Chesapeake Requiem

by Earl Swift

  But little Tangier is important in one respect. As the Scientific Reports article concluded, it’s likely to be the first to go. That experience—and the uncomfortable questions it forces the country to confront—will inform what the rest of us on and near the coasts can expect in the decades to come. What makes a community worth saving? Will its size alone prompt the nation to fight for its survival—or are other, less tangible factors just as important? Which such factors count the most? And if size is the chief consideration, what’s the cutoff, the minimum population, that’s worth rescue? What, in short, is important to us?

  And there’s the matter of the Chesapeake Bay blue crab: Without Tangier, big-city restaurants will be serving a lot less softshell, and many more will have to substitute imported crabmeat for the genuine article in their crab cakes. “Here we are, in the United States and just a few miles from Washington, D.C.,” Ooker says, “and we need protection.”

  OFF THE P’INT an osprey flies out to the boat and hovers a few feet overhead. Ooker pulls half of a menhaden from a bait box beside the console and flings it into the air. The bird watches it splash down in the water, then folds its wings to become a missile and jets in after it. Ooker postpones pulling the next pot to watch it surface and lift off for home, shrugging water from its back, the fish clenched in its talons. “That one’s Klinefelter,” he tells me. He’s named all the osprey nesting on Tangier, along with several gulls, and can identify each from fifty yards off. They know him and his boat, too, and most mornings fly out for a free meal. First comes Klinefelter, nested on the P’int’s east side and named for a former owner of that islet. He’s followed by Transmitter—so named because he wears a tiny backpack that tracks his movements, which range to Brazil over the winter—then Fishy, nested in marsh on the island’s southeast shore, and Old-Timer, from what’s left of the spit. They’ll circle for a minute before Ooker coaxes them closer with a whistled approximation of their call. Gulls form a tight swirl around them, hoping to beat the raptors to the food. Now, with Klinefelter a diminishing speck against the sky, gulls continue to noisily circle the stern. Ooker eases the boat forward.

  His behavior is not typical of Tangier watermen, who tend to pay the wildlife around them little mind unless they’re pulling it aboard their boats. An example of the norm is working one hundred yards off to our west, closer to shore: Leon McMann, Ooker’s father-in-law and a full-time waterman at age eighty-five. Leon leaves the dock each morning only to catch crabs; he spares no time to admire the beauty of the bay, the quality of the light, the grace of a gliding fish hawk, and he’ll tell you so. In rough seas or calm, whether beset by wind or fog or furnace heat, he judges a day by the number of peelers he snares and not much else. “He’s tough. Very tough,” Ooker says as we gaze at the older man, who’s stooped over his culling board at the stern of his boat, wearing the Tangier crabber’s uniform of ball cap, oilskins, high rubber boots. “On the water you don’t have retirement, so you pray for good health and keep working until you play out.”

  It may be from Leon that Ooker’s wife, Irene, inherited her attitude toward Ooker’s communion with the birds, which he considers “one of the great things about being out here,” but about which she evidently harbors some doubt. “My wife says I kill too much time feeding them,” he tells me. “She’ll say, if I get home late, ‘You been feeding the birds again?’” And it may be from Leon and Irene that Ooker’s thirty-eight-year-old son, James—a.k.a. Woodpecker—inherited his own approach to crabbing, which sees him fish up so many pots each day that he pays two island men to crew for him. James roars up now in the Rebecca Jean II, a big, high-sided craft built for ocean work, which he takes up in the winter. The deck of Ooker’s boat is a full two feet closer to the water than his son’s. The redheaded Woodpecker looms over us as he pulls alongside and stops. “How’s it going?” Ooker asks him.

  Woodpecker shakes his head. “Ain’t nothin’ but lemons.” He leans over the side to place two peelers in Ooker’s hands—as a hard crabber, he has no use for them—and, with a wave, guns the Rebecca Jean II away. Ooker watches him go. “I’m not sure I ever had the ambition he’s got,” he murmurs. “I had more than I do now, but he’s really working at it. He’s good at it.”

  We chug to the next pot. Ooker’s interest in birds goes way back. He earned his nickname as a toddler, trying to imitate a pet rooster his family kept. He is the youngest of eight children born to Will Eskridge, a seventh-generation Tangierman, and Mildred “Mish” Pruitt, herself six generations removed from the island’s first settler. Will was twenty when Ooker’s oldest sibling, brother Ira, was born in 1931, and forty-seven when Ooker came along in July 1958. He shrugs. “I was a surprise.”

