Chesapeake Requiem

by Earl Swift

  “Working on the water, you need to have somebody who can handle what you bring home. You can be making good money one month and the next month wondering what you’re going to do.” He kept the Valerie Faith for fifteen-plus years, then went to work for his uncle, Charles “Puge” Charnock, selling bait to the island’s crabbers. After a half-dozen years there, the town sent him to a police academy in Hampton Roads.

  We pass a small child standing at the roadside in Black Dye, studying us through folding opera glasses. Another piece of the balancing act: Just about everyone in town has an opinion of how you might better do your duty. John’s as quiet as his brother Ed and bears such talk with a bemused stoicism. He shrugs as we pass again through Meat Soup. “They allow me to use discretion,” he says of the council, “to do things the way I think it should be done.”

  We come to a stop. My bike, which I’d left leaning against the chain-link fence ringing the parsonage, isn’t there. “My bike’s gone,” I tell John.

  “You sure you left it here?” he asks. I reply that I’m quite sure. “Okay, let’s go look for it,” he says.

  We begin another slow circuit of the town, he peering off to the left, I to the right. We crawl down the West Ridge, John pointing out bikes parked in yards along the way. “That it? How about that one?” Then, as we negotiate the jog onto Hog Ridge, there it is, leaning against a fence near the Sunset Inn.

  Tangier’s cross-adorned water tower looms over the school on a misty December morning. (EARL SWIFT)

  Nineteen

  IN MID-SEPTEMBER OOKER HAS RIGGED THE SREEDEVI FOR scraping, as he does for two or three weeks every year. One morning, after we motor past Uppards’s eastern flank to the few remaining dots of marsh in the shallows below Smith Island, he cuts the engine. We float beside Long Tump, a grassy shelf that no longer lives up to its name; fifty yards long at most, it barely clears the tide. It is quiet here, empty of traffic save for Leon and Short Ed Parks scraping a quarter mile to our north, their boats gleaming bright against the low, ragged green of Smith’s coastline.

  The weather has cooled over the past few days on the back of an easterly breeze. Gone is the drenching humidity and brutal heat of the Labor Day weekend, when Ooker was moved to erect a giant rainbow-striped beach umbrella over his steering console. The morning could not be more pleasant. But when Ooker hauls the scrape up and dumps its contents, he finds just three doublers in a tangle of eelgrass. “Before the cold snap, I was getting fourteen, fifteen doublers a lick,” he tells me. “That’s the trouble with the snaps. They feel nice, but they’re no good for the crabs. A shedder wanting a cold snap is like a farmer wanting a drought.”

  These are the closing days of the scraping season. As a rule, the shallower the water, the quicker its temperature will shift with changes in the weather, and the sooner crabs will respond. The animals like heat, so scrapers working the shallows are always the first to feel the economic effects of autumn’s chill. Ooker will return to potting in a few days, and at month’s end Leon will lay up his barcat until next May. Even for potters, the season brings changes. Peelers in the shedding tanks will take longer to molt. “In the middle of the summer it might take three days,” Ooker says. “But when the days get short, it can take a week.”

  Another lick catches a huge porcupine fish, which islanders call a thorn toad. Like its cousin the northern puffer, it’s self-inflating, but boxier and covered with spikes. “That’ll bite,” Ooker says, grasping the fish with one hand while searching for something to stick in its inch-wide mouth. He comes up with a crab shell. The thorn toad chomps down on the thick piece of exoskeleton and splinters it with a loud crunch. “Don’t want to get a finger stuck in there,” Ooker advises. He lobs the fish overboard.

  A few yards to our west, a stained and gouged concrete cylinder rises from the water, the stump of a wooden pole jutting from its top. Fifty yards to the north is another, and beyond that a long chain of them crossing the open water. They’re the remains of an old power line from Tangier to Smith—and the work of a come-here who is still talked about on the island seventy years later.

