Chesapeake Requiem

by Earl Swift

  “You’ve got to adapt to our ways,” Eugenia Pruitt said. “I think that’s where the Kayes went wrong. When they first come, they were a lot like Mr. Jander—they wanted to help the island. But then they tried to change it.”

  “We loved the Kayes, then didn’t,” said Lisa Crockett, my own next-door neighbor. “That’s how we’ll do. If you do something to cross us, you won’t stay here.”

  Cross Tangier is exactly what the Kayes managed to do, even after they spent years making themselves all but indispensable to the place. They seemed unlikely émigrés, these New York natives. He Jewish, she Catholic, they’d spent most of their married life in Wilmington, Delaware, and first touched down on the island in September 2002. Neil, a psychiatrist, had just earned his private pilot’s license in helicopters and was at the controls of their first of many choppers. Susan, a pathologist, was along for the ride.

  “They were extremely friendly,” Neil said of the islanders they met. “They were welcoming. The physical beauty of the place is unbelievable. You have a mile and a half of beach to yourself, and it’s pristine. The town is cute. There are birds everywhere. The wildlife of that island is just outstanding.”

  “We were both taken by it,” Susan recalled. “When you first go there you don’t see the bad, underbelly stuff.”

  The Kayes had been in the market for a weekend home and found one on the Eastern Shore a few miles south of Onancock. After closing the deal, they flew to Tangier for celebratory crab cakes, and on a post-dinner stroll they passed a brick rambler for sale on Hog Ridge, just a few doors from the beach. The mainland place suddenly seemed a mistake; they changed their minds on that house and closed on the island property in August 2003. “Tangier was a terrible investment,” Neil told me thirteen years later. “It was already sinking and disappearing. But we thought it would be an easy place to sneak off to on weekends. We had no intention of getting involved in the community at all.”

  That changed when Hurricane Isabel raked the Chesapeake a few days after they moved in. “We had a chain saw and lent the chain saw to people,” Susan said. “We took the mayor up [in the chopper] so he could take pictures for FEMA.” Neil flew to the Eastern Shore for more chain saws and handed them out to their new neighbors. Though grateful, the islanders were mystified by the pair. That didn’t change.

  That fall, the Kayes stepped up their involvement. “They have proposed an idea of doing a genealogy of the entire island,” the minutes of the town council’s November 2003 meeting reported. “The end result would be to place the Tangier Island Family Tree on the side of the Rec Center as a conversation piece.” The report included a line that would characterize much of the couple’s island activity: “They have indicated that they would fund the effort.”

  Sure enough, the Kayes assembled an immense computer printout of the family tree with the help of schoolteacher Donna Crockett, herself a come-here. The years-long effort culminated when they installed the printout around the inside of the rec center in 2010. Islanders still talk about it.

  In the meantime, Susan led a drive to create a library. The couple bought a sixteen-by-twenty-foot shed, installed it on Hog Ridge, and filled it with books. It opened in December 2005. At about the same time, they launched and paid for an artist-in-residence program that drew painter Ken Castelli to Tangier. The Kayes also sought to remedy a problem they had noticed soon after their arrival: The island lacked public restrooms. When they learned the town had not followed through on a state grant to build a visitors’ center, they won permission to commandeer the project. Early in 2007, they applied for money for a museum of island history and culture, along with a system of walking and paddling trails. With Castelli’s help, they built out a closed King Street gift shop to house the new attraction. “We’d go down every weekend and work,” Neil said.

  “Work,” Susan emphasized.

  The museum opened in June 2008 to justified praise: It tells the story of Tangier’s past and cultural quirks, but even more it effectively captures the island’s ongoing struggle with the bay. Among the highlights are Castelli’s wonderfully detailed map of Tangier, occupying an entire wall, and a backlit exhibit of the island’s shrinking footprint that is rendered in colored film on multiple layers of Plexiglas. “It began with the quest for the bathrooms,” Neil said, “and a museum just happened to go along with the bathrooms.”

