Chesapeake Confidential
Grant, James
James Grant Chesapeake Confidential Self-reliance, temperance, Methodism, and automobile noise pollution still ran strong on isolated Smith Island. Crime was a stranger there-until two years...
...The prettiest sight on Smith Island is the channel approach to Tylerton...
...Soft crabs, spider-like creatures born to be fried, grow by peeling and reforming their hard shells...
...What rankles the man most is an old sore, the government's taking of the northern third of the island for a game preserve...
...But the newfound comfort is only relative...
...Awakening to a duet of rooster and gull, the visitor pleads for sleep to the sounds of demolition derby...
...Ever see one...
...He heaps contempt on government...
...You don't know no tired until you've done this," says Kathleen Bradshaw, the wife of a waterman...
...Kitching said, but she had to bake 800 cookies and fry 600 chicken wings for the wedding...
...Chelton Evans, January 11, 1910-February 3, 1978...
...After the exchange of vows, to good-natured laughter, the bride leaned down to kiss the groom...
...Several persons have been questioned but no active suspects remain...
...Owing to salt air and bloody-mindedness, scarcely.a car on the island is equipped with a working muffler...
...You had to get out of the way, because if you didn't give her room, she'd take it anyway...
...The house had not been ransacked...
...Food and fuel were flown in from the mainland by helicopter...
...Neither the loot nor the safe has been found, they say...
...The walk can upset an impressionable visitor because a number of preconceptions are shattered along the way...
...T hatfear has been overcome to the extent that old Chelton Evans, a long-time waterman, could lay up $67,000 in savings in his own home...
...Nowadays, the same work is done in crab "shanties" built on stilts above the water...
...I was the companion...
...Students who ordinarily commuted to school by boat stayed home...
...Men on the island will say they know who stole the money, and gossip flew last summer that a heavy safe like Evans' was discovered on an island junk pile...
...Early on a Sunday in July the fishing fleet-Miss Bonnie, Southwind, Dora Lynn, Marge, Miss Carolyn, Sun Dog, Miss Smith, Island Girl, Capt...
...This is a place of fishermen, or watermen, as they're properly known, crabbers and oystermen by season...
...There are no leads...
...Ducks would land and dive for the grain, but they couldn't work their way free again...
...they cull crabs until first light...
...They laid underwatertraps baited with corn...
...Well, it went from here to there"-he pointed ten feet away, to the church signboard, which now read, a day after the wedding, "Congratulations 'Jan and Henry' Z." "It weighed 150-175 pounds...
...Marshall asked us...
...People said with a wink: "Wait until spring...
...The cars are in unique and picturesque states of decay...
...Presently the organist, an islander given to swells and glissandos, launched into the first hymn, "You Light Up My Life...
...Nowadays, as Horton observes, the mosquitoes aren't as pesky because sometimes they can't navigate through the clouds of greenhead flies...
...I wanted to know whether Marshall had done any duck trapping in his salad days...
...After dinner, of course...
...Watermen and their wives still get up at 3:30 or 4:00 a.m...
...When the bride appeared a few minutes later, a hush fell over the church...
...Evans tacked up hand-p...
...They kept watch over long strings of wooden boxes, paddling from one end to the other in a rowboat to check the crabs for telltale changes in color...
...The crime was a year and a half old when two newsmen, one a native of these parts, the other an interloper from Brooklyn, made landfall at Ewell, the largest of the island's three villages...
...Teenagers cruise the street, all five miles of it, in aging Fords and Chevies, radios blaring over the din of naked exhausts...
...Jason II, and the rest-bobs at dockside...
...A yellow Somerset County school bus, brimming with elderly day-trippers from the mainland, roars along the potholed road...
...My grandfather could remember a time when people here were afraid to eat crabs...
...we crossed the street and edged into the crowded church...
...or so, go back to the shanty for more sorting...
...As much as eleven feet a year is being lost to the Bay, the Army Corps of Engineers reports...
...There weren't any helicopters...
...Two Maryland state policemen appeared on the island and established themselves at the firehouse, letting it get around that they would accept either evidence or a confession...
