The Watermen: Selections From Chesapeake by James A. Michener
The difficult part of the winter came with the birds. One morning Ethel Steed rose to look out her window at the familiar scene of snow and ice and saw to her horror that a whole congregation of ducks had gathered on the left fork of the creek, trying futilely to break the ice so that they could feed.
‘Owen! Look at this!’ He joined her and saw that these creatures were famished. For six weeks they had been cut off from grasses at the bottom of creeks and rivers; they had been able to dive for nothing; their feeding places were frozen solid.
The Steeds put in urgent phone calls to their neighbors, and the advice they got was concise and harsh: ‘Mr. Steed, thousands of birds are perishing. Worst place of all is the creeks around your home. What to do? Feed them, damnit. Buy all the corn you can afford and scatter it along the edges of the ice.’
Without waiting for breakfast, they jumped into their station wagon, maneuvered it carefully down frozen roads and hurried out into the country east of Patamoke. They stopped at a dozen difference farms, begging for corn, and when they had purchased a load which tested the springs of their Buick, they directed other farmers to the Refuge, buying from them as much corn as they could deliver.
They hurried home with their cargo, broke open the bags and began scattering the corn broadcast along the ice, and before they were half through with their work, great flocks of ducks and geese moved in, sometimes to within six feet of where they worked, and it was clear that the birds were starving.
For three days the Steeds bought corn, spending more than a thousand dollars, but when they saw how desperately the fowl needed it, how hungrily they waited for the Steeds to appear, they felt more than rewarded. Never before had they seen waterfowl at such close quarters, and when a flock of seventeen white swans flew in, emaciated and near death, Mrs. Steed broke into tears.
Her husband halted this in a hurry. ‘Let’s get the axes and break a hole in the ice. Those birds are dying for water.’
So in their fashionable hunting togs they worked until heavy sweat poured from their bodies, trying to hack an open space in ice two feet thick, and then Owen had an idea: ‘I remember a Currier and Ives print in which they sawed the ice.’ He fetched a long saw, and after making a hole in the ice, widened it out to an opening about ten feet on the side. Before he was done, more than three hundred birds had flown in to compete for the water.
For two days the Steeds did little but stay at the hole, watching the splendid birds as they ate and bathed. ‘They’ll explode!’ Ethel Steed said, but the birds continued to gorge themselves. Then she began trying to identify them; with the aid of color plates she was able to spot the green-headed mallard and the copper-headed canvasbacks, but that was about all. There were at least twelve other breeds which her husband could rattle off: ‘Black, gadwall, redhead, teal, scaup …’ Once he had hunted ducks with a powerful gun and good eye; now he was content to feed them.
It was while endeavoring to explain the difference between a bufflehead and a baldpate that he had his bright idea. Running to the house, he telephoned Annapolis and after some delay got Admiral Stainback. ‘Spunky, this is Owen Steed. Tulsa. Yes, good to hear you, too. Spunky, can you hire me a helicopter? I know you can’t get hold of a Navy one. But there must be …’
The admiral, a crisp Oklahoma man who had done much business with Steed’s company, wanted to know why his old friend should need a helicopter, and when Owen explained that it was a mission of mercy, saving a hundred thousand geese, he said, ‘Hell, that would justify one of our choppers!’ And he asked for specific landing instructions.
Within an hour a Navy helicopter landed at the Refuge, within fifteen feet of the barn, and was loaded with bags of corn. Admiral Stainback sat in back with Ethel, while Owen rode co-pilot to do the navigating. With graceful ease the chopper lifted into the air, tilted to starboard and swept at low altitude up one river after another, while the passengers in back ripped open bags of corn, scattering the golden kernels across the frozen rivers.
It was a trip that dazzled the Steeds: each pond of water, no matter how small, reflected from its icy surface the shimmering rays of the sun; each cove was a frozen diadem. Marvelously attractive were the thin strands of rivulets which in summer would go undetected; in frozen splendor they shone like veins of silver. The relationship of water to land was sharply defined; the mystery of the Eastern Shore lay revealed, this wedding of snow-covered land and bejeweled rivers.