  The Kayes designed and ordered trash cans shaped like the old Tangier Lighthouse and placed them around town. They created a walking history trail spotlighting the island’s older homes. And their good works took more personal forms. Neil, who was licensed to practice medicine in Virginia, offered free psychiatric care to a few islanders, whose kin cite his intervention as lifesaving. He flew the sick to mainland hospitals at no charge, ferried equipment during emergencies, and offered helicopter joyrides during the annual homecoming celebration. When Ooker’s son Joseph asked him to photograph his wedding, Neil said yes—and served as photographer at Tangier weddings for years after. The photo in Swain Memorial of the rainbow descending on the church is his, too.

  By any measure, the Kayes were terrific neighbors and a boon to the community. Which makes what happened later all the more frustrating.

  IN APRIL 2009, the couple found themselves the subject of, as they put it, a “classic Tangier rumor.” That spring they were immersed in a new project: trying to establish a government-subsidized, year-round ferry link with Onancock. This made sense, they figured, because the town’s reliance on Crisfield denied it ready access to the Virginia services it supported with its tax dollars, from substance abuse treatment to driving tests.

  But the effort stirred a deep and long-standing fear among Tangiermen about their school and its drain on rural, cash-strapped Accomack County. In 2009 the school’s thirteen teachers taught eighty students, giving Tangier Combined one of the lowest pupil-teacher ratios in the state, at 6.2—lower by half than any other school in the district.

  Islanders had long assumed that the only thing keeping the county from transferring their kids to mainland schools was the expensive and difficult commute across Tangier and Pocomoke sounds. But if the state were already running a ferry and paying for it—what then? “If the mailboat went to Onancock,” Nina Pruitt told me, “maybe our schoolchildren would be on it.”

  So it was no small matter when word circulated not that the Kayes were trying to start a ferry service, but that they were trying to close the school. As is typical with island rumors, it spread like lightning and was treated as fact before the couple learned of it. “A lot of people got pissed off,” Neil said. He and Susan responded with an open letter to the town, which they posted in the grocery store, the post office, and on telephone poles around the island. “This is not true,” they wrote. “We are 100% in favor of children being in school on Tangier from K–12, of the school being fully funded, of grades being kept separate, and of Tangier students getting all of the same benefits and opportunities that all children in the state receive.”

  As the Kayes saw it, kids wouldn’t be schooled on the mainland, with or without a ferry. No matter how big the boat, it would have to contend with the Chesapeake’s darker moods, and the district couldn’t well have its students getting seasick on their way to class or racking up absences due to rough weather and ice. So the couple continued with the ferry project for another three months, until the town council voted unanimously that it wanted no part of the idea.

  Folks got exercised, too, when the Kayes “floated the idea that Tangier could go to the government and get bought out,” Neil told me. From their helicopter he and Susan could see the effects of climate change unfolding week by week, and the island’s eventual fate seemed plain. They suggested that the town make itself “a model for how you relocate a community. We might be able to move Tangier as a block.” This idea upset many.

  So islanders already had a few qualms about the Kayes to go along with their admiration and gratitude when, one Saturday afternoon in August 2010,
Susan opened Facebook while at home in Wilmington and saw a photo of the newly repainted Tangier water tower. As with the old paint scheme, Tangier’s name faced north and south. New to the tank’s east side was a big orange crab. Facing west was a startling addition: an enormous budded cross, its four tips ending in trefoils. She showed it to Neil.

  “I was pretty horrified,” he said. It seemed clear to both that the cross violated the separation of church and state: It had been painted at the town’s behest on a tower that had been built with government money and was maintained at public expense. And besides being unlawful, it was bound to make many tourists uncomfortable, as it did them. “When I was in first grade, I was the only Jewish kid in my class,” Neil said. “One of my friends had a birthday party. It was at a country club. They had no Jewish members. So I was the only one of my friends who wasn’t invited to the party. I am passionate in my opposition to this sort of thing—to religious bigotry and exclusion.”

