Steve Ruark

Waterman Ralph Harrison pulls his day's hard crab catch into the backyard of his home in Ewell on Smith Island. He said that the day's harvest was not as bountiful as he had hoped.

Their hands fly, their knives flash and their voices soar like a choir of angels. It's a mesmerizing mix of art forms – picking crabs and singing gospel hymns, the way they've been doing it for generations on Smith Island. Foot-high piles of steamed Chesapeake blue crabs that swam in the bay hours before cover a stainless steel table where the women extract succulent white meat from their husbands' daily catch. The eight ladies from the Smith Island Crabmeat Cooperative tap mallets, crack claws and harmonize. In the natural reverb of the mostly empty cinderblock room, the hymn echoes just right, you’d never believe you’re standing at the edge of a swamp listening to crab-pickers doing as they do most every summer’s afternoon.

Precious Lord, hear my cry and keep me safe
Till the storm passes by

Till the storm passes over, till the thunder sounds no more
Till the clouds roll forever from the sky
Hold me fast, let me stand in the hollow of Thy hand
And keep me safe till the storm passes by

They could be singing about the storms, real and metaphorical, that Smith Island has weathered for more than three centuries. It is, after all, a place steeled by hurricanes and Nor'easters and floods; seasons when no amount of ingenuity or work ethic could coax a decent catch from the bay’s waters; frigid winter weeks being shut off from the mainland by a frozen bay on every side; “oyster wars” and gunfire over the bivalves, before disease wiped them out; over-fishing and, any local will tell you, over-regulation. And the bay’s forever swallowing Smith Island, sometimes bit by bit, but occasionally, devouring huge swaths of the marshy land all at once.

In the early 20^th Century, 800 people lived on Ewell, Tylerton and Rhodes Point, the three bayfront villages that comprise Smith Island, 12 miles by water from the mainland, in the middle of the bay. Every Sunday, the islanders packed the three Methodist churches, one for each village, and gave thanks for the bounty of the bay that had sustained them for centuries.

Today, 260 people live year-round on Smith Island, and just 17 kids attend the only school left, on Ewell. The islanders savor life in villages where everybody has always known everybody else, and if they’re not related, they’re still closer than many of those who are on the mainland.

More than ever before, sons and grandsons of aging watermen head for the mainland, seeking stability and certainty that working the bay no longer promises. They drive trucks, pilot tugboats, guard prisoners at the Eastern Correctional Institute in Princess Anne. Daughters of women who picked crabmeat for decades now raise families on the mainland and return to visit their kin for a week or maybe a month in summer. Outsiders, seeking refuge or a weekend getaway, keep paying more to buy the onetime homes of watermen and their families. A half a planet away, women pick meat from crabs caught in Asia and sold as “Maryland-style crabmeat,” for about half the cost of the Chesapeake variety.

Tina Corbin takes a break from singing and picking crabs. She and the other wives used to pick the crabs in their homes until somebody in the state health department decided this was unhealthy (even though no one had ever been known to get sick from eating crabmeat picked in Smith Island). So a decade ago, Corbin and the other crab-pickers helped start the co-op and turned it into a self-sustaining business.

Corbin’s hands, speckled with tiny flakes of white crabmeat, keep moving, punctuating her words.

“Yeah, you know, there’s always something that’s a threat to us, this or that, but we’re still here,” Corbin says. She couldn’t imagine another life in another place for her, her husband and their 9-year-old daughter, Taylor. Theirs are lives intimately connected to the tides, the winds, the day’s catch, and then, as now, they find strength in the simple faith like that inbred in a Smith Island girl. “We always believe that the Lord will bring us through, so we don’t worry about it. Whatever comes, we’ll face. This is an island built on faith.”

And the storm, of course, always passes by.

***

‘They’ll have to drag us out of here’

Jennings Evans stopped working the water seven years ago, but he's never far from it, physically or otherwise. He spent 45 of his 75 years as a waterman and he knows well the life he described in one of the many poems he composed while making crab baskets: "Nothing comes easy but the aches and pains."

Evans serves as Smith Island's unofficial historian and poet. He leads walking tours for visitors and thus becomes the voice and face of Smith Island. Visitors marvel at a place where locals awake before sunrise, talk with a slight twang, get around mostly by foot, golf cart, bike or boat, and take a 45-minute ferry ride to get to Wal-Mart or high school. Evans, a slender, white-haired man who favors checkered shirts and a baseball cap, is happy to oblige visitors who want to hear about all this.

