by Earl Swift
Iris Pruitt, at eighty-eight the most senior member of the New Testament congregation, sounded a similar theme when I sat with her on her sunporch in Meat Soup. “I’ve often wondered about it myself,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “Why would he protect us? He has a purpose, I guess, in protecting us.” Her theory: “There’s a lot of dedicated Christians here, and with the support we give to missionaries, probably the Lord thinks about that.”
Be that as it may, the rising bay has steadily claimed the sandbars and marsh that once shielded Tangier from wind and tide, leaving the island wide open to weather from every point on the compass. In August 2006, tropical storm Ernesto exploited that vulnerability with high winds, heavy rains, and a storm surge that rolled through town. October 2012 brought Sandy, which pounded the island for more than two days, and swelled the bay so high that it covered the airstrip and lapped against the back doors of houses at Canton, the island’s highest ridge. Inundation elsewhere was almost complete—the Heistin’ Bridge was the only piece of road that wasn’t covered.
Carol Moore’s late father had left her his crab shanty, which stood on the north bank of the boat channel, its back to Uppards. “A few weeks before [Sandy], something told me, ‘You need to go get your dad’s glasses and his hat,’ which he’d left in the crab house and I’d left just as they were,” she said. She retrieved them. The morning after the storm, she and Lonnie walked up to the Parks Marina, at the north end of Meat Soup, to check on the shanty. “We wore boots, and in places we had to wade,” she said. “I didn’t want to look. I asked, ‘Lonnie, is it there?’ He just shook his head. It had washed away in the night.” It was later the same day that she came upon the open graves at Canaan.
Damaging though Sandy was, it was minor next to Hurricane Isabel in September 2003. That storm churned twenty-foot seas and pushed a wall of water up the creek and into the harbor, shredding much of the island’s industrial infrastructure. Of Tangier’s eighty-five crabbing shanties, thirty-four were destroyed or heavily damaged, and because they were built over water they weren’t covered by federal flood insurance. Isabel swept away shedding tanks, the big electric coolers that preserved the peeler catch, and crab pots by the thousands.
Islanders and outsiders alike wondered whether Tangier could shake off the injury. Watermen who faced the greatest rebuilding costs were unable to work during the last month of the season—and for many, if not most, losing a month’s wages was unsustainable even without repair bills. Economic implosion loomed. Indeed, some crabbers gave up after Isabel and found work on tugboats and dredges.
In all the fuss over the damage to crabbing, it was easy to overlook flooding on the island itself, which damaged ninety-nine houses. All in all, Isabel was about as bad a storm as the island could survive today, in part because the economy is fragile in the best of times, but also because much of its private property is underinsured. In a marginally higher flood, Accomack County officials later reckoned, the island could see $4 million in residential losses. Only about $500,000 of that amount would be covered.
ALMOST AS SOON AS Isabel’s winds had calmed, the hurricane was being compared with the benchmark storm of Tangier’s long history—the worst, by general acclamation, to strike the Chesapeake region in modern times. It made landfall on August 23, 1933, in North Carolina’s Outer Banks, passed directly over Norfolk—where it pushed tides nearly ten feet above normal and swamped the city’s downtown under five feet of water—then trundled north over the western shore.
The track put Tangier on the cyclone’s eastern side, where it was ravaged by eighty-mile-an-hour winds. At the storm’s height, Meat Soup was part of the bay, with breakers rolling down Main Street and storm surge overwhelming the entire island. The flood ruined everything in the big store owned by Carol Moore’s great-grandfather, forcing him out of business. “It covered every home but the parsonage,” said Jack Thorne, who was about to turn nine and lived next door to the pastor. “Every home on the island. I’d say at least from the ground it would be that high”—he held his hand thirty inches off the floor, or about the height of a kitchen counter—“in the house.”
Ginny Thorne Marshall, Jack’s sister and three years younger, recalled “men going down the street in little boats.” The high water tore loose a big, masted fishing vessel, sixty or seventy feet long, and carried it over the shore and into Main Street, and when the flood receded it stranded the Marian Sue in front of what’s now Daley & Son. “You talk about a strange sight,” Jack said. Two other large boats, fifty feet long or better, were carried overland, too. One of them, belonging to Jack’s uncle, “went right over Uppards almost all the way to Canaan, right over that marsh.”