  Neil banged out an email to the town council:

  I just saw the photo of the water tower painted with a cross. I am asking you to repaint this. As a Jew, it is offensive. Further, it may be illegal. As the Constitution requires a separation of Church and State, if any public funds were used to paint this, it would be a breach of that sacred separation and will bring a lawsuit against the Town as soon as others who are also upset take note.

  While I have deep respect for all religions and everyone’s right to practice his/her own brand of religion, Tangier should not be taking a stance on religion in this manner. . . .

  Citizens are free to erect crosses in their yards, to build temples, churches, mosques, sweat lodges, perform rituals, sacrifices, or whatever else they want. But, Town sponsored public displays endorsing a particular religion are a different situation.

  In hindsight, his use of the word “offensive” in the opening paragraph was probably a mistake, because when news of the dispute raced through town, it was distilled to The Kayes called the cross offensive, which was all that many Tangiermen needed to hear. Within hours, the island’s greatest benefactors were personae non gratae. “It was pretty clear that they saw it as attacking their religion,” Neil said. He and Susan tried to clarify their objections to the paint scheme and offered to pay to have the cross modified into an anchor. The islanders weren’t interested. At a town council meeting a few days later, Ooker announced that “the cross would not be taken off unless ordered to by a judge,” according to the minutes. The vote backing him up was unanimous.

  “Verbally, we were told by at least one member of the town council that if we insisted that the cross come down, we were ‘done.’ We took that threat seriously,” Neil said. “It also probably caused us to reflect a little more—and we reflected on the whole crazy experience of Tangier. We realized that going to Tangier was some sort of calling and that probably the cross thing was the signal that our calling was over.”

  A week after their Facebook discovery and seven years after setting up house on the island, the Kayes again emailed the town council. “Our time on Tangier has come to an end,” they wrote. “We realize that we cannot live under the shadow of the cross, and we know we also cannot live under the shadow of the hard feelings if the cross were removed. We have chosen instead to move off and sell our home.” The next day, they were packed up and gone.

  The conventional wisdom on Tangier holds that a host of other, more complicated issues, unconnected to island government, provoked the Kayes to leave and that the cross was merely a handy excuse. As Anna Pruitt-Parks observed, the tower’s new paint scheme could hardly have been much of a surprise, as “Tangier was notoriously famous in our Christian faith.”

  But not only do the Kayes say the cross, and only the cross, drove them away, their emails and journal entries from the period offer compelling testimony that the conventional wisdom has it wrong. Five days before the couple’s Facebook discovery, Neil, a faithful diarist, wrote that they’d bought lamps for their Tangier house. Just hours before finding the cross online, he wrote that they’d bought a painting for the place. Neither seems the action of people already mulling a move. After that, Neil’s diary abruptly shifts in tone. His entry for the day after the town council’s vote reads: “Susan and I are struggling to comprehend the enormity of leaving Tangier.” The next day’s reads: “Devastated.”

  When I asked Ooker about the controversy, he told me that the town council never considered taking the cross down. “We heard from some who didn’t like it, who said they thought it looked like a Catholic cross. But that one’s staying there,” he said. “Me and some other citizens, we decided that if they took us to court, they’d have to paint over it. And if they paint over it, we’d take turns climbing up there and painting a new one.” Ooker also told me that the idea for the cross came from Dr. David Nichols, the town’s beloved “Doctor Copter”: “He said, ‘I think you should have a crab and a cross. Those are the two things that make you who you are.’”

  The Kayes, who counted Nichols as a friend, heard the same thing, and brought it up in a September 2010 email to the doctor. “We later learned that you had suggested the designs to represent the pillars of the community, faith and crabs,” they wrote. “We in no way hold you responsible for any of what transpired. But, it freaked us out.”

