by Earl Swift
The years since have seen a procession of islanders claimed by violent winter weather. James E. “Puck” Shores drowned in such fashion in November 1965. He was the father of Rudy Shores, a peeler crabber whose shanty sits alongside Ooker’s and who’s married to Ooker’s sister-in-law. Harry Smith Parks, JoAnne Daley’s brother, disappeared in April 1989, after he reported engine trouble while motoring his forty-foot deadrise, Miss Annette, home from the lower Eastern Shore.
And then there’s a much more recent mystery, one that every Tangierman over twenty recalls with sadness and frustration. James Donald “Donnie” Crockett was seventy-seven, a lifelong waterman, and a man who kept his head in difficult circumstances. He lived in Meat Soup behind Leon’s place. In a trim two-story house there, Donnie and his wife, Eldora, had raised four sons who followed him onto the water.
Eldora died in 1982, and most every evening after, Leon’s wife, Betty Jane, would knock on her kitchen window as Donnie walked past and offer him leftovers from the supper she’d cooked. He later lost his oldest son, Don, to cancer. With his other boys grown, he now stayed busy by potting in the summer and oyster dredging in the winter, fixing bicycles, and tending to a large and growing family of cats.
Even on an island overrun with the animals, his brood was noteworthy. He kept more than twenty cats, had a name for each—biblical and weather references mostly, as in King David and Solomon, Foggy and Frostbite—and looked after them closely. Getting home to feed them was a daily priority. And it was one of his pets, a gray tabby named Spottie, that prompted Donnie to set out for Crisfield on the blustery morning of March 8, 2005.
It spoke loudly of wind that day, in the form of a fast-moving nor’wester that had prompted the National Weather Service to issue a gale warning. His sons pleaded with him to stay off the water. But Spottie needed to be spayed, so Donnie Crockett left Tangier in his forty-foot box-stern deadrise, Eldora C., to deliver his cat to her veterinarian. The twelve miles to town, a trip he’d made thousands of times, was uneventful.
By the time he picked Spottie up for the trip home, the conditions had turned and were worsening by the minute. The temperature plummeted. Freezing winds raked the Little Annemessex; in fifteen minutes, they jumped from twenty miles per hour to forty-five. Snow blew sideways so thick that visibility was near zero. The storm was so fearsome that Leon, headed back to Tangier with Betty Jane after visiting their daughter Carolyn on the Eastern Shore, doubted that even the sixty-four-foot mailboat was safe. “I seen that rim to the northwest,” he told me. “Just when we got to the mailboat, it came in. We went by the dockside, and I looked out and decided not to go.”
Indeed, the mailboat’s skipper—Rudy Thomas Jr., Brett Thomas’s father—had second thoughts once he set out for Tangier. He had a good many passengers that day, among them Donnie’s grandson Twin Denny and Twin Denny’s wife, Danielle, and their two small boys, and Denny’s sister-in-law Andrea, pregnant with another of Donnie’s great-grandchildren. The seas they encountered ranged from four to six feet, and the big, steel-hulled mailboat heaved and tossed. Spray froze thick to the rails and lay heavy on the weather decks, compromising the boat’s handling and balance. Rudy would have turned around, he said later, but feared coming broadside to the waves. When they reached the island after a white-knuckle hour, Rudy told his passengers, “I don’t know who’s dumber—you for coming aboard or me for leaving the dock.”
Donnie, meanwhile, got back to his boat, hauling Spottie in a carrier. He had a sister in Crisfield. He could have stayed. Perhaps he worried his other cats would go hungry. In any event, he climbed aboard the Eldora C. and headed for home. “It was an awful time, blowing about fifty,” Leon told me. “And he went right out in it.”
He had company. Dorsey Crockett, another Tangierman, was eyeing the weather at the Crisfield waterfront when Donnie’s boat chugged past, and he reacted in a manner common among watermen: “I figured if he could make it, so could I.” He fired up his own deadrise and tailed the Eldora C. out of the harbor, overtaking it a short way out. He and Donnie exchanged waves as he passed.
