Chesapeake Requiem

by Earl Swift

  With its youngsters departing and its numbers unreplenished by a steady supply of newcomers, Tangier faces a danger unique to island communities. Because it’s marooned from other population centers and the services they offer, its viability hinges on the health of a few key enterprises, without which daily life would become taxing, if not impossible. Each operation relies on a critical mass of patronage to remain solvent—in other words, each has a tipping point. And as the population falls, their tipping points draw nearer.

  The first such outfit is Daley & Son. In 1986, JoAnne and Terry Daley Sr. became the fourth owners of the store, the island’s sole source of packaged food, fresh produce and meats, and over-the-counter medicines. The grocery’s three long, narrow aisles are heavy on canned and boxed goods, as you might expect. Medicines dominate one wall. Lining the other are coolers and freezers offering everything from frozen pizza to hummus. At the store’s rear, produce is displayed in bushel baskets and meats behind a glass counter that dates to the mid-twentieth century.

  The shelves are replenished every Thursday, when the Daleys haul eight to eleven thousand pounds of consumables from the mainland aboard their forty-five-foot deadrise, the Working Dog. “We try to stock all the basics,” JoAnne told me one afternoon at her home in King Street. Twenty-eight or more cases of milk per week. Ninety dozen eggs. A mountain of bread, mostly white. Drinking water in half liters, liters, and gallons, and distilled water for golf cart batteries.

  Her son, Terry Jr., worked at the store in his teens, then followed the water until his father’s death in 2013 brought him back. JoAnne has since ceded the store’s day-to-day operation over to Terry Jr. and his son, Lance. Not all of their top-selling fare is endorsed by the American Medical Association. The store sells a year-round average of fifty to sixty cartons of cigarettes per week (Marlboro Reds are the most popular) and up to eighty cartons a week in midsummer. The store also goes through twenty to fifty cases of potato chips a week, twelve bags to the case. Cookies, crackers, and candy by the bag and bar. A lot of cake mix. Enough chocolate syrup to float a skiff. And so much soda in the summer that the Working Dog makes special runs a couple of times a month. On each, it carries five to six hundred cases, which supplies the store, the island’s restaurants, and six outdoor soda machines that Terry Jr. owns. On a dry island, sugar rules.

  All of this could be had on the mainland. Walmart Supercenters stand a few minutes’ drive from both Crisfield and Onancock, and the Maryland port has a well-appointed Food Lion. From a distance, it might appear Tangier could survive if Daley & Son were to fail. But island life would be a logistical nightmare. Trips to the mainland are expensive and time-consuming and beyond the ability of many elderly islanders.

  And those mainland stores don’t allow their patrons to run a tab, or “tick.” Three out of four Daley customers do, and given the hit-and-miss nature of a waterman’s pay, it’s more than a convenience. “I have some customers pay every two weeks and some by the month,” JoAnne said. “I try to give them a break in the winter, and they’ll be able to pay their bills over the summer. Most of them do it.”

  When I asked JoAnne whether she could envision a time when the population could no longer support the store, she told me that yes, sadly, she could. “It will probably come down to it,” she said. “But it’ll probably be on my son and grandson, on them two, more than it will be me.”

  I raised the subject with the men. “We might not be doing as good now as we did a few years ago,” Lance allowed. “We’ve lost a lot of good customers, people who’ve passed away.”

  I asked if he worried about it. “Not really,” he said. He paused, then changed his mind: “Well, I guess we do.”

  ANOTHER MUST-HAVE ENTERPRISE is the mailboat, which has operated so reliably, for so long, that it could be mistaken for a government service. Actually, it’s a family business—Joshua Thomas’s descendants have carried the mail, passengers, and freight between Tangier and Crisfield since the turn of the twentieth century. Captain John W. Thomas, Joshua’s great-grandson, started the service and ran it until his death in 1934. His son, Captain Eulice H. Thomas, spent sixty-some years as a skipper. He eventually turned over the helm to his son, Rudy A. Thomas Sr., who expanded the family business to include tour boats operating out of Crisfield and Reedville.