Even when the bags were empty and their muscles tired, the Steeds did not want the flight to end, for they were seeing a wilderness of beauty that might never be repeated. Generations could pass before the shore would again be frozen as it was this day, so when Admiral Stainback asked on the intercom, ‘Shall we head back now?’ Owen said into his microphone, ‘I’d like to see how the Choptank develops,’ and Stainback said, ‘Said and done. Pilot, fly to the headwaters.’
With lovely, falling, sideways motion the helicopter dipped low toward the mouth of the frozen river, then turned east and flew slowly up the river that Steeds had occupied for so long. There was the mansion, half eaten away by summer storms, its widow’s walk collapsed. There was Peace Cliff and the red roofs of Sunset Acres, where the marsh had been. Here were the gaping, rusted girders of what had been the Paxmore Boatyard, and beyond it the new redbrick homes in Frog’s Neck, replacing the burned-out wooden shacks. But it was east of Patamoke that the Choptank became most memorable, for here vast marshes spread along the shore, marked now and then by rotting piers to which the ancient steamboats had come, all white and silver and shot with romance; now the pilings were eaten to the water line and silt filled the harbors where women in bombazine had once waited for their lovers returning from Baltimore. How noisy it had been then; how silent now.
There were the long stretches of river totally unoccupied, looking much as they had in 1700, and up toward the end the vast, rusting sheds at Denton where huge riverboats had once brought their cargos of guano from Peru. Beyond lay the flat fields of Delaware in which the river rose, and beyond them the vast Atlantic Ocean, whose waters salted the Chesapeake and all its estuaries.
As they flew at a few hundred feet above this frozen wonderland, Ethel saw from time to time some hole broken in the ice by mysterious forces; often the opening was no larger than a tennis court, but about it clustered thousands of birds, desperate for water, and often, at a distance from the opening, lay swans and geese and ducks whose feet had frozen to the ice, holding them prisoner till they died.
‘We can go home now,’ Owen said from his front seat, and like a homing pigeon the helicopter twirled, found its heading and crossed frozen fields to the Refuge.
There was one aspect of that fearful winter to which the Steeds would never refer; it was too painful.
One morning as Owen was shaving he heard the mournful cry of the heron—‘Kraannk, kraannk!’—and he looked out to see two gaunt birds, whose habits he had studied with loving attention, land on the ice and walk in long awkward steps to those spots at which they had so often fed, hoping to find them free of ice, that they might fish.
Desperately they pecked at the unyielding surface. Then, with mounting terror, for they were starving, they hammered at the ice with their feet, a kind of death-dance. Accomplishing nothing, they pecked again, their long necks driving sharp bills with a force which would have broken normal ice. But this was different, and the poor birds moved from spot to spot, frustrated.
‘Darling!’ Steed called to Ethel in the bedroom. ‘We’ve got to do something for the herons,’
‘Are they back?’
‘They were. Trying to find open water.’
‘Why don’t they eat the corn? Or go where the ducks are?’
The water at the big opening was too deep for them to fish; corn was a food they did not eat. What they required was some wading place in which they could feed in their accustomed manner, and across the entire Eastern Shore there were no such places.
The Steeds would make one. All
But in those few minutes ice had formed again and the birds found nothing. In panic they tested all their feeding places, and all were barren.
‘What will they do?’ Mrs. Steed cried, tears in her eyes.
Owen, studying the birds with his glasses, saw how emaciated they were, but had not the courage to inform his wife of their certain doom. The herons, stepping along like ballerinas grown old, tried one last time to penetrate the ice, looked down in bewilderment and flew off to their frozen roosts. They were seen no more.
In early March of 1977, the rowdy skipjack captains from Deal Island rolled into town with a proclamation that struck at the honor of the Choptank; blacks and whites rallied to defend their river, and old animosities were forgotten.