But he'd rather talk about being on the water. He recalls praying when waves washed over the cabin of his workboat. He hangs on to memories of simple joys: staring into the underwater grasses through water once clear and pristine; seeing a crab molting in its shell to become the exquisite delicacy that is the Maryland soft-shell crab or, in local parlance, peeler; pulling up a wire-mesh trap and giving quiet thanks once more that  crustaceans that fill it.

Watermen, he says, are tender-hearted and tough, at times stubborn as can be, and always acutely aware of their heritage. He recounts tales of the pirates who once plundered “Rogues Point” before they changed its name to Rhodes, the bands of Tories and traitors who lived here during the American Revolution, the bootleggers who sneaked moonshine over. In Evans’ lifetime, watermen have struggled with the toll of pollution, oyster disease and over-harvesting. They’ve fought and railed against the middlemen and corporate seafood processors, the regulators and scientists with the gall to believe they know better how to save the bay than the men who fish it.

And now, more than ever before, outsiders are buying up Smith Island. From his front yard, Evans counts three for-sale signs on Tyler Road in Ewell, where 80 acres of soggy land on the water sold last fall for $1 million. A house in a prime location on the southern edge of Tylerton is on the market for $500,000, and homes that might have gone for $55,000 six years ago now bring in as much as $250,000.

Homebuyers come from Washington, Ocean Pines, Pennsylvania, even Florida, and they are not coming to work the water. Outsiders, foreigners, weekenders, the old-timers call the newcomers. “We’ve got so many people moving in, and the young ones are leaving, and all the regulator people are trying to regulate us out of business,” 60-year-old waterman Bill Clayton says as he checks on peelers that molt in floats inside a shanty. “It’s been a hard life. But you look around, what else have we got here to do? We can’t run down the street and get a job at the factory to see us through. This waterman` way of life is on its way out now.”

One of Clayton’s sons reached the same conclusion and went to work for the prison in Princess Anne.

Now, only the hardiest of a hearty breed head out before the sun rises to coax crabs from the bay. Older guys with faces of leather and hands raw and calloused join a smattering of younger watermen, stalwarts all. “And they’ll have to drag us out of here to get us out of here,” Evans says.

But when Evans rides the narrow streets on his golf cart or bike, when he steps onto a dock and glances at the ramshackle watermen's shanties and wire-mesh crab traps stacked everywhere, he's certain much of what he sees will disappear. “Somebody’s gonna come around and make a resort of this place is what we’re afraid of,” he says.

One afternoon Evans, the poet, tried to put words around his musings and forebodings. 

Big corporations with their smooth operations
Would quickly move in with their slick manipulations
And then, where do you think the watermen would be
Of course, working for "The Big Man" and no longer free.

Yes, these are times of apprehension
When a waterman can't clearly see
What lies ahead for the Chesapeake Bay
Or what his catch will be.

He penned the one-page poem more than a decade ago and called it “What is a Waterman?” He You could say Jennings Evans sensed the storms coming, but then, that would be nothing new.

***

Revival: Smith Island-Style

On a sultry night in August, the men dress in pressed shirts; the women, in skirts and heels. It’s Camp Week, and people dress up for that, even on Smith Island, where they rarely get dressed up for anything. The annual gathering started as a religious revival when Joshua Thomas landed here on a sailing canoe, brought with him his brand of Methodism and soon became the "Parson of the Islands.” Today Camp Week provides an annual homecoming for the islanders who have moved to the mainland. They come from Maryland and Virginia and Pennsylvania, their arrival almost doubling the population.

Steve Ruark

One of few young watermen on Smith Island, Daniel Smith, 21, stands outside his Tylerton shanty at around 4 a.m. before taking his workboat out to catch hard and soft-shell crabs in the Chesepeake Bay.

At dusk, they head to an old wood-frame tabernacle with screens for walls, walk across the sawdust covering the dirt floor and take their places on red wooden benches under naked light bulbs hanging from the ceiling.