By this time, Tangier Sound was unfit for any vessel. The light station off the Tangier beach recorded winds of fifty-eight miles per hour. Once the boats left the shoreline’s protection, six-foot waves crashed over the decks and froze to glass and wood. The men could see nothing through the whiteout of blowing snow.
“This is rough, ain’t it?” Donnie radioed to Dorsey.
“Sure is,” Dorsey replied.
Minutes later, the Eldora C. disappeared.
Dorsey Crockett, running blind, was navigating by radar when he saw the blip representing Donnie’s boat vanish from the screen. “I tried raising him on the radio,” he told the Virginian-Pilot, “and there was nothing.” Less than a mile separated the boats, but going back was out of the question. “There weren’t no letup,” Dorsey said. “I ain’t been out in no rougher.”
Word reached Donnie’s sons that their father was missing. They struck out into the storm to look for him. As they left the harbor, Lonnie Moore pulled in, having left Crisfield about forty-five minutes behind Donnie. “That was one of the roughest days I’ve ever been out in,” Lonnie said. “We saw his son Will going out as we came in the creek, but we didn’t know Donnie was missing.” The men searched the crazed sound until dark. The Coast Guard joined in with search-and-rescue helicopters and a C-130 fitted with night-vision equipment. In the days that followed, Tangier watermen and boats from the Virginia Marine Resources Commission and Maryland State Police zigzagged over a 450-square-mile slice of the bay, on the lookout for any sign of the boat or man.
A diesel-powered deadrise has many loose parts that float, among them the big plywood lid that covers its engine box. Nothing came to the surface. For the Eldora C. to go down without marking its position, and without a Mayday from Donnie, suggested to his fellow watermen that the sinking was instantaneous, or nearly so, and that the boat settled upside down on the bottom. In the conversations that inevitably follow any tragedy on the water, Tangiermen traded theories as to what might have brought the end so fast. Donnie’s boat was forty-odd years old and reputed to have a balky bilge pump; it could have simply taken on more water than the pump could bail. A rogue wave could have come over the low stern and overwhelmed the vessel. Or his oystering rig, which Donnie hadn’t removed at the season’s close, could be to blame. The device might have thrown the Eldora C. off-balance in those heavy seas, especially with ice adding to its weight. The boat might have flipped without warning.
For days, then weeks, then months, hope prevailed on Tangier that Donnie Crockett’s body would be found, or that the bay would turn loose pieces of the boat so that searchers would know where to look. History, or at least tradition, was on their side. Months passed before Puck Shores’s body washed up, but so it did, the spring after his boat sank. Harry Parks’s body was found more than three weeks after he went down, clear across the Chesapeake.
When William Henry Harrison Crockett drowned in 1896, his body went missing, too. Five months passed, the story goes, until his distraught widow paid a call on Charles P. Swain, the Methodist pastor, and told him she feared her husband would never receive a decent burial. The pastor told her he had been praying on the matter and that he was sure the captain would come home soon. Within days, the tides carried his body up the ditch right behind his house.
Donnie Crockett’s family was not so fortunate. The only trace ever found of him was a life ring from the Eldora C. that washed up on Watts Island.
WHEN WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON CROCKETT DIED, the Methodist congregation that he’d so faithfully served was housed in a small, plain building in Meat Soup, snug every Sunday and stuffed to overflowing for weddings, funerals, and holidays. Pastor Swain suggested that the growing and godly town required a bigger house of worship, and so began a campaign to build one. The new church, finished in 1899, was an airy, soothing place that could seat six hundred or better, lit by gas chandeliers and an
abundance of stained glass. It instantly became the center of island life.
The year after its debut, Charles Swain moved to Deal Island, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Tangier was sorry to lose him, for in his five years there he’d transcended the typical role of pastor. He’d been a compelling preacher, to be sure, and a balming witness to the sick. He’d marshaled the island to build a church equal to any on the Eastern Shore. He’d also embraced the town as his own, carried himself as a Tangierman, and promoted and defended the place to the greater world. His slim A Brief History of Tangier Island survives in libraries here and there, and when the Washington Evening Star published a July 1899 story asserting that many islanders “know as little about the civilized world as a child,” and that “women nearly all go barefooted,” and that “girls here sixteen years old will measure six feet and weigh two hundred pounds,” and that Tangiermen “have signs for everything, and almost worship the moon, by which they foretell storms and all kinds of disasters,” Swain was quick to do battle. “There is hardly a truth in it,” he wrote to an editor, in a lengthy treatise that dismantled the story sentence by sentence. “We are not out of the world, but it would be a blessing if some newspaper correspondents were.”