  Nichols replied a few days later. “I did mention to one of the Tangier clinic staff, when asked, that the Crab and Cross would be representative of the community,” he wrote. “I must admit the notion of separation of church and state never came to my mind, but of course you are correct in this fortunate constitutional fact. I also was remiss in not thinking how this would impact all the islanders including yourselves. I understand your concerns and for this I sincerely apologize.”

  Eight years later, the cross remains.

  So does the museum. So do the library, the trash cans, the historical markers.

  The Kayes have been back just once, for Dr. Nichols’s memorial service.

  A homemade sign on the Main Ridge pushes the island’s favored ticket, November 2016. (EARL SWIFT)

  Twenty

  AS THE SUMMER ENTERS ITS FINAL WEEKS, THE UPCOMING presidential election looms ever larger on Tangier. Tourists travel a harbor channel lined with TRUMP FOR PRESIDENT signs, then step off the boats into a gauntlet of them. Golf carts display Trump bumper stickers at bow and stern. Four Brothers is so adorned with MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN placards and Trump flags that it looks more like a campaign headquarters than a cart-rental business and café.

  The election even snakes its way into church. “Now, I’m going to get political on you for just a minute,” John Flood announces in the midst of his sermon one Sunday. “How you vote is between you and the Lord. When you close the curtain, that’s up to you.”

  Soon enough, he gets to a but. “There is one party that believes that there should be same-sex marriage,” he says. “How can a Christian vote for that? How can a Christian vote for anything goes?” Many heads nod. “Who would have ever thought that there would be a party pushing the point that you could go in any bathroom that you want to?”

  The larger message, the pastor says, is that “The world is still rejecting Jesus Christ. The world is not mourning the pierced savior, or the pierced prince. Right now, the world thinks that it’s doing great. The world thinks that it’s in control. But one day, and I’m afraid that it’s going to be one day soon, they’re going to mourn, because they’re going to see that they’ve made an eternal mistake.” He wraps up with a tacit endorsement of Dr. Ben Carson, whose candidacy ended months ago: “The man, I believe, knows the pierced savior.”

  In the Situation Room, the election moves near the top of the agenda, right behind crabs, wind, and waves. One mid-September afternoon we arrive to find the water’s been shut off over much of the island, leaving the old health center without an essential ingredient for coffee. With a muttered “Lord sakes,” Leon drives over to Daley & Son for a gallon of water, and we await his return before taking
up anything substantial. He’s back and making a pot when Lonnie gets down to business.

  “I’m at the point that I’m thinking about voting for Gary Johnson,” he says, referring to the Libertarian candidate. “That tells you where I’m at, if I’m thinking about somebody like Gary Johnson.”

  Jerry Frank points at him. “You’re throwing your vote away, voting for Gary Johnson.”

  “Well, you’re throwing your vote away, voting for Donald Trump,” Lonnie says. “He can’t win, Jerry. It’s impossible.”

  “I’m smart enough to not get into this today,” Jerry Frank says.

  “Completely impossible,” Lonnie says. “There’s no path for him to win.”

  “I’ll take him before I’ll take her,” Jerry Frank replies.

  “Well, you’ll have to take her,” Lonnie says. “She’s going to be president.”

  “I hope you’re wrong.”

  “I’m not wrong,” Lonnie says. “And really, voting for him, it’s the same as voting for her. They’re the same. If either of them wins, nothing changes.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Jerry Frank says. He looks over at me. “He has a talent for pulling you into arguments. He knows the magic word to get you going. He knows just how to strike that chord.”

  I look at Lonnie, who’s grinning. “I’ll tell you what, Jerry,” he says. “I feel better about voting for Gary Johnson than I do for either of them. And he has as much chance as Trump does.”

  Ooker enters the room as Jerry Frank sighs and says, “Well, that remains to be seen,” then adds, cryptically: “Like Captain Otis Evans says, the longest pole knocks down the highest persimmon.” A little research reveals that Jerry Frank has uttered a rural nineteenth-century aphorism meaning that the stronger party will carry the day.