...It was in the depths of winter-that much is known...
...No throaty Ford disturbs the morning stillness because no one has yet dreamed up a way to convince the people of Tylerton that they want or need a bridge to Ewell...
...no one's ever died of pollution here...
...one, like a rusting Panamanian freighter, bears a painted name: "Nightmove...
...First thing Monday, after Horton and I had returned to Ewell and were getting ready to take our leave of the island, we ran into John Marshall, the local game warden...
...Many or perhaps most of the island's 700 souls are related by blood or marriage...
...At current rates of erosion, Rhodes Point, or Rogues Point as it used to be called, the most vulnerable of the three villages, will stand exposed to the full force of the elements within a decade...
...watermen, who in better weather would have been out on the Bay tonging for oysters, sat around mending their gear or playing pinochle and dominoes at Evans' store...
...they're building the new utility stations too near the water, just like last time...
...You're so tired sometimes you can't even sleep...
...We dined on crab cakes, oyster fritters, potato salad, fruit salad, corn pudding, and green beans-there would have been enough to eat, Mrs...
...In neither Ewell, Rhodes Point, nor Tylerton is it possible to buy a drink...
...From time to time, state inspection officers have quietly landed to protect the people from themselves and their cars, but the people refuse to be improved...
...To the waterman with an eye in his head, this is all he needs to sort the catch...
...tide's enough to raise coffins from the ground, wait and see what it does to those new concrete blockhouses...
...You had to then...
...Men who preferred gunpowder slaughtered birds by the score with artillery known as skiff guns...
...Kitching greeted us with the news that the Methodist minister, Henry Zollinhoffer, was going to marry a local girl that night, and that we would be welcome to come...
...You'd get up and go crabbing," says Edward Marshall of Tylerton, "and unless you could start your engine right away, they'd eat you alive...
...About 7:00 p.m...
...Don't need the sewer, he says...
...A rare setting and one which, literally by the year, was growing rarer...
...in the summertime...
...Marshall pointed out that the waterman's trade, the economic backbone of Smith Island, is not very old...
...Nowadays the center of life on the island is the Methodist church...
...cull, pack, eat dinner, and, at 7:00 p.m...
...The Corps has advised residents of Rhodes Point to begin to think about moving...
...The theft perplexes and disturbs the island even today because logically only an islander could have done it...
...In the churchyard at Ewell, a plain stone bears the legend: "L...
...When you got cut off from the mainland, it was a matter of survival...
...Jagged ice barred the way across the water...
...But where had they stashed the swag, and what did they mean to do with it...
...A little...
...Horton and I arrived on what proved an ideal Saturday...
...That much is clear now, two years after the crime, but who could have known it then, in December, as the ice began to glisten on the Chesapeake Bay...
...This is Mrs...
...The first thing a stranger does in Ewell is to walk along a single unnamed street past the Post Office, beyond the Ewell Methodist Church ("Your Idle Days are Satan's Busy Days," a signboard counsels), to a white house with a sycamore tree in front...
...Not long ago, crabbers culled on the water...
...Evans, as it happened, lived only a year after coming home...
...You laid down next to it on a skiff of a dirty night and got in close to the ducks...
...Failing construction of jetties and seawalls, a recent report says, the community's days are numbered, intelligence that the islanders have known or suspected for years...
...Tom Horton, who had first reported the affair for the Baltimore Sun and who had grown up on the Bay, was the leader of the expedition...
...Young and old flout the mainland's traffic laws, and cash, for some people, remains a preferred alternative to checking accounts and the extortions of the Internal Revenue Service...
...People lived in the marshes, in a clump of trees, with their hog, their chickens, their garden...
...The hours are still long, but the island's insects are reduced from the swarms of a few generations ago...
...James Grant is associate editor of Barron's Financial Weekly...
...People would paint their screens at night with kerosene...
...The eye surveys wood in greys and blacks: old crab shanties, boat masts, telephone poles, channel marker poles, pier pilings, poles canted left and right, here and there topped with herons and gulls...
...Smith Island beckoned not only for its eccentric and unsolved burglary, but also for its self-reliance, temperance, and Methodism...
