Way of Life Slipping Away Along Chesapeake's Edge

Gallery

Watermen Face Troubled Times

Watermen along the Chesapeake Bay face difficult times -- as dwindling crab and oyster populations leave many without enough to make a decent living, and forcing changes within the communities that reside along the bay.

» LAUNCH PHOTO GALLERY

"I just always wanted one," he said.

He bought his in 1991, from a heartbroken couple down the bay in Deal Island.

The Abbotts.

St. Michaels, Md.

"Two minutes, ladies and gentlemen," George Dabrowski said into the microphone. "Warm your little daubers up."

Saturday night bingo in St. Michaels. A glimpse inside one of the bay's strangest and most successful places: a real Chesapeake town that has thrived by playing a fake one.

"This is worth 238 bucks," Dabrowski said, bewildered, as he described the prize for one bingo game. It was a white leather purse from Coach. The players pored over their cards, holding fat markers to daub the numbers. "I never knew that a 'Small White Flap Soho' would be worth so much."

Bingo here used to mean a $5 entrance fee, a small crowd of parents and die-hard bingo ladies, and modest gift baskets as prizes. Then, a couple of years ago, an idea: Parents donated money to buy Coach and Vera Bradley bags to give away as prizes, and they upped the entrance fee to $15.

More than 400 people showed. The Parent Teacher Organization's take zoomed from $1,200 to $12,000.

"We all kind of went, 'Huh,' " said Lisa Hayes, the PTO president. It was a different town out there.

To a casual observer, this appears to be the history of St. Michaels: In 1813, townsfolk hung lanterns in trees to trick attacking British ships, causing most of their cannonballs to miss the town. Then, everyone painted their house pastel and began selling knicknacks and espresso.

For decades, though, St. Michaels was like dozens of other places on the Eastern Shore: "a jerkwater crab town," as somebody in Tilghman said. Oyster-shell streets. Fighting in the bars. It smelled like funky marsh mud and the pickled bull lips that watermen used for bait.

But as the Chesapeake declined, St. Michaels found a way out: It built an economy that relied on the bay mainly as scenery.

After the first span of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge was built in 1952, it drew in tourists with the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum and the Crab Claw restaurant. Then the real estate agents descended, and this became the capital's Cape Cod, a getaway for the likes of Donald H. Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

But walk around with a native, and it's obvious: The Town That Fooled the British is now fooling itself a little bit.

"This . . . building right here used to be the town five-and-dime," said Virginia "Ginny" Adams, 74. She was standing in front of a "home decor gallery," with an metal sculpture of a giraffe out front. "Now it's filled with all kind of junk holes."

The old barbershop is an art gallery. The funeral parlor is an inn (they get a kick out of that one, tourists sleeping in those rooms). And the grocery store, where it smelled like wood varnish and a quarter bought 25 pieces of candy, became an antique shop . . .

"Junk store," Adams said.

. . . and now sells rugs.

"If people come here thinking that these stores were here . . . no," said Hayes, who is Adams's niece. "There was stores here, but I don't think they were the kind of stores that would have drawn people from D.C."

Hayes sees the bigger picture here, realizes that her own kids missed the childhood she had. They didn't, for instance, learn what to call water that is untroubled by wind. The old folks here don't say "calm": The Chesapeake pronunciation rhymes with "jam," with no hint of an "L."

"I said, 'It's cam, honey. Remember that,' " she said.

But the new St. Michaels paid for college scholarships for her two girls and provided the kind of jobs that will allow them to come back. "It's not a bad change, because it kept our community alive. It kept our schools open," she said.

To Adams, a slim, sly woman, the changes are just humorous. She and Hayes stop in front of an old building that has been a funeral parlor, a restaurant and now sells . . .

Well, it sells antiques.

"It's just junk," Adams said. "I would have thrown it away."

Epilogue

In these three places, life goes on despite the bay's condition. The trick is learning to live without it.

Jeanne Webster Abbot now works as a geriatric nursing assistant at Deer's Head Hospital Center, a state long-term care facility in Salisbury, Md., 29 miles inland.

One recent day, patients were wheeled into the dayroom, where a sign reminded them: "The season is AUTUMN. The weather is COOL. The next holiday is THANKSGIVING."

"Is your tummy better?" Jeanne Webster Abbott, in nurse's whites, asks an elderly man in a wheelchair. "Yeah," he says softly.

Abbott said this is how her prayers were answered. She's living in Salisbury with her fiance, a retiree named Ron Goodwin.

"It's what God made me to do," she said. It smelled clean, like hard scrubbing. . . .

A few days later, Murphy and his five-man crew got to the Thomas Clyde after 5 a.m., smoking cigarettes, almost asleep. Then they set out on the bay in darkness, scrambling eggs for breakfast on a propane stove below-decks, nursing instant coffee.

It smelled like cigarette smoke -- puffing from their Marlboro Lights and breathing out of the cabin walls below. After the dredge started and the oysters started piling up, the air on deck was scented with brine.

By 6 p.m., Murphy had reached his limit: 150 bushels. They sold for $32 each. A good day.

"It's been a good year. Better than last," he said later. . . .

. . . On another day in St. Michaels, Captain John R. Larrimore was scolding the crew on his own skipjack.

"My old daddy used to say he'd rather you walk on his head than walk on his oysters!" he said.

But the boat, the E.C. Collier, was on dry land. This was an oystering exhibition at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. Larrimore died in 1983: That was a carved wooden mannequin at the wheel, and the voice was somebody else's, a recording made from a script.

The exhibit's few visitors filtered out, and the room was empty. Outside, a chilly wind made little whitecaps on the Miles River. It smelled like . . . nothing.

Staff researcher Meg Smith and http://washingtonpost.com videographer Whitney Shefte contributed to this report.