  Two of his older brothers, William and Warren, were twins; Warren died in combat in Vietnam when Ooker was ten. The island was accustomed to wartime loss—Tangier sent more of its young men into World War II, per capita, than any other town in Virginia, and eight didn’t come home. But Warren’s death, the town’s sole casualty in Southeast Asia, devastated the population, and it remains an ample source of grief for the Eskridges. To this day, William keeps a bronze plaque eulogizing his brother on his front lawn.

  Otherwise, Ooker enjoyed a fairly typical Tangier childhood. He mudlarked in the marshes. He played with other island kids on an abandoned menhaden fishing boat beached down on the spit, climbing its rigging and swinging into the water from its mast. He worked summers for his father, shaving ice blocks so that Will could cold-pack his soft crabs for shipment and, later, crewing on Will’s boat, as Will had on his own father’s. He sang in a mediocre island rock band called Hot Ice; Carol Moore’s brother-in-law, Tracy, played the drums. One atypical element of his youth: Ooker stayed in school. Most Tangier boys in the seventies quit at sixteen to follow the water, which promised an income at least equal to blue-collar work on the mainland. When he was in fourth grade, there were ten boys in his class; when he graduated in 1976, he was one of two.

  In the next pot, a few crabs are joined by a northern puffer, a small, pop-eyed fish with spines covering its entire body and tiny fins that look to be afterthoughts. Ooker picks it up, flips it onto its back, and rubs its belly with the tip of a finger. The fish instantly swells into a sphere. “Ever seen a puffer fish bounce?” he asks. He flings it to the deck and it rebounds into his hand like a tennis ball. “I did that with a group of visitors one day,” he says, “and this lady says to me, ‘Should you be doing that to that fish? Aren’t you being hard on it?’

  “I said, ‘Well, normally I’d be cutting its head off and pulling its meat out of its skin. Comparatively, it don’t mind this at all.’” He looks at me and chuckles. “I guess I was a little harsh.”

  After Ooker has fished up the last of his pots, we head for the harbor and pull alongside a big, unpainted aluminum workboat belonging to Lindy’s Seafood. A wholesale outfit, Lindy’s sends the vessel sixty miles down from Woolford, Maryland, to buy up Tangier’s hard crabs every day but Sunday. The number ones Ooker’s caught will bring in $100 a bushel—this early in the season, they’re hard to come by and thus fetch the highest price of the summer. Clean sooks and number twos are going for half as much. Lemons earn just $20. “Good meat and lots of it,” Ooker says of the pregnant females, “but there are fewer crabs in a bushel because the sponge takes up so much room.”

  In all, he’s made $280 on his by-catch and has a half bushel of peelers that he’ll sell by the dozen once they become softshells. Before setting out this morning, he sold two boxes, or eighteen dozen soft crabs, to New York’s New Fulton Fish Market for $460. He put them on the mailboat, and by now they’re on a truck rolling up the coast. “All in all,” he says, “it’s been a pretty good day.”

  It’s far from over, however. After sweeping mud, slime, seaweed, and bits of eelgrass and crab from the boat, Ooker ties up at his shanty and dumps his peelers into the shedding tanks arranged in long rows out back. Each tank holds crabs sorted according to the time remainin
g before they molt. Greens or snots, a day or two away, crouch in a couple of tanks under six inches of water pumped from the harbor below. Ranks, just hours from shedding, are in a third tank. Busters, actually in the process of leaving their old shells, are in another.

  Ooker must check the tanks every four hours from now until bedtime, because in that time ranks can become busters and are open to attack from their neighbors. More important, busters become soft crabs, and left in the water, their new shells will firm up. Pulled out, however, they won’t harden, and they’ll be ready to pack off to Crisfield or New York.

  IT’S WELL INTO THE AFTERNOON, most days, when Ooker motors from the shanty to dock space he rents on the Tangier waterfront and climbs from the boat onto the Main Ridge, the middle and most important of the three low strips of upland on which the town is built. It’s here, on either side of a road a dozen feet wide—just big enough to permit golf carts to pass—that the island’s commerce, culture, and most of its population are concentrated.

