Tilghman Island: A Treasure in the Chesapeake
by John Greiner-Ferris
A few years back, halfway through my first stay on Tilghman Island, the hardscrabble fishing community on Maryland's Eastern Shore, I was browsing through the island's only gift shop. A couple from Long Island entered, only this wasn't just any couple.
“Hi, I'm so and so, and this is my wife,” the man with the loud voice and the equally loud shirt said. “We're from…” and here he plugged in the name of his hometown. Then came the clincher: “We're neighbors of Steven Spielberg.”
They had read about Tilghman Island in the travel section of a New York paper, and, because the island was within a day's drive, our esteemed couple had decided on a lark to visit. Now they were genuinely puzzled at what all of the fuss was about.
The shopkeeper, nonplussed or amused, I couldn't tell which, directed their question my way. Pack a lunch, I told them. There are two country stores on the island, both within walking distance, and they both sell fixings for sandwiches. Walk, or bike, to Walnut Point, the southern-most point of the island. Sit there. Eat your lunch. Talk to one another. Look at the bay. Next, hitch a ride on a skipjack. If you want, you can help hoist the canvas sail up the mainmast hewn from a single tree, steer, and sample oysters you yourself dredged up from the bay. After that, walk up to Knapps Narrows. In the afternoon the watermen—the fishermen who make their living on the bay—will be docking. Eavesdrop on their conversations.
When I finished answering their question, I don't think there ever were more disappointed looks than the ones on the Long Islander's faces. I can only imagine that they scrambled back in their car and plotted how fast they could get home to a cookout with the Spielbergs.
A couple of years later, trying to escape the demons of modern life, I found myself once more heading over the Delaware Bridge, following the tangle of lines on a map that unravel in a simple progression: Interstate to state highway to county road to finally a red bit of lint that crosses Knapps Narrows onto Tilghman Island.
When you rattle across the drawbridge onto Tilghman Island you're crossing over into a real, live fishing community that hasn't been Disneyfied. A chamber of commerce hasn't gotten its hooks in the place yet. Tilghman Island stands in stark contrast to St. Michaels, just up the road. St. Michaels had its own tradition as a waterman town. Today, it's all upscale gift shops, cheery pastel paint, pricey restaurants, and an overabundance of inns and B&Bs. It's all perfectly nice for the tourists, but it doesn't stink of crabs and oysters any more.
The boats moored in its marinas are the toys of the wealthy, not the tools of the fisherman. The seafarers who clog the streets are yachties with anti-seasickness patches stuck behind their ears, not watermen who stay rock-steady on a pitching deck even in winter's meanest weather. And while some vestiges of the old ways remain — Big Al's Seafood, the Carpenter Street Saloon where bleary-eyed watermen would line the bar after dredging oysters on the bay — St. Michaels, to my way of thinking, is as pathetic as a dancing bear.
Tilghman Island is a place where you can walk right down the center of the main road with your dog off its leash. As a matter of fact, right down the center of the road is exactly where my dog and I had to walk because there aren't any sidewalks. For five bucks I joined a video club at one of the general stores. I not only had my choice of perhaps 100 tapes, of which I was interested in maybe 10, but I could get the dirt on the locals.
Harrison's Chesapeake House wasn't the place to eat any more, I was told, and it didn't surprise me that a local would harbor some petty Hatfield and McCoy vitriol against Harrison's. A combination restaurant, hotel, and sports fishing outfitter, Harrison's is a Tilghman Island institution—you see the name sprinkled throughout the graveyards on the island—and it claims it has the largest privately owned sports fishing fleet on the Chesapeake. Who would want to go through the bother of disputing Harrison's claim, but I should have paid more mind to the gossip.
The food at Harrison's wasn't bad. It was mostly hearty country cooking like fried chicken and Eastern Shore seafood faire like crabs and oysters prepared in their various embodiments, but the service was laughable. A young man, who seemed genuinely afraid of me, answered the question, “Are there any specials?” with, “Not really.”
More promising was the Tilghman Island Inn, but that proved a bust, too. Written up in Gourmet back in 1998—there really should be a statute of limitations on restaurant reviews—Southern Living, and a couple of other hoity toity magazines, you can bet the only door of the inn a real waterman passed through might have been the back one for deliveries. When I stopped by to peruse the menu, one of the owners tried to determine my social status by fobbing off questions like what business was I in and where did I go to school for conversation. So I missed out on its creamy-sauced oysters and the inn missed out on my good breeding.
