Photography by Kirsten Beckerman
Waterfowl Caller
Hunter Phillips, 14
There is a certain lyrical musicianship to calling waterfowl—a combination of blowing and speaking actual words to lure birds in, says champion caller Hunter Phillips. “You just have to learn the language,” says Phillips, fourteen, who explains it took him “many years of practice” to perfect it. “The duck call, the basic quack, is ‘Quit.’”
Demonstrating, Phillips rattles off a machine gun volley of quacks. “That’s ‘Quit, quit, quit.’ And for the basic honk, you want, ‘To wit.’”
At the age of seven, Phillips placed seventh in the World Goose Calling Competition in Easton. Since then, he has won thirteen first-place awards in either goose or duck calling.
“I grew up around ducks,” says Phillips, a freshman at Stephen Decatur High School, who lives in Ocean City. “I had ducks in my backyard, raised ducks. So I know what they sound like.”
“That’s how we both got into it, actually,” says Phillips’ father, Glen, also a champion caller. “When I was his age, I had ducks. I raised waterfowl—swans, ducks, geese.”
In 1999 the father and son formed Little Quackers, an outdoor youth club that hosts an annual calling competition at the Maryland Watermen’s Association trade expo in Ocean City. Phillips and his father also conduct calling seminars once a month at Gander Mountain outdoors store in Salisbury, and sell a line of game calls designed by Glen—the Little Quacker for youths and Bottoms Up for adults.
Hunter Phillips doesn’t consider the art of calling old-fashioned, but he’s very much aware of its traditional roots on the Eastern Shore. In 2004, Phillips and his father were invited to represent Maryland in “Water Ways,” an exhibit celebrating maritime communities from Long Island to North Carolina, part of the 38th Annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival, held on The Mall in Washington, D.C. That same year, Phillips’ calling talents were tapped for From Bridge to Boardwalk, an audio CD that explores Maryland’s Eastern Shore culture.
Phillips hopes to pass his skills on to future generations of waterfowl callers, and looks forward to the day when he can take his own children into the marshes. He also says that he’d like to make the outdoors his career, possibly as a hunting guide or game warden. But whatever the job, he’s adamant: “I want to be outside.”—J.T.
Decoy Carver
Colin McNair, 21
Colin McNair sold his first hand-carved decoy for five dollars to his handwriting teacher in kindergarten when he was six years old. It was then that he realized he could do something he loved, and make money doing it. Even at that young age, McNair had a passion for turning a block of wood into something majestic.
Now twenty-one, it’s not surprising that McNair exercised his artistic proclivity so early. His father, Mark McNair, is a carver. So is his older brother, Ian. Since Colin was home- schooled through fourth grade, it was easy for him and his older brother to slip into their father’s workshop. Now it’s the father who learns from his sons. “At this point in our relationship, they’ve long since passed the point of asking my opinion—they’ve been working from their own ideas for years,” says Mark McNair. “That’s such a great feeling to see what’s coming out of them. We really learn from each other.”
Colin McNair’s objects are carved by hand and given an aged patina using a technique that remains a family secret. “As soon as I could hold a tool, I was doing something with altering wood or painting,” recalls McNair. “It was a natural thing to do. My father did it and was always encouraging. And I’ve had a lot of financial success with it ridiculously early.”
These days, McNair’s decoys average $1,200.
The monetary rewards are only a fraction of what McNair loves about his work. (Though, he says, “We try not to call it work.”) He enjoys drawing inspiration from the family’s waterfront home in Craddockville, Virginia, working with his brother and father, and getting plugged into the interesting people who inhabit the “decoy subculture.” Though he often works eight- to ten-hour days, preferably working into the night, the freedom of self-employment is also nice. “If the tide is right, and it looks like the fish might be biting, I’m gonna be out in the boat,” he says.
McNair, who spent one year in art school before attending the College of Charleston to study biology with a studio art minor, finds it easier to call himself a sculptor when explaining what he does for a living. “I enjoy taking trees that have just been cut down and refining them until you end up with this object that will either be hunted over—which is a pretty sweet feeling—or you have a piece of art that people will appreciate. I love the process of creating.”—C.M.
The Farmers
Kristen Nickerson, 34, Jennifer Debnam, 39, and Bill Langenfelder, 38
After graduating from college, Kristen Nickerson, (then Langenfelder) actually toiled as a certified CPA. “I worked for about a year and decided I didn’t like sitting behind a desk,” Nickerson recalls. “But it wasn’t automatic that I could come back to the farm—the operation needs to be big enough and there needs to be enough money to support someone—so when the opportunity came about, I jumped on it immediately.”