The incident for which he was best remembered, however—and which spoke to his devout faith and close relations with the Almighty—was that prediction about Captain William Henry Harrison Crockett’s homecoming; even today, you won’t stay on the island long without hearing the story. Swain left Tangier its most revered figure since Joshua Thomas, which explains the overwhelming grief the town felt when, not long at his new post, the pastor died of pneumonia. He was just forty. The congregation voted at once to name its new church for him.
Swain Memorial’s bell summoned a population in the midst of an explosion—from 590 souls in 1880, to 900 by Sugar Tom’s reckoning in 1890, to 1,064 ten years after that. In most respects, the crowded little town remained a throwback. Everyone walked everywhere—besides a few wheelbarrows used for delivering freight, the island was without land vehicles. The Heistin’ Bridge’s deck was just three feet across, and the road to Canton was the width of three wooden planks. Children tended to stick to their own neighborhoods, rarely venturing from their home ridge to another or even from Meat Soup to King Street. Only the Methodists of Uppards ranged far afoot, and then only on Sundays: They’d walk to church on a doglegging path across the marsh and over a rickety footbridge that landed in Meat Soup at the north end of Main Street.
“The road that they made from their houses down to that bridge, they made from the ashes from the stoves they had in their homes,” Jack Thorne told me. When he was a boy, he added, he heard that one Sunday, Pastor Swain’s son Arthur observed a gale blowing outside the parsonage and “told his father, ‘Dad, I don’t think you’re going to have those people from Canaan down here today.’” A short while later, they saw the folks from Uppards crawling across the bridge in their oilskins. “Crawling,” Jack said. “And now people won’t go to church in their golf carts.”
A few features of daily life were almost modern, however. The post office received mail from the mainland every day but Sunday. In 1905, a cable was laid to the island, and some of the stores installed telephones—a brief novelty, as the cable rapidly corroded in the bay’s salt water. Electricity reached the stores first, too, in the form of generator-powered lights, though elsewhere the kerosene lamp ruled the night. Tangier became an official town, lost the designation, then got it again. And in the new century’s first decade came the biggest advancement of all: the outboard motor.
The gasoline engine transformed crabbing. Watermen could now harvest several places in the course of a day and run multiple trotlines—the predominant technology of the time, consisting of cotton string, hundreds of feet long, held in place with buoys at each end and baited every few feet with fish, chicken, or bull lips. Crabs would grab the bait and hold on even as they were lifted from the water and shaken into a net. The new motors did much for safety on the water, too, for no longer were crabbers dependent on the winds to outrun a looming storm. Not least, they could deliver their catches to Crisfield within hours of landing them. And so Tangier continued to grow. By 1913, the island’s population stood at 1,262, of whom 777 lived on the Main Ridge, 216 on the West, 107 in Oyster Creek, 104 on Uppards, and 58 in Canton.
The Army Corps of Engineers estimated that the island deployed about a thousand small boats. That underscored the pathetic state of Tangier’s waterfront, which offered no protected dockage: The only deep water was in Steamboat Harbor, a long walk from anywhere and well shy of the space such a fleet demanded. The logical place for a harbor, the creek bordering Meat Soup, was only two feet deep at low water—too shallow for the typical workboat—and lacked a channel out to the sound.
During World War I, the Corps of Engineers judged the situation worthy of a fix. Its boats dredged a turning basin four hundred feet square off the north end of Main Street, then connected the basin to Tangier Sound with a navigation channel—five feet deep, fifty feet wide, and a mile long—that threaded the narrow gap between Uppards and the P’int. “This improvement has made navigation more dependable,” the corps reported, “as vessels no longer have to await favorable tides to enter or leave Tangier Harbor.”
