Blue Highways: A Journey Into America

  “A Methodist island, I hear.”

  “To the last inch. In nineteen thirty-eight, a fire took the church. People kneeled in the road and prayed up one side and down the other. Our houses stand close because we’ve got no terra firma to waste. That’s why our roads are narrow. The fire was about to take the town. Then, while people were still on their knees, the wind shifted and only the church burned. The hand of God, they said.”

  I poured tea and my wine, and all the while Miz Alice explained.

  “A teacher should carry a theme—a refrain to sing ideas from. Mine was what they call ‘ecology’ now. I taught children first the system of things. Later we went to grammar and sums. Always time for that. I wanted to show them there’s only one place they can get an education—in the school of thought. Learning rules is useful but it isn’t education. Education is thinking, and thinking is looking for yourself and seeing what’s there, not what you got told was there. Then you put what you see together. It’s more than difficult to get kids today to look for themselves. They want their visions to be televisions. ‘Eyeballs!’ I said to them. Once your own eyeballs start working, then you can see what’s around, you can see history isn’t a thing of the past. You can see the land is kind. But it’s hard to make our people here nature lovers when they see so much of her in the raw. We have an attitude on this island that God will take care of it all—oystering, crabbing, water, the geese. ‘I’ll get as many crabs today as getting can get,’ that’s the way we talk. ‘Then I’ll get more tomorrow.’ Now we’ve caught the bottom and haven’t bothered much to put it back. Fished out the babies for years. But, as I hope to fly, a man’s deeds count. Everything counts. We live in dependence, not independently. But don’t tell an islander that, or he’ll knock your talk into a cocked hat. Don’t tell us ‘No man is an island.’” She sipped her tea. “Let’s not get too worked up. If people could say only what they’d bet their lives on, the place would go mute. No telling what we’d hear then.”

  “It seems as if there are still lots of oysters.”

  “They don’t teem in here anymore. Why, the front yards of our houses are made from oyster shells. Throw down a bucket of shells, a bucket of dirt, and presto-chango, a yard! Don’t need a growing hand here. We’re at sea level plus four feet—maybe it’s five feet now because of the oyster shells. But you don’t appreciate what I’m saying until I tell this sentence—from my own house for better than half a century, I’ve seen three hurricanes and never a drop of water inside. Never a storm in this kitchen.” She stopped. “But what were we talking about? Surely, it was never the tide. My tea is bewitched.”

  “Chesapeake oysters.”

  “A flavor that leaves you hanging between heaven and earth. That’s where our big houses came from.”

  “Heaven?”

  “Oysters. Oystering money. As for crabs, no one ate crabs here in the earliest days. Indians didn’t eat crabs. You don’t find crab shells in their kitchen middens, and I think I can tell you why. People only took to eating crabs when the oyster rocks started giving out. They knew the blue crab is the buzzard of the deeps—scavenges the bottom. Want to catch a crab? Load your pot or trotline with a pickled eel. Pickled and sour as rot. That’s a crab’s menu. Give his life to eat it. But now, some people prefer a baked pailer to a fresh oyster.”

  “What’s a pailer?”

  “Peeler. Here, they say ‘pailer,’ and ‘dredging’ is ‘drudgin’.’ The pailer is a metamorphosis, but watermen don’t call it that. In all things except a ship’s works, they use the simplest words. But when it comes to boats, you better know your bugeye from your batteau. The pailer splits his shell like a spider so he can grow. ‘Softshell crab,’ restaurants call them. Crabbing begins in early spring when the jimmies start walking up the bay to look for the sooks—the females. Mating season. Sometimes you catch a ‘doubler’—a mister and missus arm in arm. You can go potting or trotlining or scraping eelgrass. Scrape and pot for crabs in summer, drudge for oysters in winter. You can tong for oysters too.”

  She took a yardstick and broom, crossed them like scissors to show how hand tongs work. “They look like twenty-foot rakes linked at the center, but it takes the back of Quasimodo to nipper up oysters. Now they have patent tongs, power machines that scoop up the bottom. Ten times as many tongers as drudgers today. Don’t ask me what the machines do to the culch—the beds. Couldn’t say. But I know nothing lasts long when you turn the machinery on.” She stopped again. “Am I a reactionary?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Not so sure myself anymore.” She got up from the table. “I’m going to show you a book I wrote and then something else if I can find it.”