The Rev. Rick Edmund, who ministers to the Methodist churches in each of the three villages, clears his throat and speaks his truths slowly, gently, hardly raising or lowering his voice. “Lord, we appreciate the bounties that you’ve given us: work, loved ones, our financial situation. Lord, compared to the rest of the world, we’re filthy rich,” Pastor Rick says. “Lord we just pray that we’ll be wise stewards of whatever that you have given us.”

“Amen,” a handful of people say.

Tonight’s guest preacher, the Rev. Jonathan Daniels, who comes over from the Crisfield area, delivers the scripture about the time St. Peter and the other disciples couldn’t catch anything. “Cast the net on the right side of the ship and ye shall find,” Jesus tells them. Everybody here knows the rest by heart, for this passage has long fortified them. 

Joy and faith and hope echo in the night when the choir members and the congregation join the piano: “And when you take me by the hand, and lead me to the promised land,” they sing, “what a day glory and praise that will be.” 

One at a time, or in pairs, the faithful go to the altar lined with four big pots of flowers and kneel before the simple wooden cross painted brown.

Sometimes Daniels almost whispers, his voice slows and he seems to be sounding out the syllables: “Jesus Christ wants to move among us this week. I believe that with all my heart.”

Two minutes later, he’s shouting: “Jesus Christ tonight has something for us in this camp meeting. This week, I tell you, we should be fired up. We should be looking forward to an old-fashioned Holy Ghost moving right here on Smith Island.”

Amen, amen, the congregation cries out.

Next morning, Pastor Rick somehow holds the attention of 30 squirmy kids inside a classroom when the sun’s shining bright and the swing set and boats and Ewell baseball field lie just outside vacation Bible school. He’s teaching about the word “symbiotic,” and what that has to do with living faith: God gives to us, and we give back to him by sharing his love.

Pastor Rick had been a computer programmer for 20 years before he heard the call and became a minister for the United Methodist Church. He’s been assigned to Smith Island for six years now and gets from church to church by boat or golf cart.

On a steamy evening when bug spray's not optional, Pastor Rick, as everybody calls him, cruises in a skiff "The Methodist." He sings Amazing Grace to the tune of “House of the Rising Sun,” then stops and drinks in all the shades of purples and pinks and oranges. "We certainly have God's paintbrush all around us, this constant reminder of his presence," Pastor Rick says. “And when your survival depends so much on God, you pay more attention to providence and prayer.”

***

Attuned to Silent Music

They wanted to leave to live someplace where they could see God's imprint in nature, pray, meditate, study, write, befriend locals, welcome strangers and share their sense of wonder. 

LeRoy Friesen and his wife, Sharryl, found what they were looking for in a handsome white house with a screened porch 30 feet from the water near the southern point of Tylerton, the clump of land separated by water from the other villages. Career academics, each with a Ph.D., they got a lot of quizzical looks when they told people they were leaving the nation's capital to live on Smith Island.

A decade after opening their B&B, aptly named The Inn of Silent Music, they're still “for'ners,” of course, and know they always will be, at least to the old-timers.

At first, LeRoy and Sharryl couldn't stop asking the inevitable question: Would the locals accept us? One lifelong islander still mutters, "Can you believe they’re actually career academics? Here?"

But if some islanders worried the new couple would be intellectual snobs in a place where few go to college and some don’t finish high school, LeRoy and Sharryl dispelled that notion quickly. They've worshipped, broken bread, exulted, mourned, celebrated and worried with the islanders. They’re both Catholics, but they attend Methodist services. If they hadn't, LeRoy says, they never would have been accepted.

On a cloudless morning when the sun's warming the screened porch, the omelets’ perfect and the coffee's good and strong, Sharryl and LeRoy talk about some of the other 57 Tylerton residents they have come to know. "When I think of the ones I see in the post office and the ones who come to the store and go to the church," Sharryl says, "I realize I know them better than I've known a lot of family members."

And the strangers they hoped to welcome? Silent Music guests have come from as near as the Eastern Shore, Baltimore and Washington and from as far away as Lithuania and India. Once, Leroy recalls a Sikh who stayed at the inn wore his turban, prompting a kid to walk up and ask him, "Sir, are you Aladdin?"

Nobody seems sure what the retired Indian army general said in reply, but people still laugh at the story. And, no doubt, the world expanded a bit that day for all those present in the little village.