The island quickly reoriented itself to the new harbor. Docks sprouted from its edge. Meat Soup, until then largely residential, became the business district. One of the new establishments there was owned by Carol Moore’s great-grandfather, who’d operated a store at Canaan for years. He opened a new place just off the main drag offering both groceries and general merchandise, including shoes.
The population kept growing, and its density as well. Perhaps it was the bustle of the ridges on Tangier proper, their air of close community, that fueled a keener sense of isolation in the outer hamlets and a desire to relocate, for in the ten years following World War I, those smaller settlements dwindled. Canaan, already beset by advancing seas, emptied altogether by 1929, its people dismantling their houses and businesses and barging them to the mainland or down to the central town. A good many houses from Canaan survive today, in varying states of repair, on the Main Ridge. Ooker was born in a house floated down from the tiny Uppards outpost of Persimmon Ridge.
Then, not long after the transplants settled in, came the storm of ’33.
ALTHOUGH QUICK-HITTING SQUALLS can imperil life and limb, they rarely land more than a glancing blow on the island itself. It is big weather systems, laying siege for days, that pulverize the shoreline, scatter crab pots, and push the bay into streets and homes. Every year brings northeasters, almost without fail, and the fact that they’re forecasted days ahead of time does little to soften their effects. One, in April 1889, arrived as a gale that pushed water into the streets and up into buildings and kept shoving until the first floor of every home was underwater. It did not relent for forty-eight hours. Within the recollections of living Tangiermen are a few storms that nearly equaled that 1889 maelstrom. The great Ash Wednesday storm of March 1962 flooded scores of houses. A March 1984 northeaster put most of the island under a foot of water. Back-to-back storms in February 1998 created near-record tides.
But it’s hurricanes that have earned the greatest fear among islanders, for the topography of their homeplace girds it little against a sustained assault from shredding winds and surging water. The nearly two hundred years since the Great September Gust have been punctuated by blows and grazings from many tropical cyclones, some of them milestones around which islanders organize their memories—weddings and births that occurred before or after, loved ones lost, homes built.
August 1879 brought a hurricane remembered as the Great Tempest, which whipped up storm surges throughout the Chesapeake. An unnamed cyclone in September 1936 put the island underwater, and tides swelled again with the Great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944. Ten years after that, Hazel brought some of the highest winds ever recorded in the bay. “Hazel, that was 105 mile,” Jack Thorn
e told me in a conversation at his Hog Ridge home. “You talk about wind. But I was in Crisfield—it caught me in Crisfield. I was potting for crabs, and when I went in to sell my catch, the wind came up and I couldn’t get back out to come home.”
In August 1955, Connie dealt the island a glancing swipe, and in September 1960, Donna brought preposterous rain. Agnes, in 1972, nearly drowned the place. And in 1999, Floyd seemed poised to deal the island a fatal punch. “The tide came up higher than it had been in years and years, higher than anyone had seen it,” recalled Duane Crockett, who was twenty-one at the time. “It covered the island, and it kept coming up higher and higher and we heard that it was going to keep rising for another two or three hours. And we were all thinking, ‘How can it get worse than this? How can we go through this for two or three more hours, with the water getting higher all the time?’
“And right then, the storm changed direction, and the tide stopped rising,” Duane said, his voice cracking. “The Lord tells the water how far it can go.”
Actually, Floyd did not change direction: It crossed the bay near its southern end, on a straight northeast course that took it from Tangier’s west side—where the island was exposed to its fiercest winds, given a hurricane’s counterclockwise rotation—to its east. But a belief in heavenly intercession is common on Tangier, and has been since Joshua Thomas’s day. How else to explain its survival through so many disasters that, had God not interfered, would have finished the place?
“I think of this little island often in the fact of all the storms that have come,” then mayor Dewey Crockett told me during my stay in 2000. “Many you’ll hear say, ‘You couldn’t be a waterman and not believe the Word of God.’ You look at the many, many times that life has been spared because of the rough waters.” We were talking at the school, where the six-foot-six Crockett served as assistant principal, and at this point he leaned back in his chair and opened his hands. “I feel,” he said, “and maybe this is just being prejudiced, but I feel there has been a special anointing that has been put upon Tangier because of their strong religious stand and their strong belief in prayer. We’re a blessed people.”
