Photography By David Harp
Wheels won’t get you to Tangier Island. It’s either take to the skies or cruise the tides, with the latter probably the most apropos way to reach an island smack dab in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay.
And it’s the cruise aboard the ninety- passenger Captain Eulice that makes the journey to Tangier as delightful as the destination.
The former mailboat, built in 1923, is tied up in the picturesque town of Onancock, on the northern end of Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Nineteen-year-old Derrick Savage, the only hand needed to assist Captain Freddie Pruitt on the lazy ninety-minute, twelve-mile crossing, greets the morning passengers as they step onto the turquoise deck.
Even though a light rain persists, all of the passengers shun the boat’s cozy interior for the best view of the waterscape, cushioned benches encircling the small vessel, most protected by an overhang. The leisurely journey sets the pace for what tourists can expect when they reach their destination, not an island of tiki bars and boutiques but an oasis for hardworking watermen struggling to carry on centuries of Chesapeake Bay tradition.
It isn’t long before the island, approximately three miles long and one mile wide, begins to appear in the distance. So flat it seems to float, adrift in the surrounding seas. Erosion has shrunk and reshaped the island that Captain John Smith supposedly visited during his 1608 exploration of the Chesapeake Bay. Though there is no definitive evidence to back it up, the English explorer is also credited with giving Tangier its name.
As the Captain Eulice moves slowly closer, the island takes shape, the jagged outline of trees appear punctuated by the town’s water tower. The next identifiable shape is an arrow-straight steeple pointing heavenward. It belongs to the historic Swain Memorial United Methodist Church, built in 1899. Joined later by the New Testament Congregation Church in 1946, both are guiding forces for the tight-knit community of roughly 650.
Even the movie star power of Paul Newman, who visited the island incognito back in March 1998, and Kevin Costner couldn’t sway the community’s religious convictions. Tangier’s town council voted unanimously against allowing the filming of the movie Message in a Bottle on the island because of the script’s inclusion of swearing, sex, and drinking. A conservative village, Tangier is also a “dry island"—no alcohol is sold. Some islanders favored the economic gain the movie’s exposure would bring, but, fortuitously, Tangier’s unrelenting position brought an even brighter spotlight to the watermen’s hamlet. “We got letters from as far away as England from people who admired us for taking a stand against Hollywood,” says current Tangier Mayor Ed Parks. “The people who make them movies didn’t get Tangier here. The people in those graves got Tangier here,” he says, referring to the gravesites located in the small yards of many of the island’s older homes.
The ladies are waiting as the tour boat pulls into Tangier: Miss Eloise, Becky Jean, Andrea Lynn, Suzanne Carol, Violet Jane. The line-up of these proud working boats go on and on, tied to bent docks that lead to small boxy houses. The rickety structures resemble a tiny floating village, but the only residents are the peeler crabs in season, harvested from the Bay and brought to these crab shanties to shed, their hard shells under the watchful eyes of the watermen. Once shed, they become the Chesapeake delicacies known as soft-shell crabs.
Like sliding foot in boot, Pruitt moors the Captain Eulice at the east end of the island known as the tourist dock. This is one of three tour boats that deliver camera-touting tourists, who for the next four hours, will double the island’s population before they return with appetites satisfied by fresh seafood and imaginations whetted by a glimpse of island life.
A fleet of golf carts await the throng, some the stretch-limo version with four canopied benches. The women drivers chat amongst themselves waiting to give guided tours of their home with a known-by-heart spiel that answers every conceivable question a visitor might have about this unique community.
Their Tangier-twang identifies them as native islanders. Much has been made of the distinct dialect, considered to be Elizabethan in origin and honed by decades of isolation. Their voices have a pleasant lilt, a singsong grace akin to the waves that lap the island’s shores.
To both hear about and eat the catch of the day, one can take a bench aside the tourist dock and enjoy a tasty and reasonably priced soft-shell crab with watermen whose presence speaks well of the sandwiches and quick fare here at the outdoor Waterfront Restaurant, the only eatery on the water.
Waiting with the golf cart brigade, in his “taxi” sporting the Shirley’s Bay View Inn sign is Captain Pruitt’s brother, Wallace Pruitt. Since the beginning of the island’s recorded settlement in the 1700s, only a small number of families have lived on Tangier. Those like the Pruitts and Parks, Crocketts and Dises can trace their roots to ancestors from Cornwall, England, who crossed an ocean to end up inhabiting a Bay island.