  The Main Ridge begins at the water’s edge at the far northeast corner of Tangier proper, or clear across the island from the spit, at the weedy and hardscrabble Parks Marina, the point of entry for visiting boaters: They reach the road on foot via a narrow, zigzagging path that takes them from the slips past a succession of hand-painted signs, some rustic to the point of folk art, touting the town’s restaurants.

  At the path’s end, the asphalt begins. Main Ridge Road runs south past a couple of tumbledown crab shanties, a few houses, and a fine, rambling Methodist parsonage into what passes for the island’s downtown: two restaurants (one open just for the four-month tourist season) and the Daley & Son Grocery; a couple of summer-only gift shops; a combination outdoor diner and cart-rental joint, likewise open from late May to early October; the power plant and post office; and, beneath a simple but stately bell tower peaked with a four-sided steeple, Swain Memorial, its gabled south, east, and west sides lit by enormous arched windows of stained glass. Here and there along the way, narrow lanes branch off to the docks for fuel, bait, the mailboat, and summertime tour boats, and to houses clustered behind those facing the main road. No path travels far before dead-ending at water or marsh.

  For longer than anyone can remember, and for reasons no one can say, this northernmost four-hundred-yard stretch of the Main Ridge is called Meat Soup. Just past the church the road jogs through an S-curve, and for another 830 yards it’s lined mostly with houses. About halfway down, give or take, stands the New Testament Church, austere home to a flock that broke away from the Methodist congregation just after World War II, and which now rivals Swain in its head count. The stretch of the Main Ridge from Swain to New Testament is called King Street, an old name for the road. Again, skinny lanes sprout east and west to houses tucked back at the ridge’s verge into wetland.

  The southernmost third of the Main Ridge, from New Testament down to the road’s unceremonious end—where the houses peter out and the asphalt gives way to a rutted dirt track into the marsh guarding the town’s southern flank—is called Black Dye, another name no one can explain. The border between the lower two neighborhoods is indistinct, and Tangiermen will disagree as to where King Street ends and Black Dye begins. But if the line isn’t at the New Testament Church, it’s close.

  So runs the stem around which Tangier is built—about two-thirds of a mile long, at no point much more than two hundred yards wide, and in places less than half that. Most afternoons will find Ooker pedaling his beach cruiser to a low, nondescript building in Meat Soup, across from Swain Memorial: the former Gladstone Health Center, named for a longtime island doctor, and supplanted in 2010 by a big, modern clinic farther south on Main Ridge Road. The building’s back door is unlocked. Just inside, a dark, twisty corridor leads to the center’s former birthing room. Every weekday from 2:30 to 4:00 P.M., it hosts a fraternity of island men who convene to discuss the weather, crabs, erosion, and the shortcomings of government regulators and marine scientists. About half are retired; a few others probably should be. Ooker, among the youngest regulars, calls it the Situation Room.

  A typical session might begin with Leon McMann, the presiding elder, ranting about the state’s crabbing rules, as he did one afternoon in late May. “They’re trying to make laws that’ll make more crabs, but they don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t have no idea,” he said, pointing at his fellow members with a finger curled and swollen with arthritis. He leaned back in his chair. “Well, they ain’t water-men,” he added with a sigh. “None of the people making the laws are watermen. They don’t know nothin’ about it. They know the water’s wet, is all.”

  The group might mull the wonders of the strange animals they hunt, as they did when Richard Pruitt, a sixty-year veteran of the water, still chasing peelers, walked in with a freshly molted soft crab and the empty shell, or “shed,” that it left behind. He displayed them both in the palm of one hand. The newly emerged crab seemed impossibly big next to the translucent husk it had occupied until minutes before, and inside the shed was a maze of cavities, each an obstacle to molting, a potential snag to a soft crab striving to pull free. “That’s amazing, isn’t it?” Richard asked quietly. From the eyebrows down, his face was already tanned the color of beef jerky. Under his ball cap—which, like all Tangier watermen, he wore indoors and out, except in church—he was fish-belly white.

  “It is that,” said Bruce Gordy, a retired schoolteacher, the island’s unofficial historian, and Richard’s lifelong friend, leaning in close to study the creature.

  “The people who make our laws, they don’t know that right there,” Leon said about the marvel before our eyes. “They don’t know nothin’ about that.”