Folks on the mainland knew the storm was coming, and those on vulnerable ground had time to get out of the way. But Tangier failed to get the word, and most of its watermen were out in their boats. Ooker’s father, Will, twenty-two at the time, was among them, and after riding out the worst of it north of the island, he came home to a scene of widespread devastation. “There was only two boats afloat when we come in the harbor,” he told me in 2000. “There was a bleak-looking time.”
That it was. And the outlook after such storms also tended to be bleak, for the hand they laid on the shoreline was hard. Any Tangier-man could see that his island was getting smaller, but after a hurricane, the changes seemed dramatic. Many islanders left after the storm of ’33. From that point on, Tangier’s population fell steadily.
Consider that in 1930, when Jack Thorne turned six, the census stood at 1,120. By the time he turned sixteen, he had at least 100 fewer neighbors. In his midtwenties, the count was down by 105 more. Twenty years later, another 101 were gone. In 1990, when Jack was sixty-six, the population had dwindled by an additional 155, to 659.
At the millennium it stood at 604.
More than one in five Tangiermen have died or moved away since.
Lonnie Moore prowls for hard crabs in Pocomoke Sound with Isaiah McCready and Cameron Evans, June 2016. (EARL SWIFT)
Eleven
HOURS BEFORE DAYBREAK I’M ABOARD LONNIE MOORE’S thirty-two-foot deadrise, Alona Rahab, headed out of the shanty-lined channel into Tangier Sound. A hard rain is falling, and its drops catch fire in the beam of a powerful spotlight on the cabin’s roof. Beyond them, all is black: Clouds smother the moon, and at 3:50 A.M. the few lights burning onshore hide behind a heavy curtain of mist. The way ahead is an impenetrable blank. Undaunted by the heavy chop, Lonnie opens the throttle, the diesel roars, the bow rises high, and we shoot bucking and thumping into the wind and confused water beyond the P’int.
We’re bound for Lonnie’s hard crab pots, 425 of them strung in three-mile rows off the Eastern Shore, the nearest about ten miles from home. With us are Isaiah McCready and Cameron Evans, two rising high school juniors beginning their ninth day as Lonnie’s crew. Still adjusting to the early hours, Isaiah dozes in a small berth shoehorned into the boat’s forepeak. A yawning Cameron and I struggle to keep our feet on the cabin’s rolling, shuddering deck.
Lonnie is hunched in his chair behind the wheel, eyes locked on radar, GPS, and depth finder, rocking with the hard thumps that accompany our collisions with water churned by wind blowing the other way. We’re taking it “right in the painter holes,” as Tangiermen say, but rather than slow down, he brings our speed up to nineteen knots. The boat’s short nose plows into a wave, and a thick tongue of water arcs over the windows and the spotlight, filling the cabin with a weird blue-green light.
“Ride ’em, cowboy!” Lonnie shouts over the diesel’s noisy throb. “We got a little wind out here. The forecast was for less than ten knots out of the south, but it’s blowing harder than that.” We hit a wave, and I feel my spine compress. “About twenty, it feels like to me,” Lonnie says, peering through the glass. “We got flood tide and we still got whitecaps, so about twenty, I’d say.” Translation: The southerly wind is blowing with the tide, rather than against it, and still the sound is foaming.
The boat dives into a wave, and another huge scoop of water sweeps over the cabin. On the GPS I see that we’re rounding the southern tip of Watts Island. We rattle and thud east into Pocomoke Sound’s middle, then turn due south. Up ahead, a channel marker’s red light flashes weakly through the rain. Lonnie adjusts his radar to zoom in on our location and, at 4:25 A.M., cuts the engine. Isaiah crawls blinking from the berth. We’re three miles west–southwest of the entrance to Onancock Creek. So say the instruments. The Eastern Shore is invisible, as is everything else beyond the cabin’s fogged windows.