  The book was a pamphlet: Maryland’s Right, Tight Isle. “That’s my coinage and accurate it is. The book’s our only history of the island. But remember half of history is story. It’s the best we know. But to truly understand our right, tight little isle, you should read the life of Joshua Thomas, the Parson of the Islands. A ‘powerful exhorter,’ they say he was. Made the whole east bay into Methodists. He came from Potato Neck to the islands during the War of Eighteen Twelve or thereabouts. Arrived in his log canoe, The Methodist. Once he asked the mother of a crying child that was interrupting his sermon, ‘Madam, won’t you kindly give the babe a tater?’ A sweet potato to quiet it. Maybe it works. Wouldn’t for me. Sweet stops right in my throat. Have to eat a dill pickle to chase down sugar.”

  She went off to hunt the something else. I’d read much of her pamphlet when I heard a call from very far away. She was at the top of the steep stairs on the third floor.

  “Can’t find it,” she said. “Can’t find a Nanticoke spearpoint as long as my palm. Picked it off the beach one day just as if it had been a clamshell. A piece of craft it is. Brought to mind my father’s work. So much for that.”

  In my hand she laid earrings and a necklace made from colonial-era pottery shards she had found on the beach. “Jewelry should have meaning. Can you make out the numeral ‘four’ here? Is it four gallons? Four quarts? I don’t know, but we have four of something.”

  She motioned me to the high window where, to the west, we could see across the entanglings of guts and coves and marsh grass, the far gray line of water scumbled by dusk.

  “Chesapeake,” she said grandly. “Not so many waters in the world as fertile as that one. Two hundred miles long. An inland sea. A drowned river at the bottom that runs miles into the Atlantic. In ten thousand years, the bay will be ocean when the Eastern Shore goes to sea. Straight across, that’s where the Potomac comes into Chesapeake, and it’s as wide as the upper bay.”

  In the salt marsh, during the Revolutionary War, watermen used the maze of coves as cover to launch sudden raids on passing British ships. “Our baymen took such a liking to the work, they kept at it for another half-century after the war. When they gave up pirating, they began hunting ducks and geese with cannons mounted in sneak-boats. A single blast could bring down a hundred birds. More than one game warden has been put to the bottom of those guts. We’ve known our lawlessness.”

  The steeple on the west shore marked Rhodes Point. “They first called it Rogue’s Point. Pirates. As the town became decent, they changed the name. Kept the sound but not the sense. Renamed it after Cecil Rhodes—as in Rhodes Scholars and Rhodesia. It’s all watermen now, but I hear they want to attract the yachting mob. Pirates to yachtsmen, there’s history.”

  From the attic window, Miz Alice once had watched big schooners out of Baltimore sail seaward and also many of the two thousand Chesapeake oystering boats beat along the bay: skipjacks, bugeyes, pungies, sloops, now all extinct but for the skipjack. “Just before the edge of dark, the light would turn the working sails gold as angels’ wings. It was a glory.”

  The low rises on the island, the hummocks, islanders called “hammocks.” A square of pines grew from one hummock where the Teackle mansion had stood. “Closed up for years. Full of antiques. The Tylers just walked away from it. Do
n’t know why. A marsh fire swept it up fifteen years ago. A deal of lost history, and I couldn’t tell you if the fire was by hook or crook.”

  She was silent to let me take in the great spread of flatness. Then she said, “It was from this window that my husband saw me walking across the ice after being marooned all night in the Island Belle when the sound froze over. Caught on the island boat coming home from the Eastern Shore. What a night that was! The Chesapeake, the boat, and us. Nothing lost, not even the Belle. When the water opened, they just motored her away.”

