Island of Calm

Back in Ewell I ducked out of the noonday sun into the information center for the Martin Wildlife Refuge, two rooms in an old house with no one in attendance. There were the requisite dioramas and waterfowl population statistics, the news on ibises and ospreys and eagles and peregrine falcons, on mink and foxes and otters and terra-pins, all of them refuge denizens no doubt happier for the fact that I couldn't go over to see them. I walked over to the new Smith Island Center, a museum of island life and history where there were recordings of the local dialect and, in an exhibit on island domestic life, a sculpted model of the famous Smith Island 10-layer cake (that night, I had the real thing at Ruke's). I ate dinner like a waterman, at 2 in the afternoon -- buffet at the Bayside Inn, crab soup, crab cakes, clam fritters, corn pudding, stewed tomatoes made with cinnamon and sugar, green beans, macaroni salad, cole slaw and applesauce custard pie, washed down with iced tea: Smith Island is dry as a bone. Then I took a nap.

At night, I strolled over to the only place open on Smith Island on a weekday night, Katie's Ice Cream. Katie scooped me a cone and we got to talking. She was a "foreigner," as nonnative islanders are known. I asked her what had brought her there, and she smiled and said, "Him." She meant her husband, a big waterman sitting across from the counter, with their baby in his lap.

It turned out that I had hit Smith Island during camp-meeting week. There has been a Methodist camp meeting every summer here since 1887. Given that Methodism is not only this unincorporated community's lone established religion, but the lone establishment, period, camp meeting has become an important social as well as ecclesiastical event. "I don't know how religious people here are," one islander told me, "but they use this as an excuse to get together with their family and friends."

Camp meeting is held in a big, screen-sided wooden building called the Wilson-Butler Tabernacle. On the first night of my stay, a Sunday, folks were arriving for the opening service as I watched from a bench between the tabernacle and the town baseball diamond. It was odd to see men in ties and women in heels on a hard-working island in high summer. On Nantucket, at that very moment, there were no doubt venture capitalists in T-shirts eating smoked bluefish pate.

Nearly everyone inside the tabernacle was briskly moving the sultry air around with paddlelike paper fans. Kids were squirming and being shushed. As the sun went down, and with cicadas buzzing an off-and-on chorus, local trios and soloists got up and sang hymns, interrupted only occasionally by out-and-out preaching. Finally, the star of the evening took the podium. He was a Virginia TV evangelist, with a baritone so thick and rich it could have frosted a 10-layer cake. He sang wistful religious songs of his own composition, with recorded accompaniment and backup, a sort of sacred karaoke. His message, between songs, was more benediction than brimstone.

Late that night, there was a spectacular electrical storm. It didn't rain much, but the thunder was terrific, and the sky was more light than dark for the better part of an hour. Between the side door of my motel and the tabernacle was the Ewell cemetery, and the gravestones flashed a bright metallic gray in the lightning. Branches swayed and cracked. Not far into the storm, the power blew out, and stayed out for five hours. Later, I heard how the electric company crew had come over by boat from Tangier Island in the middle of the night to get things going again.

The next night the preacher really got wound up, using the storm as the text for his exegesis. The Lord, he told the tabernacle gathering, had "walked through the community by way of lightning to kiss you to sleep . . . and walked by without harming you." What we had experienced wasn't danger, he explained, that mighty baritone rising: "That was mercy walking above."

Well, sitting on my bench outside the tabernacle, I didn't know if the storm had been danger, or mercy, or merely a sound-and-light show occasioned by the most prosaic of clashes between two weather fronts. But what fascinated me was that here was a place small enough, intimate enough, for that storm to have seemed personal and specific, like a house fire or a bad day's crabbing. Never mind if that same storm had hit Ocean City or Baltimore -- here, it seemed altogether plausible for a folk theologian to interpret it as part of the schedule of events for camp meeting.

Now it was nearly time to leave, and I had yet to figure out how to get to Tylerton. The morning boat from Crisfield stopped there after leaving Ewell, but it looked like taking that route would leave me stranded until the next day -- and the B&B on Tylerton was booked up. I had posed my dilemma to Katie, of Katie's Ice Cream, and she'd had an idea. "Find a teenage boy," she said. "They all have skiffs from the time they're babies. You see one standing around, he'll be happy to take you over for 10 or 15 bucks and wait for you while you walk around."

Katie's suggestion made perfect sense. How else would a boy make a quick killing like that on Smith Island, assuming he wasn't already out on the water with his old man? I went down to the harbor the next afternoon, and saw two kids bring a skiff up to the dock. The older boy, who was handling the outboard, nosed right in at a good clip, then threw the motor into reverse and swung neatly around, parallel to the dock, just the way the skipper does with the ferry. The younger boy hopped out and tied up.

The older boy was tall and rangy, maybe 16 or 17, with short blond hair and cool-guy wraparound sunglasses. He and his friend scooted over to help load cargo onto the ferry, which was getting ready to leave, and when they came back to the skiff I called him over to where I was standing.

"Can you take me to Tylerton in your boat?"