Just when I thought I was in for a week of home cooking, I found the So Neat Café and Bakery. Homey and friendly, the little restaurant was financed through the sale of an Arabian horse that gave the café its name. Cindy and Patty, the owners, know how to combine flavors and present even the simplest meal as if it were a feast. The best way to describe the food is addictive. The So Neat is the kind of place where you can sit in the corner by yourself and be left alone, or strike up a conversation with the person sitting next to you, who happened to be, one day, the owner of a Golden Retriever, aptly named Tilghman.
Summer days on Tilghman Island melt in the mid-Atlantic coast humidity, but the house in which I stayed backed up on the bay. An offshore breeze usually feathered the leaves on the trees making a deck chair and a good book assurances of a peaceful nap. Once a hummingbird skidded to a midair halt right in front of my face, hovered nose to nose while it considered me, then zipped off again, disinterested. I wasn't insulted. Evenings brought the light show. Behind the house a solidly built dock thrust over the water facing west, and every night, little fireworks sparkled on the water wherever fish fed as the sun lowered itself, looking for all the world like an enormous, orange hot air balloon coming to rest.
No matter what a person does during a stay on the island, whether it's sports fishing or kayaking with one of the eco-tour companies on the island, poking around in an antique store, or perusing the shelves at Crawford's Nautical Books, which boasts over 10,000 “watery” books of all types and prices, the one thing that is a must is a ride on a skipjack. The skipjack is a piece of history, and the last fleet of skipjacks in the world calls Tilghman Island homeport.
Just the fact that you can sail on a skipjack speaks volumes about the socioeconomic situation of the island and the watermen. Over-harvesting of oysters, water pollution, and interstate politics between Annapolis and Richmond, Virginia have all conspired to put the watermen's lifestyle on the endangered list. Along with hauling oysters off the bottom of the bay, they've had to resort to other moneymaking means like hauling tourists and promoting products. The vessel I went out on, the Rebecca T. Ruark, sported an advertisement for Old Bay seafood seasoning on its mainsail. I suppose it's better than advertising beer or cigarettes.
But have no doubt, sailing with the Rebecca's captain, Wade Murphy, is a true Tilghman Island experience. A third generation waterman, Captaian Wade is as crusty as the barnacles found on the oysters you'll dredge up and eat right there on the boat. He hollered at me while I steered for bringing the boat too close to the wind. His knowledge, opinions, and gift of gab have attracted the likes of National Geographic, CNN, PBS, and the New York Times Magazine. On a two-hour cruise, you'll get a crash course on the waterman's life and lore. He can tell you how to mark time by an osprey or how to tell a boy crab from a girl. And he won't make any bones about pointing out a rich businessman who bought a fishing license, wondering aloud why the man would deprive a real fisherman who needed to make a living.
At sunset one evening I sat on a dock leaning against a piling listening to the sun go down. Have you ever done that? Listened to a day end? Have you ever been someplace that wasn't your home and watched the majestic ball slide down the far wall of the sky seeming to pick up speed the closer it got to the horizon? And as it drops, it drains the day right off the planet until there's a void. The earth sounds hollow, like the sound you hear when you hold a seashell to your ear. Then, the evening star, a single, intense point of light, heralds the night.
Of all of the memories I have of Tilghman Island, by far the single most intense one was the strength of Captain Wade's arms. I was hoisting the Rebecca's mainsail. Wooden hoops were rattling up her mast, the sail was billowing, and though I'm far from weak I couldn't get the canvas up the last foot or so to the top. I put all of my weight on the halyard, hanging on like a bell ringer. Captain Wade gave an exasperated snort, and in maybe two or three short jerks hoisted and secured the line. The strength in his arms was, to my way of thinking, superhuman. He could have been tying his shoes for all it mattered.
For a hundred years men like Captain Wade have been hauling oysters up from the bottom of the bay with muscle and sweat. A person needs muscles like his to live. To work. To survive on a daily basis. The bay is being fished out, and everyone points fingers. The watermen point to the politicians, and the people who don't make their living fishing say it's the greed of the watermen. The watermen say it's the only life their families have ever known for generations, and they are entitled.
You can come to Tilghman Island for the quiet and the simplicity. You can choose to ignore the people in the general store, the waiters, and the local proprietors as so many characters out of central casting. You can see the sights, eat crab and oysters and not give a second thought about from where they came. Or, during your visit to Tilghman Island, you can ponder that question and gain a small understanding of a part of the United States that is a national treasure.
Oh, and the difference between a boy and girl crab? “The girl has red on her toes, like fingernail polish; even my three-year-old granddaughter knows that,” Captain Wade explained.