The visitors bring a different way of seeing. Leroy recalled how Waverly Marshall, who takes visitors around the islands and to a wildlife refuge on his boat, stood up at Methodist testimony meeting one day and said he'd been looking at mud and marshland for 80 years and never made much of it. "Now I've got these folks coming in here and they say, 'Oh, look, oh look,' and I'm learning to see it for the first time through the fresh eyes of others."

One guest arrived at the inn convinced that Smith Island lagged far behind the rest of America by so many measures. But riding back to Crisfield on the ferry, he wrote later: "I can't quite figure out now: Are they trying to catch up to us, or are they ahead of us?" 

Ten years, a few hurricanes and thousands of stories later, Leroy and Sharryl will pack up and leave the inn for good by Labor Day, as they had planned for several years. He's 66 and she's 64, and they're retiring in the land of the fighting Irish, moving into new housing on the Notre Dame campus in South Bend, Indiana. They hope to sell to somebody who wants to keep the old house an inn, and the locals all agree that would be best.

On the ferry ride back to Crisfield, I'm looking at Leroy's words scrawled in a notebook.

"I consider it a gift from God that I was able to be a part of this culture during a time where there's no thoughtful person who would deny that it's heading toward its end... I lament that because I think as cultures go, this is a damn good one, and its preciousness will always be in my heart."

The more I think about his words, the more I want to go back to what's there while it's still there. I feel like I’ve seen it for the first time.

***

Though a Maryland native, I'm the quintessential “for'ner.” For I had made the requisite day trips on the ferry but never stayed overnight until camp week in August.

What a difference staying a night or two makes, or, more precisely, seeing Smith Island in so many different lights. A morning dawns cool and purple. A midday sun sears, creating gray shadowy silhouettes and making faces and places look older. Sunset beats any I’ve seen. The night sky is a great black velvet blanket dotted with stars. And three dozen seagulls line up like busts, one to a post on a pier, and sound like they’re laughing.

Back home in Baltimore after camp week, I reread sections of An Island Out of Time, the memoir in which Tom Horton, newspaperman and author, captured Tylerton with the eye and ear of a storyteller and the soul of a poet. I understand it better now, I think:

“You become attuned, almost subliminally, to the winds and moon phases, to the ebb and flow of water,” Horton writes. “And then you leave, one late-summer day, for the mainland, for the dream home you have bought, spacious and modern in a quiet leafy suburb – good schools, neat playgrounds, near to major malls. Life there is very much more convenient and predictable and controllable. Soon, you don’t even notice the wind outside your bedroom window.”

Longing to notice more, I head back to Smith Island two weeks later. This time, I bring my son, Joseph, then 3½, too because I want him to know while he can that people still live and work like this in a place like this.

Joseph helps reel in his first flounder on the big fishing boat piloted and owned by Capt. Chris Marshall, who ran tugs and tourists in New York for a while but returned after September 11 and now operates Chesapeake Fishing Adventures out of his house at the water’s edge in Tylerton. My son squeals in delight, beams and points at the flounder flopping around on the boat’s deck. I do too. It's one of those moments I don't want to end, and I know right away it’ll stay with me all my days.

That night, Chris’s wife, Sharon, serves a feast of flounder we caught, crabs right out of the trap, baked corn, mashed potatoes and a Texas transplant’s best take on Smith Island’s famous cake, with eight layers and chocolate frosting between each. Sharon watches her son Reagan, who just turned 2, as he darts from the kitchen to the long hallway and back, while his baby sister, Charity, sleeps. The mother says she could think of no better place to raise a family. "It's like growing up with 30 grandparents,” she says, “and everybody in their world loves them."

I stroll shady paths back to the Drum Point market and the Tylerton church and the crab co-op and next to that, a sight that stops mee. Once, they played baseball and softball here, watermen and their kids, whole teams of them. The announcer's booth looks ready for a game tonight. The rest of it looks like it'll never see another: Weeds sprout all over the infield, and instead of grandstands, rusted ruins of cars and boats sit along the first and third-base lines.

Nearby, on a basketball court outside the Tylerton elementary school that closed in 1996, two boys, Dylan and Dalton Swanger, dribble and shoot jumpers in the glow of last light, and the sound soothes. They're here for six weeks, and it's hard to imagine them wanting for anything more when you see them riding their scooters and dipping crab nets into the water and playing ball and boarding the morning boat for Bible school on Ewell.

Add a comment to this article Send an e-mail to the Editor