  Rudy Jr., born in 1956, started making the Crisfield run for his father before he was old enough to drive. When he married Beth Parks in 1978, the company charged its passengers ten dollars each way or twelve dollars per same-day round-trip. Rudy was always reluctant to raise it, even as the population—and thus the company’s pool of customers—dropped by more than one hundred during the 1980s and kept falling. “Once [the fare] hit twenty dollars,” Beth said, “and the cost of fuel continued to go up, I’d say, ‘We need to raise it,’ and he always said, ‘No. Twenty dollars is plenty enough to go to Crisfield.’”

  Rudy Jr. was able to hold firm because the shrinkage in his customer base was at least partly offset by an uptick in trips per islander. Thirty years ago, a run to Crisfield was a special occasion. Today, scores of Tangiermen keep cars there, and commutes to college, tug-boating jobs, and medical specialists are routine. It helped, too, that passenger fares composed only part of the boat’s income. The company contracts with the U.S. Postal Service to carry the mail and with FedEx and UPS to deliver packages. The Courtney Thomas also carries the bulk of the island’s general freight, from boxes of soft-shell crabs to building supplies. “We carry pretty much everything,” Beth said. “All the Sysco products for the restaurants. Stuff from the hardware stores. We carry dead bodies—and we don’t charge anything for dead bodies. That’s an order from generations back. Rudy said he heard that from his grandfather: ‘We don’t charge anybody for their last journey home.’”

  But a diversified income stream only slows the inevitable. Trips to the doctor stop when the patient makes that last free journey. Fewer islanders produce less freight. And overhead is high. The Courtney Thomas, built in Louisiana in 1989 to carry crews to offshore drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, is a confident craft that can shoulder a heavy payload in all but the fiercest weather, but its diesels drink a lot of fuel.

  And there are no painless means to boost income or tighten spending. Raising fares would likely suppress ridership, and switching to a smaller boat would save money but slash capacity, especially for freight. In 2011, three years before his death at age fifty-seven, Rudy Jr. told an interviewer, “Sometimes I wonder if this is where it’s all going to end. I don’t know how much longer we’re going to be able to sustain things around here.”

  Were the boat to stop running, Mark Haynie, who already makes round-trips to Crisfield seven days a week throughout the year, could assume some of the burden in the Sharon Kay III. But that vessel is far smaller than the mailboat, with limited room for cargo—and many older islanders are uneasy about winter crossings in anything smaller than the Courtney Thomas. Without the vital link it provides to the greater world, the island would become an even tinier place.

  “I guess if we sat and thought about it too much, we’d all get out of heart,” Beth said. “But the proof’s in the pudding. There are a lot of senior citizens, and we don’t have a lot of young families having children.”

  THEN THERE’S THE BIG ONE. Of all the disasters that might befall the island, nothing but a killer hurricane would bring the end as surely and quickly as the demise of Tangier Combined School. Not one of the island parents I’ve talked with would allow their children to boat across unpredictable Tangier and Pocomoke sounds twice a day to attend classes on the mainland. “You’d see people leaving like rats off a sinking ship,” Cindy Parks told me. “They’d say, ‘I’m not putting my kids on that.’”

  Islanders have watched with growing angst as the school’s enrollment has fallen. When Nina Pruitt graduated in 1980, the student body numbered about 120. As of the start of the 2016–17 academic year, it stood at 67. By the 2018–19 school year, it’s projec
ted to drop to 54 and to 53 the year after. It’s expected to rebound slightly in 2020–21, to 58, but that promises to be only a temporary reprieve. Babies are in short supply.

  Rhonda Hall, Accomack’s assistant superintendent for instruction, told me that the numbers aren’t an immediate cause for worry. “I don’t think that the board has gotten to that point where they say, ‘Okay, if the student body falls below fifty, or whatever, we’re going to close the school,’” she said. “I’ve been here as an assistant superintendent since 2005. It’s never been suggested that Tangier is becoming too expensive to run.”