  Henry Jander was a Connecticut building contractor who visited Tangier with his wife, Anne, while on vacation. They were so charmed by the place that they sold their New England home, bought an old house in the marsh below Hog Ridge, and moved here with their children in 1943. At first, islanders were uneasy about the new arrivals. Both were college-educated sophisticates, which were in short supply on Hog Ridge. They shared a yen for art and classical music. And their surname sounded suspiciously German. A war was on.

  But Henry Jander turned out to be a handy man to have around, and soon found himself elected to the town council. When the old electrical plant failed, he took the lead in trying to get service restored, making the island’s case to the Rural Electrification Administration. He was rebuffed—the REA judged Tangier too small to warrant its help—so Jander and other town leaders sold shares in a town-owned system, promising to repay their investors with interest. They raised enough money to build a new Meat Soup powerhouse equipped with two war-surplus generators. When Jander couldn’t track down transformers for the system, he went back to the REA. While the agency didn’t produce the equipment he needed, it took another look at Tangier’s situation. Smith Island, it noted, was also in the hunt for help, and the REA saw that by combining the two populations, it could create a customer base that qualified for federal assistance.

  With that, the Chesapeake Islands Electric Cooperative was born. By 1947, these poles, girded with concrete, carried power lines across Uppards and the crabbing grounds to Smith. Tangier’s lights returned that winter.

  THAT IT TOOK an outsider to lead the drive for electricity illuminates a curious aspect of the Tangier character, one that natives readily acknowledge: As individuals, the islanders are fiercely independent and self-sufficient—modern-day cowboys, or so they like to think. As a group, however, they show precious little initiative. “Nobody wants to jump in and volunteer,” Anna Pruitt-Parks told me one day at the firehouse. “People seem to think that, ‘Okay, you got elected to the town council, you take care of it,’ especially if getting involved gets in the way of being on the water.”

  I heard much the same from Nina Pruitt, the school principal. “When people come from the county or state and we have a meeting, maybe thirty or forty people might come to it, and twenty of them will be aged sixty-five or over. And you have to imagine that all those officials go home thinking, ‘Why should we spend all that money on so few people, and all of them so old?’”

  Denny Crockett, the former principal, figures that the island’s faith might play a role in its lack of gumption. “We’re a very religious community, and I think that sometimes we put it in God’s hands,” he said. “We do believe that God takes care of things.” But, he acknowledged, “there’s also the view that sometimes God expects us to take care of ourselves.”

  The collective lethargy, or apathy, or whatever you choose to call it, showed itself early in the summer, when the grapevine carried word that homecoming had been canceled. Much lamentation followed, for homecoming is the island’s biggest party, a days-long affair that draws those who’ve moved away back to their birthplace. This time, the one Tangierman who put it together every year couldn’t manage the job. No one offered to step in.

  I saw it again one summer afternoon in the Situation Room, when those assembled discussed a rumor that the state might cancel the 2016–17 oyster-dredging season, an important source of wintertime income. “There ain’t no question that they can do it,” Leon growled. “They can do anything they want, any time they want. But I thought there’d be more talk about it than they’re doing.”

  “There ought to be,” Allen Ray said.

  “Somebody better call somebody,” Ernest Ed Parks said, “and find out.”

  Bruce Gordy: “That’d be a good way to start.”

  Allen Ray: “We need one man to go down there who can talk.”

&n
bsp; “Need a man with education,” Leon said.

  Jerry Frank Pruitt entered the room. Leon asked whether he’d heard the rumor. “Yeah,” Jerry Frank replied. “I know that Billy Boy”—William Ayers Pruitt, a Tangier-born former head of the Virginia Marine Resources Commission—“put on the website that we’d all better get down to the meeting. I think it’s Wednesday. It’s very important for people to go. They’re talking about stopping oystering in Virginia.”

  “What are they thinking?” Leon wondered.

  “Don’t know,” Jerry Frank replied.

  I spoke up. “So, who will go?”

  “Somebody should,” Allen Ray said.

  “Somebody needs to go,” Jerry Frank agreed.

  “But who will do it?” I asked.

  Allen Ray: “Somebody should.”

  Me: “Will you go?”