“Get your sea legs, boys,” the captain tells his crew. “It’s rockin’ and rollin’.” Indeed, heavy swells are moving beneath us, tilting the boat fifteen degrees one way, then the other. He flips a switch and three spotlights bathe the rear deck with stark white light. With each roll, water slaps the boat’s sides and geysers up past the gunwales. “Think I should wear my coat?” Cameron asks.
Lonnie squints at the pelting rain visible in the spotlights, the water sloshing up the boat’s sides. “Up to you,” he says. “You’ll definitely be getting some spray. That’s for sure.” He slips his oilskins over his shoes, hoists them up over his pants legs, untangles the shoulder straps. “I’m going to start out without mine,” he says. “I’d rather be wet from the salt than wet from sweat.” Cameron nods his agreement. Suited up, the three step from the humid cabin to the windswept, pitching deck. A sunshade over most of the boat’s work area offers little protection from rain blowing sideways. Lonnie strides to the rear steering station, Cameron takes up position just astern of him, and Isaiah organizes bushel baskets in the deck’s middle. Then, wordlessly—which is the way Captain Alonza J. Moore III prefers to work—they launch into a complex but fluid choreography.
Step one: Lonnie works the engine and transmission to bring the boat alongside a buoy. He drops the engine to idle, hooks the float out of the water, and loops the line through a motorized puller, which he activates with a pedal. Wheels spin, the device whines, and in two seconds, maybe three, fifty feet of line piles up next to Cameron and the pot breaks the surface. Lonnie lifts it aboard, sets it upside down on the gunwale, and unlatches the bait hatch on its bottom.
Step two: As Lonnie engages the transmission and the boat eases forward, Cameron seizes the pot, flips it over, releases its bungee closure, and shakes the catch into a galvanized metal tub on deck. He then closes the pot, flips it back upside down, grabs a couple of menhaden from a cardboard box at the stern, and stuffs the fish into the wire cylinder that forms the pot’s bait box. He re-latches the hatch and tosses the pot overboard, throwing the piled line and buoy after it.
Step three: While Lonnie snags the next pot, Isaiah culls the catch, plucking crabs from the tub and tossing each into the appropriate bushel basket. He has to move fast, as Lonnie has refined this routine to a lean efficiency, and the time between pots averages little more than a minute. With that in mind, tenacious crabs that cling to the wire mesh are left in the pots—the Alona Rahab’s crew will get them tomorrow—and Lonnie has custom-fitted the boat with features that streamline his movements: After threading the line into the puller, for instance, he slips his hook into two homemade brackets, where it waits for the next pot. Its placement is so ergonomically natural that he can grab it without looking.
Likewise, he uses a steering stick in place of a wheel because it’s faster. Pushing it forward turns the boat right, and pulling it, left. He rarely has to give it more than a tap, an economy that saves seconds per pot. Working the stick, the transmission, and the pedal has become so intuitive, he says, that if he thought about what he was doing, he wouldn’t be able to do it.
We work south along the row, the visible world defined by the spotlights: water deep green and fizzing, slapping loudly against the boat’s sides; the tossing deck turning slick with mud, red moss, bits of crab, and rain, which is slanting aboard on the gusting wind; and flashes of white as gulls stalking us for handouts cross the field of light. A pot comes aboard with fifteen crabs crowded inside. “Look at that!” Lonnie hollers.
But it’s an anomaly. Most of the pots bring just one or two crabs. As the sky brightens to a steely gray, Lonnie brings the hundredth pot aboard. “A quarter down,” he says, and nods toward the catch so far: two bushels of clean sooks, nearly a bushel of lemons, and half bushels of number ones and twos, along with a few peelers he’ll sell to Ooker. “Not too good.”
“It’s the moss,” he tells me. “When you have a lot of moss, you don’t get any crabs.” Many of the pots are choked with the algae, which here seems blonder than the variety Ooker’s found in the waters just off Tangier. If Lonnie were a peeler potter, a little of it might work in his favor—a crab about to molt is seeking sanctuary, after all, and the growth makes a dark cave of a wire pot. Hard crabs steer clear, however. “Yesterday there was no moss here. We caught a lot of crabs,” Lonnie says. “But it was so bad a couple weeks ago I had to bring a power washer and clean the pots as I went. Couldn’t even see into the pots.”