  Instead, the district has addressed the decline by combining six elementary grades into three classrooms and relying on computer streaming for foreign-language courses and other specialized instruction. It’s also decided that some capital improvements aren’t likely to happen: “What will come up is something like, for instance, a playground,” Hall said. “We’ll talk about how much sense it would make to build a full-blown playground there for so few children.

  “It’s a struggle. But we’ve gotten it down to a science now.”

  Even if enrollment slips considerably, former principal Denny Crockett figures that Tangier Combined will remain safe. “When you look at what you’d have to do to replace the school, it would be at least as expensive,” he said. “You’d have to have a boat just for that, with a licensed captain and a licensed mate.” The cost would be a minor hurdle next to the journey itself. Students on Maryland’s Smith Island are boated to mainland schools from eighth grade up, but their commute is half the distance of that from Tangier to Onancock and across comparatively protected water. The sixteen-mile crossing for Tangier youngsters would take an hour or more, assuming the waters were smooth—which is hardly a safe assumption. “If you have an exam,” Denny said, “and you have to go over to take that exam and it’s blowing twenty-five miles per hour and you get seasick on the way over—well, educationally, it wouldn’t be very conducive. So I think Accomack County is stuck with us.”

  But islanders do have one cause for concern, and it isn’t the number of students in the school. It’s their teachers. “The average age is older than dirt,” as Nina put it. Some are in poor physical shape. It’s likely that a couple will retire in the near future and conceivable that two or three others might, too. “[And] with the dwindling population,” Nina told me, “teachers who retire won’t be replaced.”

  Hall pointed out that Nina could retire herself. “She could retire at any time, and she has five or six teachers who could retire right now. They could go at any time.

  “It isn’t really when the number of students starts declining that causes a problem,” she said. “But if we had a lot of teachers retire at one time, that would be a problem.”

  For Tangier, it could be existential. Close the school, and the households with children would relocate—and considering that all but a few children live in two-parent homes, we’re talking a third of the population. They’d waste no time about it. The other essential enterprises would implode. And as it did at Holland Island a century ago, wholesale abandonment would loom large.

  ON A FRIDAY IN MID-AUGUST, word reaches the Situation Room that Cook Cannon has just fallen out of a tree and broken both of his feet.

  “That didn’t hurt none,” Ernest Ed Parks observes.

  “All he can do is crawl?” Leon asks.

  Lonnie arrives with details. He understands that Cook broke a toe on one foot and at least three bones in the other. And he didn’t fall from a tree; he lost his balance while standing on a pile of brush at the P’int and fell with his feet locked in a tangle of branches. We all wince. I wonder who will pull the air conditioner from the window once the weather cools.

  The conversation turns, as it has in several sessions over the past month, to the presidential campaign. Most members of the group have been die-hard supporters of Donald Trump since he announced his candidacy, and the reasons for that go beyond party affiliation or his stands on abortion, same-sex marriage, and immigration: Tangiermen reckon that he’d cut through the government red tape that has kept the island’s salvation on hold. That he’d put a stop to incessant corps studies and spur the agency to action. That he’d force Congress to find the money. That he’d recognize Tangier as a town imbued with patriotism, reverence, a strong work ethic, old-fashioned values—traits they deem central to his “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan—and thus worth preserving. That he’d use his experience in business and as a builder to get things done.

  But today there is a naysayer in their midst. Long before Trump became the preemptive Republican nominee, Lonnie was forecasting his defeat, famously predicting: “A couple of months from now, people will be asking, ‘Trump who?’” Ooker memorialized the remark by writing “Trump who?” in ballpoint on the wall near the coffee maker.

  Now Lonnie announces that voting for Trump or Hillary Clinton is equally wasteful. “They’re the same person,” he tells us. “They’re exactly the same. You vote for one, it’s the same as voting for the other.”