What the Deal Island men said was that they were the champions of the Eastern Shore and ready to prove it in a grand challenge race. To insult the Patamokes they added, ‘Since you need every advantage to keep up with us, we’ll hold the race in your backyard, Choptank River, first week in October.’
The Patamokes pledged themselves to enter seven skipjacks, five with white captains, two with black, but with the crews mixed three and three. The old craft were cleaned up and sailors began practicing the maneuvers required for victory, but the people organizing the race were unhappy over one deficiency.
‘It would look better … by that we mean that the papers and television … Hell, you got to have the Eden in there. Oldest surviving skipjack, and all that.’
The Patamoke captains agreed that it would be a fine idea to have the side-assed skipjack participate in the race, but she had not sailed for some years and it was generally assumed that her days were done. When the experts went out to survey her, tied up behind the ruins of the Paxmore Boatyard, they confessed that she was not much.
But when Owen Steed heard of the problem, he said abruptly, ‘I’ll provide the funds to restore her. That is, if you can get Pusey Paxmore to supervise repairs.’ The committee hastened to Peace Cliff, where Pusey told them firmly that he was too old and no longer knew enough, but he did direct them to a nephew who had once built a skipjack, and this Paxmore joined the effort.
When the refurbished boat stood on blocks beside the harbor, her mast raked and glistening in new spar finish, the question arose as to her crew. She was the property of the Cater family; a stoop-shouldered man named Absalom held title and he owned a fine reputation at oystering, bold in defending his location against competition.
But when Steed and the committee went to Absalom they found him a testy man. ‘Ain’t takin’ her out.’
‘But Captain Boggs at Deal Island …’
‘To hell with him.’ Absalom Cater was the rugged new-type black who would tolerate no affront to his personal dignity.
‘Mr. Cater, we’d really like to have you—’
‘Name’s Absalom.’
‘Goddamnit!’ Steed snapped in oil-field anger. ‘I spent thirty years in Oklahoma disciplining myself to call you sons-of-bitches Mister. Now you snarl at me for doing so. What do you want to be called? Negro, black, colored—you name it.’
Absalom laughed. ‘My problem is to discipline myself to stop callin’ you white-asses Mister. Now what in hell do you want, Steed?’
‘I want you to assemble a crew that will win this race. We’re providing you with a damned good boat.’
‘There’s a boy shucks arsters at Tilghman Island. He knows how to sail with me. And Curtis from Honga. That’s three blacks. You pick three whites.’
This was an insolent challenge, and it excited the imagination of the white watermen. ‘Turlocks used to own the Eden, so we’ll ask Amos.’
‘He’s almost seventy.’
‘He can cook. And in a fight he’s very mean.’
‘Cavenys always worked this skipjack, so we’ll invite Martin. And the Pflaum family. Hugo’s stupendous in water.’
It was a menacing crew that assembled to give the Eden her trials, and a Baltimore reporter wrote: ‘They resemble pirates about to loot a burning plantation.’ Lanky Amos Turlock had only a few teeth; Martin Caveny, round and sly, looked like some henchman guarding a castle keep; and Hugo Pflaum, past seventy, still had the thick, squashed neck of his Rhineland ancestors. The three blacks at least looked like sailors: Captain Absalom big and dangerous, his two helpers lean and ready for a brawl.
With such a crew the Eden caught the fancy of newspaper and television people; incidents in her history were resurrected: built in 1891; captained by that Jake Turlock who defeated the Virginians in the Battle of the Bay; captured single-handed by Otto Pflaum from five armed watermen; the boat of Big Jimbo Cater, first and best of the black captains. ‘Besides which,’ wrote the proud reporter from the Bugle, ‘she is the only side-assed skipjack in history, but she is given slight chance in the race because she cannot perform well on the starboard tack.’