...another, its rear window shattered, its right front door ajar, careens along the narrow road, from Ewell to Rhodes Point, from Rhodes Point to Ewell, a bushel basket inexplicably lashed to its flapping trunk...
...We'll see who turns up with a new boat...
...The victims drowned, or survived only to have their necks wrung by the returning trappers...
...Otherwise, the island is famously independent...
...Though I had never set foot on the island, I had gotten it into my head that this was the ideal place to while away a weekend...
...When you got where you wanted to be, you slapped the trigger...
...Presumably, the thief or thieves had dragged the safe, weighing 150 pounds, across ice and snow and broken it open, making off with cash, bonds, and stock...
...There was and is a question of how long this marshy land, scarcely five feet above sea level at its summit, will survive the relentless action of wind and wave...
...The gun would slam back into the stern on recoil...
...Furthermore, only someone close to Evans, perhaps a blood relative, would have known where to look for the safe, or what to expect to find inside it...
...I-d signs offering $5,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the guilty man or men...
...The minister's previous marriage had ended in divorce, off the island, but the congregation seemed not to hold it against him that evening...
...Pappy did a lot of it...
...C helton Evans shouldn't have gone to New Jersey...
...Crime was a stranger there-until two years ago...
...Kitching's inn, the only hotel on the island...
...You'd have to beat 'em off with water bushes...
...This occurred a generation ago, although to listen to him, it might have been yesterday...
...No one, except the guilty man or men-no woman could have dragged that safe from the house-knows when the crime occurred...
...We began talking about hunting and skiff guns...
...There seemed no discernible stamp to the islanders, however, except, among the watermen, deeply lined and sunburned necks...
...Marshall's cross is that he is the butt of all anti-government humor, much of which, here as throughout the Maryland Shore, is directed at game and wildlife officials...
...One old guy, a waterman emeritus, was seen to climb into his pickup truck and drive to church fifty yards away...
...Unless the waterman is careful to segregate his catch by stages of shedding, he is giving it away: Crabs in one condition of undress gladly eat those in a more vulnerable condition, as they once did unchecked on Sunday, when devout watermen refused all work...
...The years have brought a notable advance in the technique of culling crabs...
...But state police confess bafflement...
...One is the expectation of peace and quiet...
...The soloist was a man in a dark suit who sang the tune into a microphone which he cupped in his hands and held close to his mouth...
...Estimated cost: $1.6 million...
...Crabbing, like dairy farming, is hard and consuming work, though not as killing as it once was...
...This flew in the face of mainland lore that the island is peopled by hard-mouthed Methodists, many of them deformed by inbreeding...
...some are directly descended from the original 17th-century English settlers, who unaccountably chose to live in what then must have been a mosquito-choked hell...
...Two years ago, upon returning to the island from New Jersey, where he and his wife had gone to visit relatives, he discovered that the money was gone...
...That is, the belt of marshland that protects the houses and trailers on the Point will have crumbled by then, like cake, letting the westerly winds do their worst...
...Little boys in the back stopped hitting each other on the arm and a row of teenaged girls, who craned their necks but still couldn't make out the details of the bride's white gown, crouched on top of their pew...
...At Ewell, on the other hand, a cluster of signs in red, white, and blue announces that the Farmers Home Administration of the Department of Agriculture, in league with various other government agencies, federal, state, and local, has talked someone into building the Smith Island Sewerage System...
...Didn't know what they were...
...Near the docks a man out walking stops to pass the time of day...
...Joan Bradshaw, age eight, who said her stomach hurt one day, was flown out...
...Just as hardly anyone comes to live on the island, few people ever leave it...
...go out in their boats to catch some more...
...Before the land fell into federal hands, the watermen enjoyed superb and peculiar hunting...
...Walking is out of the question and an offense against nature...
...Like strong drink and civil authority, crime was a stranger to Smith Island, a speck of land, most of it salt marsh, shorter than Manhattan but a mile and a half wider at its widest point, roughly eight miles by four when the tide is out, situated six miles off Maryland's Eastern Shore...
Vol. 12 • January 1979 • No. 1