Nickerson, along with her siblings, Bill Langenfelder, thirty-eight, and Jennifer Debnam, thirty-nine, are the sixth generation of Langen-felders to work the family farm. (In an unusual twist, none of their spouses work on the farm with them.) All three were lured into the family business by a mutual affection for open space, watching things grow and give birth, and the importance of the family legacy.
“I really missed the attitude of a family business where you’re all pulling together, all working together for the same cause,” says Debnam, who studied agriculture in college and worked briefly for Farm Credit Bank before returning to the familial vocation.
The farm has advanced well beyond the scope of previous generations. The family oversees 2,600 acres of cropland and operates a 700 sow-swine operation in Kennedyville. The cropland is managed using advances such as GPS mapping to determine crop yields. In the sow barn, even feeding is fully automated; a computer controls how much each pig eats based on information delivered to a monitor from its radio frequency ear tag.
It was a different story when the siblings were young, learning the farming business working side-by-side with their parents, in Howard County. (Development forced the family to move the business to Kent County twenty years ago.) The advances in the industry are also what make it such a tough business to break into. All three say they are fortunate because it’s hard for a young person to get access to capital and land unless they take over a family farm.
The siblings hope to preserve a way of life for their children, should they choose to join the business. “Any time they’re building houses anywhere there’s less farmland, and it’s not like they are making any more,” says Langenfelder. “I think we have a viable business here, and I don’t want to see it all go away. I’d hate to see the Delmarva Peninsula turn into a metropolis.”—C.M.
Crab Processor
Clay Brooks, 29
It’s 3 p.m., the busiest time of day for the J.M. Clayton Company, when watermen arrive with their blue crab catch. Clay Brooks stands at the company’s dock in Cambridge ready to buy the crabs, then weigh and sort them by size into batches to be steamed and picked, or sold live.
“I’ve always been down here,” says Brooks, the first of the family’s fifth generation to enter the business, founded by Captain John Morgan Clayton in 1890. “I can remember following my dad, [Jack], around, stapling up seafood boxes and packing up crab meat in Super Giant label cups.”
After attending community college, Brooks joined Clayton ten years ago.
“I’ve always been a hands-on person. This is a hands-on job,” he explains. “I could never sit at a desk long enough. My brother sells insurance. I just couldn’t do it.”
In season, Brooks fills the workday with the chores that take blue crabs by the bushels from watermen’s traps to dining tables around the world. He loads frozen crab picked by American and guest workers onto company trucks, oversees factory repairs, and checks containers of lump and backfin meat for cartilage.
Because his childhood memory of annual crab harvests is hazy, Brooks can’t compare the Chesapeake Bay’s former bounty with its current yield. Other changes, though, are hard to miss. “You don’t find too many young watermen these days,” he says.
Day to day, Brooks frets more about the legal quotas for crabs and guest workers that imperil his family’s livelihood. With new bushel limits on commercial harvests of female crabs, there may be “no product to pack,” he muses. And the national cap on guest workers allowed into the United States could lead to a shortage of pickers, Brooks adds.
He didn’t come to Clayton to witness its demise, though. Not with his baby son, John Clayton Brooks IV, waiting to follow in the family business. “It would be cool to give him the opportunity to join the company,” Brooks says.
And whether or not little John follows his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grand-father to the Cambridge dock, it will be important “to show him that, ‘This is where your family has been,’” Brooks says. “There are not too many companies that have been around for over one hundred years, not to mention family-owned companies.”—S.S.
Muskrat Skinner
Trish Hayden, 16
Sixteen-year-old Trish Hayden may “dress girly” but is quick to point out that anything the boys can do, she can do, too—and that includes skinning a muskrat in about thirty seconds. A senior at South Dorchester High School, Hayden began skinning at age eight, learning the skill from her father, Joe, a Hooper’s Island waterman.
Since beginning to skin competitively, Hayden has won six first-place trophies in the junior division of the World Champion-ship Muskrat Skinning Contest, held at Dorchester County’s annual National Outdoor Show. The 2009 show in February will be her final junior contest before moving on to the adult division when she turns eighteen later that year.
The custom may be revolting to some, but trapping and skinning have been a fabric of Dorchester culture for generations. “In the twenties and thirties, it was an important part of the food chain,” says Rhonda Aaron, Hayden’s mentor and current women’s champion. “Besides the money paid for the hide, it also helped put food on the table. When you’re feeding eight to twelve children, you rely on what is available.”
There aren’t many girls Hayden’s age that skin, and she acknowledges that her friends are a bit grossed-out by the whole affair. “They just think it’s disgusting that I would skin a rat inside out and get blood all over me,” she says. “I love it and they’re like, ‘Oooh. How can a girl love it?’”
“It’s so unique and special. When a younger kid asks to learn how to skin, we try and take them under our wing and help them,” says Aaron, who estimates she’s mentored six or seven kids over the years—both girls and boys. “We don’t want to see it vanish.”
