This week marks the end of a 13-year era for me. If a place can be the love of your life, this island has been mine. Although I kept mainly to myself, here primarily to work, there’s a patchwork quilt of people I’ve come to know across these years. From wave-worn watermen with stories and laughter at the bait and tackle shop, to the charm and spirit of Miss June at the country store before sunrise with Scrapple sandwiches and a fresh jokes every day, there’s a rich diversity of personalities on Tilghman Island.
My neighbor replaced his Confederate flag with the island’s overall preferred Trump flag, I still hung my Pride flag, so I never really fit in or was invited to parties, but was grateful for the lovely women of the book club where I spent many years. I donated all my winnings at Bingo back to the fire hall, faithfully supported the wonderful country store and local shop, and donated to fundraisers when I ran the beachcombing museum and candle shop in town. I discovered and was grateful for friendships here and there along the way.
But I made one friend who will forever be close to my heart. Elaine’s had a long career in crabbing and oystering on Tilghman and I met her as a result of our common love for sea glass hunting. We were friends because of our sarcasm and raunchy senses of humor. Over the years she and her granddaughter worked at my candlemaking business, and this connection made the island a little less lonely. I took her to New York because there was a beach there she wanted to see, and as someone who spent her whole life on Tilghman, she’d never seen the Statue of Liberty.
It’s difficult to capture in words the life of a salty soul who can never remember how many grandchildren and great-grandchildren she has. Island lives are different. Countless hours on the water, when the ice and heat carve lines in your face, hands and heart, create a different type of person in a Tilghman Islander than an “up the roader.” James Michener writes in Chesapeake about an archetype of the earliest settlers of this area, and the arrowheads of the Choptank Indians from this island are in the beachcombed collection of Elaine.
Jay Fleming’s book Island Life is about the particular characteristics of the watermen of Smith and Tangier islands. Tilghman’s different. There’s something more raw here; the figs grow better in the rich soil where the region’s seafood supply is caught and the busiest drawbridge in North America rises and falls. It’s not for everyone. To be a waterman here is one thing, there’s an entire museum here dedicated to their history, but to be a woman who works the water is something entirely different; it takes a far more resounding kind of strength that knows no depths.
Elaine raised four children while she was crabbing and oystering in an industry dominated by men, rejecting the more commonly-accepted tradition for women to simply pick crabs or bake cakes. She wanted to be where the action was, and her wild stories of adventures during brutal storms at bay, interactions with state officials trying to regulate watermen, and more are always thrilling. I’ll always remember our time on shorelines together, and her nickname for me: “Fire Marshall Bill,” from the time I sprayed a can of fire extinguisher on the entire table (and her) preventatively when a tiny fire erupted while she was wax-sealing a candle.
My daughter Faith, who graduates in a few weeks from Johns Hopkins with a degree in Environmental Science, adores Elaine as well and after spending much of her childhood on the island, Faith wrote her senior capstone project “Tradition, Change and Adaptation: Women and the Chesapeake Bay” about the impact of women like Elaine. The term “watermen” seems gendered in a world where we adapted “policemen” into “police officers” but in her interviews with Elaine, Faith discovered she prefers it.
Elaine fried “crab nuggets” for me one night, a delicacy that she makes from crab “peelers”—the fragile state when crabs are between hard-shell and soft-shell state—the body section only, lightly fried. It’s not something you can buy in a store, and as someone who learned to catch and steam her own crabs on this island, it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever eaten.
Our friendship politically might’ve seemed unlikely—when I got the Covid vaccine I remember her telling me it was “the mark of the beast” and I told her I already got those sixes on the back of my neck when I joined Antifa. She’s the exception in my life, bridging that political gap because we don’t “go there” when together, but the friendship we share is the reminder that in our country, even in a time when forces try to tear us apart, there are still times and places where we have more in common than we differ.