta C.’s engine box—washed up yesterday at Milford Haven, on the western shore, which is more or less on the way to the airfield, so we head that way, still flying low and slow, still scanning the water below.
Sandbars lurk beneath the surface, coloring the bay a bright, almost Caribbean teal. Buoys of red and blaze orange and electric blue dot the shallows, and I can see gulls riding the waves. If we fly over Ed, it seems we’ll be able to see him. But our route past Milford Haven yields nothing, and we press southward to the Rappahannock River and fly into its mouth, and over the oyster rock Lonnie dredged five months ago, to land.
THE FOLLOWING SUNDAY MORNING, twenty-six islanders gather in Swain Memorial’s South Room for the weekly class meeting. “They’re supposed to go out again today to look for the body,” Hoot Pruitt announces from the lectern, “so let’s pray.”
“We know, oh Lord, that his soul’s already in Heaven with you,” Marlene says, “and with his mom and his family and everyone he knew when he was a little boy. And we’re thankful for that. We ask, Lord, that all the Christians on the island pray hard that the body be found.”
“Loni Renee came to me and said, ‘Regardless of what happens, I’m going to trust in Jesus for the rest of my life,’” says Carol Moore’s mother, Grace. She wipes her eyes. “I prayed for my grandchildren for so long of a night. I’d think, ‘Neither of them are saved.’ And now Loni Renee is.”
“That body is going to be found,” Marlene says. “Grandma Sadie lost a little boy in the ditch, out in the marsh there. It was in the cold wintertime, and his body drifted out. But she prayed, and that body came right back into that ditch.”
An hour later I’m aboard Mark Haynie’s Sharon Kay III with Richard Pruitt and crabber Allen Parks, headed into the bay to join a flotilla of boats dragging for Ed’s body. It is another lovely, near-cloudless day, with a light and steady breeze out of the south. “Very different from when we were all out here Monday, looking,” Allen tells me. “Now, that felt like a big body of water.”
The Henrietta C. lies on the bottom thirty-eight feet down, so Allen and Richard fashion two especially long lines for their drags. Allen’s line is tied to a steel bar from which dangle seven large and evil-looking treble hooks. Richard’s is studded with giant bent nails. Allen tosses his drag over the starboard stern, and Richard, his over the port. They play out the lines, which are visible fifteen feet down through the crystalline water, and we begin a three-knot search of the bottom west of the sunken Henrietta C.
Thirty minutes later they pull the drags back up. Richard’s has snagged nothing. Allen’s treble hooks have collected bundles of algae and clusters of sea grapes, which he rips away before carefully throwing the device back into the water. A Coast Guard boat arrives, its deck crowded with crew in blaze-orange life jackets. Its skipper radios that we’re to stay two hundred yards clear, as he plans to anchor to the wreck and send down a dive team.
An hour passes. The drags come back aboard. Again, nothing but eelgrass and red moss and sea grapes. We eat lunches we’ve packed and sweat under the hot afternoon sun. Allen, one of Tangier’s younger watermen, talks about Ed. “Pot for pot, he was the best fisherman on Tangier,” he says. “When Ed shined the best in his waterman’s career was when crabs and oysters were scarcest. That’s when he caught a boatload. He could think like a crab or oyster.”
TEN DAYS AFTER THE SINKING, a Smith Island waterman comes upon Ed’s body floating in the bay not far from the wrecked Henrietta C. The body passes through the hands of the medical examiner, then is prepared for burial by a mainland funeral home. He finally comes home on the mailboat. I watch a crew from the volunteer fire department load his casket into Tangier’s ambulance and carry it over to Swain Memorial.
Later that afternoon, a few hours before the visitation, the regulars convene at the Situation Room. We sip our coffee through a lengthy silence. Leon breaks it. “Ol’ Ed’s gonna be missed.”
“Yes, he will,” Jerry Frank murmurs.
“If there was a group of watermen and Ed was in the group, he’d be telling stories,” Ooker says.
Jerry Frank: “I’ll tell you something else about him. There weren’t no more honest a man in all the world.”
“That he was,” Richard Pruitt agrees, nodding.
We sit in silence for fifteen seconds. Again, Leon kick-starts the conversation: “Seems like he was all fixed up to die.”
“Yeah, it seems like everything was working so that Ed wouldn’t come back,” Ooker says. “Couldn’t get to the life vests. Ran away from the island to get water out of the boat, which made him harder to find.”
“Well,” Leon says, “I mean being saved and all.”