Hayden doesn’t want to see the custom vanish either, and realizes that a new generation of skinners will be the life blood, not only of the craft, but of the Outdoor Show itself. “You feel like you’re keeping the tradition going,” she says of the annual event, which celebrates its 64th anniversary this February. “I think it’s amazing when you can keep something going for so long.”—J.T.
The Watermen
Brian Hambleton, 21, Brooks Hambleton, 13, and P.T. Hambleton, 20
Brian Hambleton and his cousin P.T. Hambleton were probably destined to be watermen. Both their fathers are watermen. Their grandfather still owns P.T. Hambleton Seafood in Bozman, Maryland. The boys were just kids when their fathers bought them their commercial fishing licenses to ensure their future spot on the water. “It was the best job for me to work at, and for now it still is,” says Brian. “It’s good money compared to any land job I could get right now, but the future ain’t lookin’ too bright.”
Despite the dire condition of the Bay, both Brian, twenty-one, and P.T., twenty, say they enjoy the work. “It’s good scenery, you’re alone, it’s good money for the time you’re working,” says Brian. “It’s a real laid-back life. You stand there with a dip net in one hand and steer with the other. You can eat, drink, and smoke a cigarette while you’re doing it.”
“I never encouraged him, I just told him, ‘While you’re still in school, it’s a good way to make some summertime money,’” says Brian’s father, Todd, who starting taking his son out with him at age fourteen. “Once he got out of school, I urged him to go get some higher education because he could always come back to do this. But if they’re willing to work hard, I think this is a good life.”
P.T. says he was eight or ten when he started to work on a boat. “When I was a kid, it was good money to go out and work during the summer,” says P.T., whose thirteen-year-old brother, Brooks, works with him when he isn’t in school. “And it’s a family tradition.” Now he enjoys being his own boss and running his own boat. “The worst part is all the ups,” P.T. quips. “Baitin’ up and gettin’ up.”
Both Hambletons speculate about whether they can stay in the field forever, but they’re fairly certain the family tradition will end in their generation. “For fun, it would be fine [for my kids], but not for a job,” says P.T. “You have no paid vacation or benefits. I guess college is the way to go.”
When Todd Hambleton was still on the water, he says oysters and crabs were abundant, and the standard of living was more manageable in Eastern Shore communities. But he’s proud that another generation is trying to keep the old tradition alive. “It’s good to see, because if a lot of these fishermen weren’t here, the whole industry would collapse, and a whole way of life would be lost—and its people, too.”—C.M.
Smith Island Cake Baker
Dana Evans, 41
Growing up on Smith Island, Dana Evans passed countless hours in the kitchen, stacking thin layers of cake and icing into moist, sweet edible towers under her mother’s supervision. Whether intended for a weekend treat, a Methodist Church benefit, or a get-well gesture for an ailing island neighbor, the cake was an extravagant but unexceptional part of Smith Island life.
Evans couldn’t know the weekly baking ritual would serve as an apprenticeship in a traditional art form that years later would capture worldwide attention as Maryland’s official dessert.
Evans had an inkling of the confection’s appeal when she opened Classic Cakes (classicsmithislandcakes.com, 410-860-5300) in Salisbury five years ago—with her mother, Doris Bradshaw, once again by her side. From the first day, customers have queued outside the bakery, which specializes in nine-layer Smith Island cakes made in a profusion of flavors, from chocolate and banana to Butterfinger and red velvet. “I would have never thought that someday I would be selling hundreds and hundreds of cakes every week,” says Evans, forty-one.
In April, the Maryland legislature designated the Smith Island cake as the official state dessert. “I think I’m still in shock that I’m a part of something that has been put out there in the world, something that we took for granted growing up,” Evans says, who has shipped her cakes as far as Iraq. “It means so much to me and my family.”
To remain vibrant, traditions must evolve, and that applies to Evans’ popular innovation: Smith Island wedding cakes, disguised by her pastry chef in fondant or icing. “You don’t know it’s a Smith Island cake until you cut it,” Evans says.
Evans’ mother was a bit of a Smith Island cake pioneer herself. As a child, Evans loved chocolate, and her brother preferred vanilla. Bradshaw would accommodate both children by icing a half circle of each flavor on every cake layer. That’s one twist too many on tradition. “I won’t do that at the shop,” says Evans, who can ice as many as 1,500 cake layers on a busy day.
Since it opened, Classic Cakes has tripled its cake sales and space. The staff has multiplied to twelve, including Dana’s daughter, Stephanie Evans, twenty-three, a partner in her mother’s business. The younger Evans didn’t bake as a child. But now, her proud mother says, “She can put a cake together quicker than I can.”—S.S.