  “Well,” Allen Ray said, “somebody should.”

  At its meeting two days later, the VMRC didn’t suspend the season after all, but not because Tangiermen spoke against the idea. Not one islander showed up.

  OOKER PULLS UP his scrape and we motor north, into a wide expanse of shallow water that crabbers call the Knoll. “Like the one in Dallas, the grassy knoll,” he tells me. “Only here it’s seagrass, of course.” The line of stumped power poles glides by to our west, forming a de facto dividing line between bay and sound. Just to our south, where the poles crossed Goose Island, is where Elmer Crockett brushed a drooping wire with his head while hunting geese, and Half-Ass Buck saved his life. Used to be that the wire ran north to the southern shore of Smith Island, then across its marshy underside to a powerhouse in Ewell, the biggest of its three villages. In the intervening decades, however, Smith’s southern coast has retreated to the north and east. Now the poles run a straight line into a patch of open water and stop.

  One has to wonder how long Tangier would have endured life without electricity, had not Henry Jander intervened. One must wonder, too, how many islanders would have succumbed to illness or accident without the health center in which the Situation Room meets. It would not have been built without Oscar J. Rishel, one of Swain Memorial’s come-here pastors, who spearheaded the project after suffering a heart attack in the parsonage. His personal advocacy with Virginia officials brought the well-equipped building to Tangier in 1957.

  Rishel also played a principal role in finding a doctor to staff the building. Dr. Charles Gladstone, a general practitioner who arrived to treat the sick during the worldwide flu pandemic of 1918, had stuck around for thirty-six years, earning his keep by charging a small weekly subscription fee from every household. When Gladstone announced his retirement, the pastor led the scramble to find his replacement. The task occupied Rishel and state medical officials for four years before Dr. Mikio Kato—a thirty-three-year-old bachelor from Kobe, Japan—arrived in April 1957. It was Kato who delivered Ooker at his parents’ home in King Street in July of the following year.

  Jander and Rishel were among a parade of come-heres who accomplished what Tangier was unable or unwilling to do for itself. The most beloved, hands down, was Dr. David B. Nichols, who started visiting Tangier on his days off in the late 1970s, when the island hadn’t had a resident doctor for more than a decade. Nichols, who ran a family practice on the western shore, was the next best thing. He came every week for the next thirty-one years.

  Nichols grew to so love the island that he learned to fly helicopters and had a helipad built beside his mainland practice, the better to shorten the trip. In addition to treating virtually every Tangierman, he hired Inez Pruitt and mentored her transformation from high school dropout to physician’s assistant, encouraging her to obtain first her GED, then a degree from the University of Maryland, and, finally, to navigate the labyrinth of state licensing. Nichols also helped lay the groundwork for the new $1.4 million David B. Nichols Health Center, which opened in September 2010. He died of cancer four months later, at age sixty-two, but his modern clinic is still staffed weekly by a fly-in doctor and is otherwise in Inez’s capable hands.

  Another part-timer saved the P’int. In 1959, George Randolph “Randy” Klinefelter, a Pennsylvania insurance executive and avid sailor, bought the islet and renamed it Port Isobel for his wife. Over the ensuing years, Klinefelter filled the marshy island’s center with shipped-in soil and planted a thick forest of pines on its now-solid ground. Had he not done so, much of the P’int would have vanished by now, leaving Tangier’s east side unprotected. Klinefelter bought Watts Island, too, which was fast crumbling into Tangier Sound. When he found that its cemetery was washing away, he rescued the gravestones and created a monument to the Parker family, who farmed the island in the nineteenth century, in the woods at Port Isobel.

  Finally, in 1988, Klinefelter donated the 250-acre P’int, and a lovely retreat he’d built on its shore, to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. In doing so, CBF told its members, he “opened up a treasured and historic piece of the Chesapeake to thousands of students, teachers, and citizens.” Klinefelter served on the CBF’s board for eleven years. Upon his death in 2007, the organization mourned the loss of “a friend, trustee, and one-of-a-kind donor.” That he was.