Everyone nods. Talk turns to the Henrietta C. A reporter from Norfolk, here to write a story about Ed, asks Jerry Frank whether there was anything unusual about the boat. Jerry Frank, who has spent seventy years living “within three or four hundred feet” of Ed, shakes his head. “When I first heard about it I went over in my mind, wondering if I did anything different on that boat,” he says. “But no, I did it exactly th
e same as I did the others.” Then, without waiting for a follow-up question, he offers up a piece of backstory that’s been the subject of rumor for three weeks, but on which he is one of the few islanders who can speak with authority.
“About four year ago,” Jerry Frank says, “he had the boat to the boatyard and up out of the water, and they found a place in the bilge, up under the cabin, where the wood was eaten with worms—not the kind you get overboard, but the kind that get in trees, that kill trees.”
“A dry wood worm,” Jerry Frank would call it later. Park your boat or a piece of onboard gear under the trees, and the worms would drop in. They ate a boat from the inside out. He suspected they came from trees over Reedville way, on the bay’s western shore, where Tangiermen had been known to store equipment.
“I’ve taken them out of quite a few boats around here,” he said. “They’re hard to see. That hole’s so small you’d better look very close. The worm gets bigger as he eats. When he first goes in, he’s a little thing.” The boatyard might not have noticed the infestation, except that the affected boards wouldn’t hold paint, he said. So it scraped out the damage it found, filled and painted it, and told Ed he’d need to swap out that wood.
Point being, Ed had known for years that those boards were bad.
He’d loved that boat. He’d been a stickler for maintenance. He’d replaced several boards since, at the starboard stern where he fished up his pots, a high-wear region of the hull. The previous November he’d had the Henrietta C. in a Smith Island boatyard, getting the hull sanded and filled and painted, zinc applied to its rudder and prop shaft, a new seat installed in the cabin.
But he had not gotten around to replacing that weakened section of the bottom. The work would have kept the boat out of the water, would have kept them from working. And that, he knew, would be a hardship on Jason—who, as Ed had done, was raising four children.
That Monday, they’d likely cracked one of those worm-tunneled boards early in the run home. And after one went, so did another, and another, like a zipper pulled, until the Henrietta C. was no more.
The Joyce Marie II leaves Tangier harbor. (EARL SWIFT)
Twenty-Three
MAY 18, 2017. A YEAR TO THE DAY AFTER MY ARRIVAL ON Tangier, I stand on the mailboat dock in the predawn dark, looking out over the harbor and waiting for Ooker. A light breeze out of the south riffles the water as black sky brightens to deep purple, then—in the course of ten minutes—blooms red, orange, and gold, and the sun, not yet risen, filigrees a scattering of dark clouds off to the east. It’s against this riot of color that I make out the Sreedevi backing into the channel from the mayor’s crab shanty at 5:30. It putters slowly across the dark water and halts alongside the dock. “Hey, Ooker,” I say.
“Hey, Oral,” he replies.
I jump aboard. We slide three boxes of soft crabs onto the mailboat’s aft cargo deck. I ask whether they’re bound for New York. Ooker grunts and shakes his head as we pull away from the bigger vessel. “They’re all going to Crisfield now,” he says. “The price ain’t good anywhere, and it isn’t worth shipping them.” Jumbos are fetching just fourteen dollars a dozen—a third of what he’s seen them reach in the past. Mediums are a paltry four bucks a dozen. There have been times when a single whale brought that much.
The market’s flooded, he explains. A big shedding house reportedly spent $500,000 buying up doublers a week or two back, so now restaurants and stores all along the Eastern Seaboard have all the soft crabs they need. It’ll likely be June before prices rebound. We cruise at six knots through the harbor’s shanties. Workboats are tied up alongside a good many of them. “A lot of ’em are laying in, because of the funeral,” Ooker says. “I won’t stay out too long myself. Check a hundred pots or so.”
The tall pines on the P’int loom black against the sky. We cruise past the CBF’s darkened campus, 150 yards off to starboard, and round the island’s northeast tip. The scent of honeysuckle wafts strong and sweet over the water.
The first pot holds nine doublers, the second, two. The third brings up just a single lemon. In the fourth: ten doublers. “There’s no doubler run down here anymore to speak of, but what few you do see are right here around Port Isobel,” Ooker says. “Used to be you could put pots here, when the doubler run was happening, all up thisaway, and you’d catch six or seven bushels.” Those days appear to be fading deeper into the past, and this year, lemons seem to have dropped off, too. “I don’t know what changed or why they changed their habits,” he says. “People always talk about how high the tides have gotten. There are abnormally low tides, too. Things are messed up—crab habits have changed and the tides are all out of whack.”
