By William G. Scheller
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, March 12, 2000
I was sitting down to a plate of soft-shell crabs in the back room at Ruke's store and restaurant, which is one of only three places to eat in the town of Ewell on Smith Island, when a young couple came in with a snazzy new stroller. In the stroller was a 4-day-old boy, pink and wrinkly. The waitresses started fussing him up, joking about how he was a "keeper," like a legal-size crab.
Parents and baby were just back from the Maryland mainland, where the nearest hospital is, and although there were probably 300 years or more of Smith Island in that baby, it was almost as if they had gone to the mainland to get him. They had brought their little keeper back the way you'd bring back a stroller from the Wal-Mart in Salisbury, the way you bring back everything else to Smith Island. The island is self-sufficient in crabs, and not much else.
Smith Island is Maryland's only inhabited Chesapeake Bay island unattached to the mainland by bridge or causeway. It lies 12 miles by boat west of the town of Crisfield, across the arm of the bay called Tangier Sound (Tangier, another remote yet populated island seven miles south of Smith, belongs to Virginia). John Smith was the first European to chart Smith Island, in 1608, but it was named instead after Henry Smith of Jamestown, who was granted 1,000 acres here in 1679.
By that time emigrants from Cornwall and Dorsetshire already had settled on the island, by way of Jamestown and Virginia's Accomack County. They were farmers, who later turned from the poor land to the rich bay and became watermen. The baby at Ruke's is their linear descendant.
So is the crab industry, for nearly every man on Smith Island is a waterman today. Most of the soft-shell crabs eaten in the United States are caught within a 50-mile radius of Smith Island, and when they aren't in season the islanders take them in the hard shell. Crab shanties line the waterfronts of Smith Island's settlements, and the watermen's trim, low-slung work boats crowd the docks.
The name "Smith Island" is deceptive, suggesting a single shoreline wrapped around a neat bundle of dry land. But Smith Island is really dozens of islands, some of them mere hummocks of black needle rush, smooth cordgrass and other wind-swayed marsh plants, threaded by a maze of tidal channels. The whole cluster amounts to some 8,000 ragged acres, of which perhaps 900 are habitable. Most of the rest, roughly the northern part of this patchwork of land and water, make up the Martin National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge grew out of a gift to the federal government from the late Glenn L. Martin (as in Martin Marietta), and is off-limits to visitors.
There are three communities on Smith Island. Ewell is the metropolis, with a 1996 population of 215. Rhodes Point, a mile to the south, counts 85 souls along its single road, paralleling the narrow waterway called Sheep's Pen Gut. And Tylerton sits all by itself, 80 citizens strong, on its own little islet. It had a school until 1997, when the state decided that its two students would have to make the daily cruise to classes in Ewell. That was the end of the last one-room schoolhouse in Maryland.
None of all this reaches more than five feet above sea level. The average elevation is two feet. I brought my bicycle to Smith Island, and it was the only one I saw with more than one speed. If the global warming people are right, the last crab shanty on Smith Island will disappear even before the Grand Canal sloshes into the vestibule of St. Mark's in Venice. Already, Rhodes Point is struggling with relentless erosion. "If the sea doesn't cover us over, if people don't stop eating crabs, and if the good Lord's willing," one islander has remarked, "there'll be a Smith Island maybe another hundred years." As of now, the first item on the list might be the iffiest.
I suppose it was the business about Elizabethan accents that first got me interested in Smith Island. You always hear about these places where people are supposed to still speak Elizabethan English -- the backwoods of Appalachia, or islands off the Atlantic coast -- and even though you know that Primestar and DirectTV have doubtless blasted anything that quaint off the face of the earth, you go anyway, hoping to hear what the most elegant instrument ever devised for human communication actually sounded like. Nobody, of course, has the damnedest idea. Given the places where the legend holds, this usually leaves you to wonder if Sir Walter Raleigh came across like George Jones, or if Hamlet's Ophelia could have sung "Crazy" like Patsy Cline.