  They might discuss the discomforts of growing old: “I got up this morning, and I took two Alka-Seltzer Plus,” Leon told the group. In old photos, he’s a big, barrel-chested fellow with bushy sideburns and a thick, dark head of hair. He has lost his brawn and several inches of height since, and his scalp is visible through a thinning tousle of white. “When I got on my boat I took three ibuprofen. When I got home I took two Aleve. And I imagine I’ll take two or three more pills before the evening’s through. I do that every day.”

  All of this is delivered in Tangier’s odd tongue, a tuneful confluence of accent and dialect that stretches one-syllable words and knots them into two, warps vowels, and, to an untrained ear, can be as indecipherable as Tagalog or Navajo. “Hard” comes out as howard, “island” as oyalind. Visiting journalists have long pegged it a stubborn vestige of Elizabethan English preserved by the island’s isolation. That’s not the case, but it does evoke a time long passed—and it’s rendered all the more foreign by the islanders’ habit of saying exactly the opposite of what they mean.

  Talking “over the left,” it’s called, or simply talking backward. It’s signaled by subtle inflection, often by slight stress on the subject of the sentence. Thus an islander might react to a beautiful woman by saying, “She ain’t nothin’ to look at.” I witnessed an example before I even arrived on Tangier, when a Mustang took a corner too fast in Crisfield and spun out in view of a crowd on the dock. “That car—it didn’t go sideways,” one islander commented. Replied another: “I’ll bet his face ain’t hot.”

  Now Leon peered through his glasses around the Situation Room. “I know some people who never take a pill,” he said. “I think they’re the only thing keeping me alive.” He shook his head. “Pills, I ain’t took none of them.”

  On some days, too, the group might take up the subject that preys quietly on every island adult, as happened when Leon, glaring sourly from under his ball cap, announced: “Now they’re saying that we’re sinking.”

  Bobby Crockett, a former waterman who spends weeks at a time off-island on a tugboat, waved the suggestion away. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “I hope I live until this island sinks. I’d live to a ripe old age.”

  “That’s what they say,” Leon countered.

  “They do,” Bru
ce Gordy agreed.

  “I’ll tell you one thing. I hope that’s what brings the end,” the redheaded Bobby declared. “I hope it is, because if that’s the case, this island will be here for a good long time. We’ll all be dead and buried before then, and our children, too.” Well, now, Leon pointed out, nobody much fretted that the island was washing away until an islander started taking measurements on the western shore fifty-plus years ago, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t happening. Bobby allowed that erosion was another story. He remembered the western shore stretching a “right long way” beyond where it does now.

  He added that up at Tylerton, one of the three villages on Maryland’s Smith Island, the state had spent a pile of money on protecting the shoreline. Why wasn’t Virginia doing that for Tangier? “I’ll tell you one thing,” Bobby said. “In Tylerton they got the prettiest bulkhead, all along the town and even up in the marsh. And I heard they spent $10 million on a jetty all the way around the wildlife refuge [north of town].”

  Leon fixed him with a scowl. “Save the birds,” he muttered. “Kill the people.”

  Tourists walk Main Ridge Road in King Street. (EARL SWIFT)

  Three

  MORNINGS COME EARLY ON TANGIER. HOURS BEFORE daybreak—in many houses, closer to midnight than dawn—bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen lights flick on, coffee is chugged, lunches are packed, and watermen straggle in the silent dark across the marsh and up the ridges to Meat Soup. In the harbor, outboards whine and diesels burble to life. The scent of four-cycle exhaust hangs over the docks. Under long strings of bare bulbs, peeler potters exchange shouted hellos as they buster up, or sort, their molting crabs. Then, while much of the town sleeps on, the island’s crabbers take to their boats and head west to the bay, or east to the sound, and their pots.

  By four on a springtime morning, the waters off Tangier are dotted with moving light—the sallow glow of boat cabins, the powerful beams that captains use to find their buoys, and blue-white LEDs illuminating open decks. They glide among the fixed green and red flashes of navigation beacons—a sight that evokes both lonesomeness, for their being surrounded by so much blackness, and an odd reassurance, for their constancy in all but the most fearsome weather. If the wind is right, the sound of boat motors will warble to shore from more than a mile out.