The reporter had it backward. Every ship, every boat that moves under sail goes better on one tack than the other. Some mysterious combination of forces resulting from the interrelationship of mast, boom, keel and curvature makes one boat perform best on the starboard tack while another of almost identical design excels on the port. Like twins who share identities but who develop differentiated skills, the skipjacks varied, and Captain Absalom knew that his advantage lay when the wind blew from the starboard side, for then the offset centerboard cooperated with the tilted keel to produce maximum speed.
‘I think we got her tuned just right.’ he assured Mr. Steed.
Once when the black-white crew was practicing on the Chesapeake, Amos Turlock, coming up from the galley, spotted a chance to pick up some easy money. An expensive yacht had gone aground on the unmarked mud flats that rested just under the surface of the water where the western end of Devon Island had once stood. It was a perilous spot, which had not yet been properly buoyed, and the yacht’s crew could be forgiven for going aground there.
‘Halloo!’ Turlock shouted. ‘You need help?’
‘We need a tow,’ came the cry.
‘We haven’t the power to get you off’n there.’
‘Could you get us a tugboat? We’ve radioed the Coast Guard, but they have nothing.’
‘I can get you off,’ Turlock called as the Eden closed.
‘Watch out!’ the yacht captain cried. ‘You’ll ground.’
‘We draw two feet, centerboard up.’
‘That’s a hell of an advantage.’
‘In these waters, yes. Mister, I can get you off without scarrin’ the paint. Fifty dollars.’
‘Jump to it.’
‘It’s a deal?’ Turlock asked suspiciously. When the yachtsman assented, Amos yelled, ‘Caveny, break out the lines. You know what to do.’
The yacht had gone aground because its construction required a massive keel reaching eight feet below water line, and it was this bulbous steel projection which had imbedded itself in mud. No possible tow from the Eden would break this loose, and the people on the yacht could not imagine what the motley crew on the skipjack had in mind.
It was simple. Caveny climbed into the Eden’s rowboat, brought one end of a long rope with him, pulled himself onto the deck of the yacht, where he immediately clawed his way as high up the mast as he could go. There he fastened the rope securely to the spreader and signaled to Turlock back on the Eden that all was ready.
Slowly the skipjack moved away from the yacht, and as it did so, the line tightened, but there was no possibility that the frail craft could break the heavy yacht free, and the grounded sailors shouted, ‘Careful! You’ll part the line!’
It was never Turlock’s intention to exert much pulling power; what he wanted to do was maintain pressure until the line high on the mast pulled the yacht over on its port side. ‘Watc
But Turlock maintained his gentle pulling, and slowly the yacht came down until its mast was almost parallel to the water; then the miracle on which he relied began to eventuate. What had been a massive yacht with an eight-foot keel was being converted into a bizarre craft with less than three inches of wood below the water line, and the huge bulbous keel stuck at an angle in the mud. The buoyancy of the new boat was so great that it began to suck the keel loose.
‘Keep that line fast!’ Turlock called, and everyone watched as the mast came down to touch the water, but as soon as it did, the yacht broke free, and with only a modest wind in her sails, the skipjack was able to pull the heavier craft out into deep water. Quickly she righted herself, and the yachtmen cheered.
When it came time for the captain to hand over the fifty dollars, one of his crew complained, ‘A lot of money for six minutes’ work,’ and Turlock said, ‘Five dollars for doin,’ forty-five for knowin’.’
The pre-race meeting of skipjack crews was held at the Patamoke Club, and the mood was established by Captain Boggs, a towering black from Deal Island, known to his men as the Black Bastard: ‘The Nelly Benson observes on’y one rule. “Stand back, you sons-of-bitches.” ’
Another Deal Islander said, ‘This here is a race of workin’ boats. Each skipjack to carry two dredges, a pushboat aft on davits, two anchors and full gear.’
One of the Patamoke men suggested a triangular course, but the Deal Islanders protested, ‘We’re racin’ in your water. We state the rules. If the southerly wind holds, a run up the river, turn and beat back.’