Blue Highways (63 page)

“A good job this one is,” he said. “It’s no bosses on the water, excepting one—weather. No bosses is better than money.”

After fifty minutes, we headed up an inlet with two marshy islands on each side and pulled in to the pier at Ewell, the main village of Smith Island; the boat would remain overnight at Tylerton on the southern end of the cluster of islands that comprise Smith. Marshall gave directions to Miz Alice’s. “Look for a little skipjack on the weathervane. ‘Scud In,’ her place is.”

I put my duffel over my shoulder and took off down the dirt lanes, under the steeple, toward the west side of the village, to “Scud In,” a three-story red-shingled house overlooking an intricate network of coves and guts in a marsh that stretched so far I couldn’t see the bay. Scrawled on the front door was
BACK DOOR!
That’s where I went.

A
LICE
Venable Middleton was one of those octogenarians who make age look like something you don’t want to miss. She stood in her kitchen and watched through the window as I stepped around her garden of kale, collard, and corn.

“Come in and close the door on that wind. I’m Alice. You’re here about our place. Well,
Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres
. And so is Smith Island. We really should say ‘islands.’ How’s your Caesar?”

“A few years behind me, but I remember the three parts of Gaul.”

“I taught school here more years than the bottom’s got oysters. Retired eighteen years now. You passed my grammar school coming out.”

“I think I passed everything—your school, the grocery, the church.”

“The historical marker at the church—did you see it?”

“I read it.”

“I wrote it. They limit you to forty-two words on the official state markers. Not much, but it’s all cast in bronze. I like that. Runs in the family. My father was an ironmaster—a skilled blacksmith. Worked with the watermen all his life. Repaired sailing ships. Oh, but it was an art in his hammer.” She swung her arm to show me. “Like this. Tap, tap, tap, atap, BANG! When they packed me off to the academy in Baltimore, I wanted to study something in the mechanical field—like ironworking, a strong and lasting craft. When my grandmother heard about that, she went hobble-dee-hoy. Wouldn’t have a granddaughter in
that
work! Today, I could have been the oldest living woman blacksmith on the bay. Miz Smithy of Smith Island. So much for that.”

Alice Middleton was born in Somerset County on the Eastern Shore but in 1915 moved to the six-by-four-mile island. Her husband and elder daughter died some years ago and her younger daughter lived in Princess Anne on the Shore, so now Miz Alice was alone with a cat named Jersey Red and a small nameless stray that attacked anything that moved.

“We’ve had electricity on the island for only the last twenty-nine years. Phones for less than that. We’ve been a rustic tribe.” She paused. “Tea or a jigger of wine?”

“A jigger, if it’s all the same to you.”

“Pull a glass from the cupboard—don’t get a chipped one.” She put a small pot of water on to heat, and we sat at her kitchen table, and she talked. After ten minutes when the water still had not come to a boil, she said, “See if we have a frog in the pot.”

I looked. “No frog but a million bubbles.”

“So we’ve answered that question.” She moved yesterday’s
Baltimore Sun
out of the way and pushed forward a cup in her favorite pattern—Copper Lustre Tea Leaf—to have it ready for the pouring. “Now, here’s about John Smith, the Pocahontas John Smith. First white man to visit our island. Named after him. He was out looking for harbors and salt for the Jamestown colony in sixteen oh eight. In his log he mentions the island and says the waters teemed so with fish that when he dipped a ship’s skillet overboard it filled with several species. Got stung by a ray for his dipping, but he liked the bay islands. He thought heaven and earth had never agreed better in framing a place for man. He said it best in four words, ‘The land is kind.’ Somewhere in America they should cast those words in bronze. Cast them big. THE LAND, MY FRIENDS, IS KIND. But for years this was a dark and bloody ground during the fighting between the watermen of Maryland and Virginia. The Oyster Wars. They couldn’t agree on who had the right to which oystering rocks. Killed each other over an inch. Then the oysters began dying out in the lower end of the bay—a parasite called MSX did it—and that’s when the warring stopped. People said MSX was the hand of God.”

“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. Don’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.”