  Perhaps no come-here had as lasting an impact on Tangier, from so short a stay, as Susan Drake Emmerich. She moved to the island in June 1997, when the relationship between Tangiermen and the CBF was at its worst—and no surprise, because objectively speaking, islanders were poor stewards of their island and its waters. The marshes were studded with their discarded kitchen appliances, bicycles, and outboard motors. Litter made eyesores of the ridges. Watermen routinely threw trash, including motor oil, overboard; the harbor’s shallows had acquired a sharp-smelling and colorful sheen. And Tangiermen had nothing but enmity for environmentalists, who warned that the bay’s blue crab population was overfished, teetering on collapse, and would rebound only with tighter regulation of the commercial harvest.

  Emmerich, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin, came armed with powerful ideas for improving the fishery, the island’s long-term economy, and communications between the watermen and CBF. First idea: that the bay was God’s creation and its stewardship a Christian duty—and that Tangier’s ingrained disregard for the environment thus conflicted with its beliefs. Second: that the CBF and government officials overlooked the importance of faith in their dealings with the island, much to everyone’s sorrow.

  Over a few short months, Emmerich challenged the islanders to examine their relationship with the bay and its bounty, and to bring their behavior on the water into compliance with the scriptural teachings they otherwise strove to follow. The effort culminated in fifty-eight Tangier watermen—Ooker among them—signing a Watermen’s Stewardship Covenant, in which they pledged to obey the laws of God and man. That meant following fishery, boat, and pollution regulations, and supporting one another in times of doubt and duress. Many of the island’s women signed a stewardship commitment of their own. Emmerich also fostered dialogue among islanders, regulators, and the CBF that made plain to all that they’d been talking past one another.

  The fifty-eight who signed the covenant constituted just over a third of the island’s licensed watermen, and they found themselves harassed and ostracized by the majority. Emmerich herself encountered fiercer resistance. Behind her back, Tangiermen threatened to kill her and to run her off the island. They were only slightly less brazen to her face: At a New Testament gathering she later compared to a witch trial, she was castigated as an “Earth-worshiper,” a “distorter of scripture,” and even as a “beguiler.”

  Nevertheless, a March 1998 conference Emmerich organized on Tangier for watermen, state and federal officials, scientists, and environmental activists was a success. It gave Tangiermen a venue for sharing their “vision for environmental, economic, and cultural stewardship—based on their faith, an integral part of who they are as people, and how they relate to the natural world,” she wrote in her dissertation. As for environmentalists and officials, “hear
ing the Tangiermen’s testimonies of transformation enabled them to recognize, for the first time, the centrality of the Tangiermen’s faith to their view of their environment and of the world.”

  If one were to pinpoint when relations between the island and CBF began swinging positive, it would be that conference. Same goes for the island’s appearance. Though it’s still pretty disheveled in places, Tangier is far cleaner and tidier today than when I first visited. Its people turn out in numbers for organized cleanups of the guts and marshes, and watermen are likely as not to bag their trash and bring it ashore. Small gains, perhaps, but they started with the work and the courage of Susan Emmerich.

  FIVE YEARS AFTER Emmerich’s departure, the Kayes arrived.

  “Yeah, the Kayes,” Ooker says when I bring them up, and although I expect him to say more, he merely sighs. Doctors Neil and Susan Kaye are a complicated subject on Tangier—even for Ooker, who was close to them, and whose four daughters were closer still; Devi even lived with the Kayes on the mainland for a year, and still refers to them as “a second set of parents.”

  Mention the Kayes to most islanders, and the response is almost always something like: They were good people who loved the island and who did a lot of good while they were there. They were generous with their money, their time, and their sweat. They midwifed positive change. “I’ll tell you what,” former mayor and town manager Danny McCready told me, “if Dr. Neil were still here, we’d have that jetty by now.”

  Likewise, ask islanders why the Kayes left Tangier, and their answers tend to follow a predictable course. “You can’t come into a community and try to change it,” said one of the Kayes’ close neighbors, Hanson Thomas. “That weren’t going to work with the island.”