  “I’m like you—I don’t think either of them is worth nothin’,” Hoot Pruitt replies, rubbing his hemispherical belly. “I ain’t of very good heart, but I’ll vote for Trump before I’ll vote for her.”

  “You’re wasting your vote,” Lonnie shoots back.

  As a group, the others in the room tell him he’s wrong. Lonnie attempts to keep the back-and-forth going, but no one bites. When it’s obvious debate has ended, Bruce Gordy leans forward in his chair. “Do you think there will be another generation of watermen from Tangier?” he asks. A long silence commences.

  “I guess I want to be optimistic,” Lonnie finally says, choosing his words slowly, “and say you’re going to have a few. It might not be an actual generation, but there’d be a few.”

  Bruce: “How many, you think?”

  “I don’t know,” Lonnie says. “Three, four. Maybe five.” After several wordless seconds he continues: “You hear that if they lifted the restrictions, there’d be more boys going on the water, but I don’t think that’s true.” He looks around the room. He is broaching a subject far closer to Tangier hearts than the upcoming election. “There are lots of licenses for sale,” he says. “If boys wanted to go on the water, they could do it right now. But you don’t see anybody buying them.”

  The group sits in silence for another long moment. He gets no argument.

  Homebound Tangiermen study their cell phones aboard Mark Haynie’s Sharon Kay III, November 2016. (EARL SWIFT)

  Fifteen

  WHEN I FIRST SAT THROUGH SUNDAY MORNING SERVICES at Swain Memorial, in 2000, the pastor was a big-bellied, suspender-clad fellow named L. Wade Creedle Jr., born and raised in the tobacco country below Richmond. He was in his ninth year on the island, and his prayers and sermons were simple, straightforward, and fine-tuned to the concerns of his congregation. He talked about how crabbers were faring and about storms, rough seas, and money troubles. More important, he had the good sense to share his pulpit with the Tangier-born Dewey Crockett, who stood a head taller than the pastor and who had a soothing baritone and folksy delivery reminiscent of Garrison Keillor, had Keillor grown up talking backward. Dewey’s presence was welcoming, reassuring; sharp of mind but gentle in spirit, he led with a kindly chuckle, a hand on the shoulder, an “Amen, brother.”

  The church around me was packed, and these Methodists, many of them obviously unschooled, rose from the pews to deliver prayers deeply informed by scriptural study. The pastor’s wife, Nancy, banged out foot-stomping nineteenth-century hymns on the keyboards, and everyone sang so that the high-ceilinged sanctuary filled with sound. And I, no follower of organized religion, found myself thinking, “So this is why people go to church.”

  But nowhere is Tangier’s decline in population more apparent than in its churches. By early in the new century, Swain Memorial’s big Sunday morning service rarely drew more than two hundred to a sanctuary built to seat three times that numbe
r. And Swain’s situation was happy compared with the scene down the road at New Testament. The congregation there had seen its old originals fall away, and while their children had largely stayed true to the breakaway flock, they were getting up in years themselves. The third generation of “Holy Rollers,” as everyone called them, wasn’t nearly as large. “We had got to the point that on a Sunday morning we’d maybe have thirty,” said John Wesley Charnock, who grew up attending New Testament. “On a Sunday night we’d have only fifteen or twenty.” Some prayer meetings drew only six or seven. The day was coming, it seemed, when Tangier might again host just one congregation.

  Then two once-unthinkable events occurred. First, in the summer of 2009, the Methodist Church got a female preacher.

  Patricia Stover was a native of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and kin to farmers and preachers—both of her grandfathers led churches, and Stover felt herself drawn to the pulpit from childhood. “I was always talking to Jesus,” she told me. “He was kind of my invisible playmate.” She resisted the call. After earning degrees in biology and history at James Madison University, she married, gave birth to a son and a daughter, divorced, and worked a succession of jobs—as a biochemist, grants manager, state functionary—while “wrestling with the Lord something awful,” as she put it. Finally, nearing fifty, “I surrendered and said, ‘Okay, I’ll do what you want me to do.’”