We’ve worked our way three miles down the Eastern Shore, which in the predawn, rain-shrouded gloom is taking shape as a dark, uneven line to our east. Normally, Lonnie would head that way to the southern end of his next row, off the mouth of Pungoteague Creek, and follow it back to the north. But now, as we idle broadside to the waves, the air on deck pungent with brine, old crab, and diesel exhaust, he decides to change tactics. We’ll speed up to the north end of the rows, away (he hopes) from all this moss, then work our way back down, nose to the wind. We return to the cabin. Lonnie opens the throttle.
THE ECONOMICS OF HARD POTTING leave little room for a poor day’s catch. Compared with a peeler potter, Lonnie Moore has a lot of overhead to cover before he breaks even: He deploys more than twice as many pots, which are fashioned from heavier wire than those for catching peelers and more expensive. Because he plants them in deeper water farther from shore, those pots require a lot more line—which boosts their cost considerably—and he loses more of them to storms and boat traffic. His fuel costs are steeper, for while Ooker’s farthest-flung pot is rarely more than five miles from his shanty, Lonnie’s closest is twice that distance from home. He has to buy bait, which isn’t cheap at two fish per pot, or 850 a day. He must pay his teenage crew $70 per boy per day, or a total out of pocket of $840 per six-day week.
In sum, he must catch $400 of crab on the average summer day before he actually earns his first penny. Early in the season and again in the fall, that daily break-even point rises to $500, because the boys are in school and he has to take on an adult crew, and because the razor clams favored as bait in cooler months are more expensive.
This is not, in other words, an undertaking for the weak of heart. It requires him to charge hard every day, weather be damned, and fatigue and sickness, too. It demands his complete commitment to minimizing costs and maximizing his catch. And regardless of how lean his operation or how good his luck, his success largely rides on the decisions of others, for like every crabber on Tangier he has no say in the price his crabs will bring. With the season now well under way and crabs plentiful, the crab houses are paying far less than they did six weeks ago: Number ones have dropped from $100 a bushel to $65, number twos and clean sooks from $50 to half that much, and lemons from $20 to $16.
Which makes Lonnie’s choice to follow the water all the more remarkable, because for more than half of his working life, he was on the payroll of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, first as a boat captain, then as boss over all the foundation’s island programs, and later as the commander of its fleet. He chose to leave that job—and the security of a paycheck, retirement account, and predictable hours—to return to working the water after almost twenty-five years away.
Unlike most Tangier crabbers, Lonnie didn’t follow his father into crabbing. He was born in November 1954 to Edna Sears—the daughter of the island’s first and best-known innkeeper, Hilda Crockett—and A. J. “Junior” Moore, a World War II
veteran who worked for the island’s electric utility and served many years as postmaster. Lonnie also pursued land-based employment, at least at first. He worked construction for a while, then built boats with Jerry Frank Pruitt. But three years after quitting school in the eleventh grade, he was drawn to the independence and money that crabbing promised. He crewed for others for two years, then had Jerry Frank build him a forty-two-foot box-stern deadrise that he named This’ll Do, after a beach cottage his grandfather had kept when Lonnie was a boy.
Jerry Frank charged him about $8,000 for the boat. Fully outfitted, his rig cost about $21,000, he says, “and you could go to the bank and get a loan to pay for every penny of it.” It didn’t seem a bargain at the time, but nowadays it would cost six times as much, easy, and because the uncertainties of working the water have made lenders skittish, most or all of it would have to be cash.
In 1986, after potting for ten years in This’ll Do, Lonnie had a much bigger boat built—forty-seven feet long and fourteen abeam—designed to withstand the harsh conditions of winters at sea. He named it for Carol, whom he’d married in 1981, and their daughter, Loni Renee, born the following year. The Loni Carol proved a fortuitous upgrade four years later, when Lonnie got his captain’s license and Coast Guard certification to carry passengers, and he went to work for CBF as the captain of its Port Isobel facility on the P’int. The boat was big and seaworthy enough to carry a classroom of kids on educational outings.