“Did you enjoy the trip over to the island?” asks the gregarious man whose grandfatherly manner puts visitors instantly at ease. The former tug bargeman and his wife Shirley are the proprietors of a bed and breakfast that includes quaint cottages and a gingerbread-laced Victorian house, one of the oldest remaining houses on the island. Natives, they returned here after a long stint on the mainland to rescue the “home place,” which they affectionately call the house built by Wallace’s grandfather in 1904, before it was sold. For the last eight years, they have served up watercolor sunsets with unpretentious Tangier hospitality to folks from as far away as England and Belgium. “We don’t put on no airs,” Wallace says simply of their popularity.
Nor do any of the islanders, a slightly reserved lot until they meet up with visitors who appreciate their island life. Here there are no Wal-Marts, movies, malls, or supermarkets. Two small mom-and-pop groceries keep islanders supplied. For shopping excursions or most medical needs, residents board the mailboat bound for Crisfield. The intimate island schoolhouses, catering to grades K-12, recently graduated a class of nine students.
Cars and trucks are now on the island but in very small numbers. The transportation of choice is golf carts followed by bicycles. Homes are clustered on three main ridges, areas of slightly higher ground within marshes teeming with angel-white egrets. Numerous salty brooks weave through the island. Small “footbridges” let residents transverse the marshy land and provide a chance for children to net the elusive blue crab. Come evening, the creatures of the marsh softly serenade the island.
The way to truly experience everyday life on Tangier is to remain when the tour boat contingent returns the island to its residents. But an afternoon is usually sufficient time to see the main sites. The handful of restaurants and gift shops are on or a step off the main street known as Main Ridge. Rent bikes or golf carts or just plain hoof it to find delightful little diversions like the tiny museum tucked in the back of the gift shop called Sandy’s Place. Visiting this one-room museum with a small menagerie of Tangier artifacts—old bottles, models of workboats, watermen’s tools—is more like rummaging through grandma’s attic (that is, if grandpa were a waterman).
Between the six gift shops, one can get just about anything with Tangier Island emblazoned on it. Quirkier offerings include such things as whelk shell mobiles handpainted with island scenes and dangling pieces of watercolored beach glass to homespun booklets of old family stories. Tangier postcards, with beautiful black-and-white line drawings depicting island scenes and originally created by the late Tangier artist Vernon Bradshaw, are popular keepsakes.
“Recipe row” is located on a chain link fence on Main Ridge heading to the county dock. For years an industrious islander has hung plastic containers filled with packs of recipes. For a dollar—left on the honor system—the purchaser can take home instructions on how to make Aunt Nellie’s Crabmeat Casserole or perhaps Mom’s Coleslaw.
Much is said about the hardy watermen, but the island women are a resilient breed as well. Out of necessity they are mothers of invention. When Wanda Marshall’s husband, Ted, was killed seventeen years ago in a crab dredging accident, her income stopped. With four children to feed and few options, she set out a table of homemade items to sell during the tourist season. Later she was able to build a small store in her front yard, and Wanda’s Gift Shop has remained a successful business. Through the tough times, Marshall had the support of her fellow islanders. “It’s different livin’ here in Tangier,” says Marshall, who sells a variety of souvenir bric- a-brac. “When a family has a hardship, it’s those we’ve known all our lives. It saddens everyone—we’re like a huge family.”
Also on Main Ridge is another example of determined Tangier women. The cozy four-year-old eatery known as Fisherman’s Corner Restaurant is noteworthy not only for its awesome crab soup and fresh-from-the-watermen seafood but for the ladies who opened it without a drop of restaurant or business experience. Stella Brown, Irene Eskridge, Noel Marshall, and Stuart Parks knew they had to do something when their watermen husbands were finding it harder and harder to make a living on the water. State-imposed regulations aimed at rebuilding the dwindling crab population have hurt watermen here, say islanders. A moratorium on the sale of new commercial crab licenses has been the most painful, say the women, since the next generation of watermen are being denied their due, and young people have to leave the island to find a livelihood. “In twenty years we are going to be a bunch of old people here,” says Noel Marshall. “There are some who are going off to college and that’s good, but I’ve seen kids who were born to be watermen. They want to do like their fathers, their grandfathers, their great-grandfathers.”
Mayor Parks appreciates both the beauty and the hard life Tangier represents. He left the island for the Virginia mainland and a job at DuPont, but he counted the days until he could return home. “It took me twenty-five years, two weeks, and two days, and I took the best thing in Richmond with me,” Parks says of his wife, Susan.
As mayor he is working to protect his island home, fighting for new jetties to stem the island’s rapid erosion and impressing on government officials that fishing regulations shouldn’t render Tangier watermen a dying breed. “We don’t have the luxury other watermen have to earn money outside the water,” he says of those on the mainland. “On the island you crab or work the water, that’s it. It’s our heritage, it’s our whole lives.”
Donna Bozza Rich, a frequent CL contributor, writes about the people and places of Virginia’s Eastern Shore.