The sun pulls free of the horizon. From the water off to starboard juts a thin metal pole, to which is attached a rumpled flag, its orange fabric faded to dull pink. It marks a hazard to navigation: Years ago, Randy Klinefelter built a bulkhead there, hard against the shoreline, in an attempt to halt Port Isobel’s shrinkage. It didn’t work. The bulkhead survives, but it’s underwater and well out to sea.
We finish the pots off the P’int and motor south to four long rows Ooker has set off the east side of the spit. Watts Island, four miles to our east, is silhouetted against the low sun, and as often happens when I have a good view of it, I find myself struggling to comprehend its appearance. On my 1994 kayak trip around the bay, I paddled out of Onancock Creek one morning and sighted Watts miles away across Pocomoke Sound, and on a whim decided to visit. It was a dumb move. A west wind rose when I was halfway across, and I had to push hard for three hours before I was able to land the kayak on a sandy beach lining the island’s east side.
Watts was about a mile long, a slender crescent of sand and upland forest. The woods rose in two dense thickets tangled with poison ivy, so I kept to the perimeter. I recall feeling both exhilarated and marooned as I walked the beach. I could find no sign that anyone had stepped on this shore in years, stumbled on no relics of its long human occupation. And I did not see, hidden in the trees, a big electrical junction box: In 1977, Tangier had retired the diesel generators installed by Henry Jander in favor of an underwater cable from the mainland, and here the lines from island and Eastern Shore met. My only company was birds—hundreds of them, high in the trees, shrieking as I passed.
Tangier looked close enough to touch. I gazed on Swain’s steeple and the water tower during my hour’s walk and watched a scattering of deadrises plying the same water Ooker and I are working today. I was sorely tempted to keep paddling to reach the town. But the breeze was still coming strong and steady. I thought it better to turn back.
Now, from the Sreedevi, I can see that Watts has shrunk to a third of its size of twenty-three years ago. One of its forests is gone without a trace, along with the ground it stood on, and the survivor is falling, several trees a month, into Tangier and Pocomoke sounds. Nothing remains of the beach I walked. And the junction box hasn’t moved, though the ground beneath it has; once well inland, it now rests on a platform out in deepening water off the island’s south end.
Up one row of thirty pots, down a second. A few big jimmies, a great many lemons, a handful of doublers. Ooker baits each pot with a number two, first breaking its claws with a sideways tug. “It seems to attract more females,” he explains, “and this way the jimmies can’t hurt any soft crabs in the pot.”
An osprey flies out to the boat and hovers, flapping loudly, just a few feet overhead. Ooker plucks a menhaden from his bait box and offers it with an outstretched arm. The osprey eases closer, until it’s just three feet from the meal, then two—then spooks and wheels away. Ooker heaves the fish into the air after him. “I ain’t ever had an osprey take one out of my hand like a gull, but he’s come close,” he says. “I’m going to try to get him to do it this summer.”
It’s a pleasant beginning to the day, which is otherwise blue. A few hours later, I’m at the packed funeral at Swain Memorial for Ed Charnock. I sit in a rear pew, listening to a eulogy fr
om Twin Denny Crockett, who lost his grandfather Donnie to the island’s last accident at sea, and who is married to Ed’s daughter Danielle. Hoot Pruitt sings a solo. Duane Crockett tells us that God was with the Henrietta C. when it went down: “He was out there to save Jason’s life, and he was there to save Jason’s soul, and he was there to take Ed home.” John Flood wraps up the service by observing that “Ed has received a good and full measure.”
WHEN I RETURN to Tangier in early June, the island is enjoying a burst of press attention, thanks to a most unusual sook that Ooker’s son Woodpecker found in his pot: a crab with two oysters that had attached themselves to its face in almost perfect symmetry. A photograph of Ooker holding the creature has just appeared in the Washington Post and has been picked up by newspapers around the world.
But aside from that little thrill, the island’s crabbers have little to cheer about. Peelers have all but vanished in the shallows around Tangier. The underwater grasses that typically grow so thick in the island’s lee have been slow to show up, and crabs about to molt have sought safe territory elsewhere. Some of the potters and all the scrapers have little to show for their efforts of the past three weeks—Leon complains of catching no more than a dozen peelers total over three days on the water and has even considered parking his boat. “I know Dad’s a scraper,” his daughter Carlene says during prayer requests at New Testament, “but there are a lot of other scrapers, and there ain’t no crabs, and they’re hurting.
“We will praise him,” she says. “The Lord knows we have need of crabs, and he’ll provide.”
Leon’s woes are compounded the next day, when the Betty Jane II ’s hydraulic steering fails while he’s out on the water, leaving him adrift until another boat tows him in. “I went out,” he tells me later in the Situation Room, “but I had a lot of trouble.”