The drive to Maryland’s Eastern Shore is familiar territory for my family and me. I like to count the sailboats underneath the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, make a mental note of the seafood restaurants on Kent Island (dinner options for the return trip home?) and enjoy seeing the egrets and herons swooping over the marshy grass along the Choptank River. Sometimes our road trip ends at one of the popular beaches, where colorful towels and umbrellas form a patchwork quilt along the coastline. Other times, we veer onto state Route 33 at Easton and head to the quaint town of St. Michaels, with its upscale “shoppes” and moorings lined with yachts.
But what I like best is to drive the 14 miles past St. Michaels to Tilghman Island—a place where workboats are the predominant seafaring vessel, serve-yourself produce stands line the roadside, and firehouse fundraisers are the main attraction on Saturday night.
Tilghman Island (population 784) is suspended at the end of a narrow peninsula that points like a finger down the Chesapeake Bay. In certain spots, the water is so close that boats anchored just offshore appear to be floating in fields next to the road.
The magic starts at Knapp’s Narrows, where crossing the busy drawbridge onto the 2.8-square-mile island is like stepping back in time. Passing through town, I notice vintage cottages with peeling paint; further out on the main road is a steepled church built in 1891, its lawn flecked with white tombstones.
Ginny Cornwell, who retired here 17 years ago, says that when people ask her husband where he lives, he answers, “In 1950.”
I start my day with breakfast at Two If By Sea, a modest café just under a mile from Knapp’s Narrows on the main drag, Tilghman Island Road. The place is buzzing with a mix of tattooed 20-somethings and grizzled guys who look as though they’re on their way to the docks. I sidle up to the counter beside an 11-year-old boy and his dad, who tells me they’ve just sailed over from Herrington Harbour, directly across the Bay. The young waitress calls me “Honey” as she pours my coffee; behind me, a couple of locals chat in the drawl that’s peculiar to the Eastern Shore.
After filling up on "crabby" eggs Benedict—a signature dish that substitutes local crab for the usual bacon—I pass by the open kitchen to chat with chef Henry Miller, a Culinary Institute of America-trained transplant who worked in a number of East Coast restaurants and catering businesses before opening Two If By Sea in 2008. He lets me in on the secret to his spectacular eggs
Benedict: mozzarella, which makes it that much richer.
Popping into the vintage-bank-turned-bookstore next door, I meet Gary Crawford, owner of Crawfords Nautical Books. A big-bellied, white-bearded bear of a man, Crawford is quick to make a friend, and even quicker with a joke. If he’s not delivering a punch line, he’s directing you toward Big Mouth Billy Bass, an animatronic fish that sings “Don’t Worry Be Happy” in the “Sea Myths” section of the store, or toward the photo of a sub sandwich near the books about submarines.
The shop is chockablock with titles on pirates, yachting, naval history and all things maritime, along with a good selection of regional books—including several chronicles of Tilghman Island history that Crawford wrote himself. Though he’s technically not a native (he first came to the island in 1980), Crawford has become the de facto island historian, drawing much of his material from locals who drop by to spin yarns for him to share. He’s even put together several albums of vintage island photos that he uses to “prime the conversational pump,” he says. “We hope each picture will cause a thousand words.”
He shows me the album about a waterman-turned-artist (whom I later meet in person in the quirky Tilghman Watermen’s Museum, housed next door in a former barber shop). Bill Cummings, a lanky, square-jawed local, grew up on Tilghman and worked on the water for 67 years. In winter, he was a “tonger,” picking oysters off the bottom of the bay with enormous tongs that dipped over the side of the boat. In spring and summer, he went “haul seining,” handling the heavy nets used to catch fin fish including striped bass.
Those experiences are now reflected in Cummings’ landscapes, with scenes depicting teams of men hauling up nets, or young boys wading in the surf, side-by-side, raking up oysters.
Cummings is a self-taught painter—“the onliest waterman who was a true artist,” Crawford says, mimicking the island vernacular. “Bill brought all these images in his head, back to the shore."
ANOTHER DAY, I find myself on board the Rebecca T. Ruark, a historic skipjack owned by Capt. Wade Murphy Jr. Built in 1886, the skipjack was once part of an oyster boom, back when 15 million bushels were harvested annually from a bay brimming with shellfish. Since then, disease and environmental conditions—and overfishing, some say, though that claim is hotly debated—have diminished the oyster beds. In 2012, only 150,000 bushels were harvested.
A seasoned waterman, Murphy has seen it all: prices as high as $40 a bushel and as low as $2 a bushel; harvests as big as 300 bushels in three hours, and as small as four bushels a day. “It’s a daggone shame,” he says of the current conditions. “We put a man on the moon. We can’t bring back the oysters? Something’s wrong here.”
State and federal agencies have been working for years, though, on efforts to revive the oyster population, including restoring the shellfish in 10 Maryland rivers and tidal creeks by building reefs and planting hatchery-raised baby oysters.
Soon, Murphy will be gearing up for another winter of dredging with his son, rising routinely at 3 a.m. and motoring 60 nautical miles out to the oyster beds south of Tilghman to see what they can dig up. Until then, Murphy, 72—whose weathered face speaks of years spent on the water—is following his spring-summer-fall ritual of taking tourists out on his 53-foot beauty, the oldest working skipjack in the Chesapeake Bay's dwindling fleet of commercial sailboats.
Before the tour ends, Murphy scrapes the bottom of the bay for a tong full of oysters, which we carefully inspect on deck, noting their size (and whether or not they are big enough to be legal) before we toss them back over the side. It’s still a month before oystering season begins in November.
Of course oysters aren’t the only currency in this tiny Bayside town. Back on shore, I meet Wilson “Willie” Roe, 87, who patiently shows me how to make crab nets exactly the way he’s done it since he was 14. He’s manning one of the many booths that are part of Tilghman Island Day, a fall festival of rowboat races, docking contests, oyster-shucking and crab-picking competitions, traditional crafts, live music and plenty of seafood—held annually on the third Saturday of October.
Roe was born on the edge of Dogwood Harbor, in the house right behind where he now sits, weaving nets under a shady awning. His father ran a repair shop in nearby St. Michaels, he says, noting that Tilghman’s resident physician, “Doc Reeser,” delivered him in exchange for a fixed-up radio.
Roe’s dad operated a still next to the house—for root beer, he qualifies, though there was also something mentioned about a cousin stealing whiskey.
Roe never worked on boats—he was a machinist at the Westinghouse Corp. on the mainland—but he did “haul seine” from the beach, pulling nets full of hardheads (a kind of catfish) and rockfish. That’s when he learned how to tie nets, he explains, his expert hands guiding the twine through mine as I weave a few rows myself. The work is addictive, slow and satisfying.
Beside us, Roe’s friend Harvey Reed, 76, shucks oysters from a bushel at his feet, explaining that he left an office job for commercial crabbing 15 years ago and never looked back. “I went from a good, 40-hour-a-week job to an 80-hour-a-week job crabbing.” He has no regrets.
“You’re your own boss,” he says simply, handing me one oyster after another.
Sitting in the shade with Roe and Reed, I realize that a big part of Tilghman’s charm has to do with slowing down long enough to listen. And the stories are pretty good, too. There’s the one about the ongoing feud between brothers who refuse to set foot on one another’s boats. And the tale about the St. Michaels boy, bullied by his schoolmates, who was fiercely protected by island kids.
Or the time traffic was brought to a complete standstill by a black Labrador retriever sitting in the middle of the road—an incident that prompted Jim Moses, 67, to pull up stakes and move here.