  Miz Alice pointed out an island to the north. “In a couple hundred years, that one will be gone. I’ve seen them go. Holland’s Island washed down to nothing. People moved their houses by boat to Crisfield—carried them across the water. About nineteen ten.” She wiggled a thumb toward Tylerton to the south. “Third village of the island. They have their own opinionation down there, and make no mistake about it. But the families on the island are related, and I can prove it. All English and Cornish. It’s a special concern to me because of my younger daughter. She’s one of two islanders to contract multiple sclerosis. Two out of only seven hundred fifty people. I want to see something done about the genetic connections of the disease, and this may be just the place for research.”

  She motioned to the network of waterways. “They go every direction you can point, but they never stop going to the sea. A thousand directions inside a grand direction. Going forward by going sideways—like the crab. That’s how they get the feeling of the territory. Narrow at the head, wider at the shore. A picture of a life lived well, I deem.”

  At the east window she showed me Point Comfort Island, an uninhabited place heavy with small pines and only a hundred yards across the narrow inlet from the Ewell pier. “Our people won’t live on it. Too far from things. Besides, it’s an island.”

  “What’s Smith?”

  “Land surrounded by water. Like Australia.”

  We went downstairs. Miz Alice pulled out a big bony thing with a vague, skull-like appearance. “Oysterman drudged it from the bay. Brought up a whole passel of bones. In nineteen fifty-nine my students packed two orange crates of the bones off to the Smithsonian. Here’s what they said.” She handed me a letter thanking her and identifying the bones as the spine of an extinct species of whale. “Whale vertebra! Look closely.” She stood the massive bone on end. “Eyes here, mouth, nose. Don’t you see a monster skull?”

  “I lean toward a vertebra.”

  “Ye gods and little fishes! Life is stranger than that!” She looked out the front door. “What do you think of our right, tight isle?”

  “I like it.”

  “So you say. I’ll give you a hiking tour tomorrow over to Rogue’s Point.”

  Miz Alice phoned a friend, the wife of a tonger, to secure a room for me. I walked down to the harbor and ate dinner at Ruke’s Grocery, an old shingled place with a broken cash register drawer standing full and open. Beach flotsam hung about the room: embossed bottles turned iridescent with age, antique running lights, a worn dip net, broken crockery, an eroded block and tackle. The watermen drank coffee topped with melted cheese and lounged about in the sweetness of fresh produce and frying crab cakes. Five boys, all looking alike although only two were brothers, pitched pennies over the floor that rose and dropped like a wooden sea.

  I rambled around the village in the cool night, then, at eight, went to the home of Mrs. Bernice Guy, who showed me my room, a small thing with a sagging bed and oval photographs of women from the time of Chester A. Arthur.

  She said, “Our island’s a nice place, but people visit once and not again. One time, though, in your bed Henry Cabot Lodge slept.”

  The next morning, Miz Alice and I tramped the dusty road over the guts, through the tall waterbush, toward Rogue’s Point. She named the trees, few as they were: loblolly pine, gum, pin oak, red cedar, poplar, even a pomegranate and fig. The larger trees were ones that could survive when the taproot grew long enough to reach salt water. She pointed out the sights too: a house where six boys and six girls were reared to adulthood, a heron pecking and swallowing.

  As we walked, a speeding, unmufflered car forced us to the edge. “Wherever Hoss is going, he’ll soon be there,” she said. “When I came to the island, we all had working feet. Courting was nothing but strolling unless you wanted to go sing in church. We traipsed the lanes at night. Cows would snort at you from shadows and scare the lantern out of your hand. Cattle slept anywhere they pleased because there’s not enough high ground for pasturage, but we never had to cut lawns. Footmen we were then.”

  The car whipped past the other way. “Swoosh, yourself,” she said. “Here we can never be more than a mile or so from any place we can reach by feet, and yet our people aren’t walkers any longer. They keep two cars—one on the island, another at Crisfield. As for kids, they know one thing to do—drive from Ewell to Rhodes Point and back. Up and down, slow or fast, it matters not. They know every inch of the way but can’t distinguish an egret from a crane.”