But Smith Island's dialect isn't standard American Southern, as if there were such a thing. Linguists group it with what they call Tidewater English, and it is built around some interesting vowel sounds. "Round" comes out "rayund"; "room" is "reum"; and "house" reached my ear as "hayose" or "haise," depending on which end of Ewell I had pedaled to. Still, nobody said "prithee" or "forsooth" while I was there.
A tourist's day on Smith Island runs at a stately pace. The farthest exploration I could make, without a boat, was to bicycle out to Rhodes Point. I had the narrow road almost to myself. There are very few automobiles on Smith Island -- some people get around exclusively by golf cart -- and at least half the cars I saw were innocent of Maryland tags (one Pontiac seemed, judging from the rear plate, to be registered in the state of Dale Earnhardt).
Wheeling alone across the great salt marsh, I watched snowy egrets and great blue herons, and stopped once to follow a fiddler crab's circuitous crossing of the blacktop: He was the safest crab in all of Chesapeake Bay. I got to Rhodes Point and found a row of houses, some lived in and some abandoned; crab shanties with saltwater bubbling through trays where "peelers" (crabs on their way to being soft-shells) finish molting; a trim church and graveyard; and a boat repair yard. I didn't see a soul.
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?"
"I can take you over there," he said.
"Ain't nothing to do there," the younger boy piped up.
"I know," I said. "I just want to see it."
The older boy said he could go tomorrow morning, maybe even this evening. He used the word "evening," which you don't hear kids use much anymore.
Then the two of them just walked away, "Well, tomorrow or this evening?" I said.
"I'll have to see what I have to do this evening," the older kid said.
"Where'll I find you?"
"I'll see you walking around."
"How much do you want, to take me there?"
"We'll settle that when I do it," he said, all sunglasses and self-possession. I walked around plenty, but I never saw him again.
Before leaving on the 7:30 boat the next morning, I biked down to the Driftwood General Store, the only place on Smith Island where you can get something to eat at that hour. I sat in a white plastic chair on the concrete porch, sipping orange juice and coffee and pulling the wrapper off a Tastykake as I watched the morning traffic across the street at the dark and ancient post office. After I finished my Tastykake I went into the store to talk for a few minutes with the owner, Steve Eades. I told him about my frustrated attempt to get to Tylerton, and Eades said, "You should have said something yesterday. I would have taken you over in my boat."
I left for the mainland along with four islanders, the day's mail and 2,016 live soft-shell crabs. The crabs were packed with wet seaweed in heavy cardboard boxes, 12 dozen to the box, picked up at a string of shanties the boat stopped at after leaving the Ewell town dock. It was a fine, luminous morning as I stood in the stern, crab boxes leaking on my feet, watching Ewell slip behind us as we cleared the channel called the Big Thorofare and made for the open bay. Off to port, the clapboard straggle of Rhodes Point rose above the marsh. Farther still in the same direction, isolated by tawny reeds and flat blue water, the gables and squat Methodist steeples of Tylerton shone glossy white against the sky. Unattainable Tylerton, a backwater's backwater: I wished I had been able to get there -- but it's always nice to save something for next time.
William G. Scheller last wrote for the Magazine about snowmobiling on the Gaspe Peninsula.
How To
To get there: Ferries and tour boats leave for Smith Island out of Crisfield, Md. (410-425-4471 or 410-425-5931; 410-425-2771). From the mainland side of Chesapeake Bay, tours leave in summer from Point Lookout, Md. (410-425-2771) and from Reedville, Va. (804-453-3430). To stay: On Smith Island, the Ewell Tide Inn B&B (410-425-2141) looked nice, but was booked when I was there. The air-conditioned Smith Island Motel (410-425-3321) was small and serviceable, with shared bathrooms; it opens for the season in May. The B&B in Tylerton, should you manage to get there, is called the Inn of Silent Music (410-425-3541). To eat: Ruke's has a great soft-shell crab plate and crab cakes, and the Bayside Inn (open only till 4 p.m.) puts out a buffet with a lot of Southern comfort food. There's no place open for breakfast; you either buy something the night before (the motel has a common fridge) or grab coffee and a packaged snack at the Driftwood General Store. -- W.G.S.