  The salt marsh was a place of beauty, yet along much of the road lay junk: mattresses, rusted barrels, appliances, a drive shaft, tires, a sofa. At one gut full of cans, Miz Alice said, “I’ve yet to see a bean can sprout. Won’t be long for that gut now.” She shook her head. “The grave’s for people when they’ve seen enough, but how can you see enough when you’re twenty? I read in the Sun that kids feel disconnected. How can that be? Connections lying over the land like stardust. They live in the Land of Nod.”

  We came to a high piling of rusting automobiles, where a teenager was stripping wheels from a smoldering pickup. “He’s found a drowned man with a pocketful of money,” she said. “We’re a dead end here when it comes to merchandise. There aren’t any repair shops on the island, so whatever gets shipped out here stays. We’re at the end of the assembly line, and there it is. Not enough space to hide from our junk. You’d think living beside trash we’d do something about it, but all we do is get used to it. We think it’s the way of things.”

  “Is the cause poverty?”

  “We have no poor except those that choose to be—those that would be poor as gar broth anywhere, the ones who work only so they can quit. No, the cause is education. Not enough of the proper kind at the right time.”

  She told about the organization of the island: no mayor, no jail, no local taxes, no water bill unless you counted the annual twenty dollars for maintenance of the artesian wells. The water, delicious and cold, has its source in the Blue Ridge Mountains. “A natural underground ‘pipeline’ from Virginia to us. I think it was our good water that finally got us to build a sewage system to replace septic tanks. In the nick of time.”

  We came to Rhodes Point, a single street of watery yards hung with fishing nets and stacked with chicken-wire crab pots. Everywhere lay oyster shells, their pearly interiors gleaming like bits of a broken necklace. We weaved in and out of the yards, and Miz Alice commented on more sights: a birdbath supported by three plastic sea horses (“Properly belongs on a wedding cake”), a peculiar house with a chimney above the front door (“Do you enter through the fireplace?”), and, overlooking the bay, an old house with a new picture window on the second floor (“Wouldn’t catch me up there in a nor’wester unless you chloroformed me”). When we came to a front yard with a stone obelisk in memory of Job A. Evans, who drowned in Tangier Sound, I asked why it wasn’t in the cemetery.

  “It’s not rightly a grave. Never found the man. Chesapeake keeps her dead. But the islanders do sometimes dig graves in their yards because land is at such a premium.”

  Yet, next to the old Methodist church, a big wooden building not at all of a size commensurate with the tiny fishing village, was a burial ground of watermen’s tombstones carved with bugeyes and skipjacks.

  Miz Alice stopped at a fresh grave. “Fifteen years old. Sitting in his car one night, made a little sound, and fell over dead with dope. Went to his funeral. The young find their drugs, even out here.”
r />   At one empty home, a large telescope house built by Captain Hoffman, we looked in the broken windows. “Never did get my curiosity cured,” she said. “Some people sit around and wait for the world to poke them. Right here in this old curiosity shop of a world, they say, ‘Poke me, world.’ Well, you have to keep the challenges coming on. Make them up if necessary.”

  23. Alice Venable Middleton on Smith Island, Maryland

  At the end of the street, which was also the end of dry ground, the island became a tangle of water and weed, neither solid nor liquid but a treacherous in-between running most of the way to Tylerton. On the bay side of Rhodes Point stood crab houses and pounds with shedding floats where peelers were held until they molted. “Once the crab peels, you have to pull him out directly or the water will start him to hardening again. That is, if another doesn’t eat him first, soft morsel that he is for a few hours.”

  Tied up at the pier was the Island Belle, an old skinny wooden boat of quaint lines. Miz Alice said, “Listen to this sentence: the Island Belle—she’s a gas boat—she changed our social pattern. Some people wouldn’t agree, but it’s the truth. She made her first crossing the month I arrived sixty-three years ago. She’s never been underwater, and that’s something here.”

  “How was it she changed the island?”

  “Before the Belle, people got to the Eastern Shore once a year—at Christmas. She brought passage. Regular comings and goings. We got outside and the outside got in. She ended our isolation. Carried mail and medicine, the sick and dying. Brought news, food, gas, firewood. Even ideas, I deem. There aren’t many places in the country that can point to one thing and say; ‘Right there, that’s the thing which changed us. That’s what made us the way we are now.’”