Too Many Colors

For so many years I wrote poetry because there wasn't time for the short stories or essays or character descriptions I had in mind. I would be driving from here to there in a series of things to do. I would catch a dialogue or an irony or a gesture -- and an idea would cross paths with me almost as though someone had yelled, hey!, before throwing a ball in my lap. I'd catch it that way. But then -- my mind, having caught it, would be spinning with what had to be done; and there was always so much noise around me, and so many things to do once I got home, and so much needed out of me -- and the best I could do was to jot down the phrase I heard or a few words to describe the idea or the irony. After a day or so -- still no quiet time to make it into a short story -- I'd say, Well, I'll just turn it into a poem. It was the best I could do.

I went to Tangier Island yesterday. This is a working island, not a resort island. It is the soft shell crab capital of the entire world, a one- by three-mile strip of land, 18 miles out from shore in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, accessible only by ferry boat. The 458 residents are watermen and watermen's wives and watermen's children. I went there because I've always heard that the islanders have retained their Elizabethan dialect -- and I wanted to hear it. Also, the world was too much with me, as the saying goes.

There are three primary family names on the island as evidenced by a walk through the cemeteries -- Crockett, Parks, and Pruitt. They say many older residents have never been off the island. The old men line up like birds on a wire at the only fueling station on the island, this one at the marina since there are no cars on the island. I walked not-so-inconspicuously back and forth in order to catch what they were saying. It's not even an English accent, more ancient and Scottish. One old man said something about another man, "Hez gote no doge, gote no wefe . . . " I couldn't decipher what was becoming of the man now that he's got no dog, got no wife, but it seemed sad. I sensed that I was looking at the strange combination of 17th century America and circa 1952.

So far no developer has touched the island other than a local man who offers this seasonal once-a-day, 90-minute ferry boat ride to another world so that mainlanders can stay in Hilda Crockett's bed and breakfast and eat her lunch or dinner of crab cakes, clam fritters, Virginia ham, corn pudding, pickled beets, and so on and so forth.

I stood in the small history museum put together with backdrops of newspaper clippings and maps; with frames holding local artwork and watermen's poems -- and I looked at a disturbing map which illustrates that, in the past 150 years, Tangier Island has lost 2/3 of itself to the waters around it -- swallowed up at the rate of 9 square acres per year. I made my own grim calculations -- taking the 750 or so square acres that remain of the island, dividing that by 9 -- and I figure that in 50 years or so the island will be no more than a strip of land on which to stand and watch the tide from either one's front or back sides.

One of the Crockett clan, a middle-aged man with a guitar cradled in his arms, said, "I tried to live on the mainland once a long time ago, but there were too many . . . colors." He hestitated for a while, as everyone does on the island, and then added, "too many sounds, strange faces . . . cars."

The senior graduating class this year will total five, about average for any given year. For the first time in the island's 400-year history, however, all five seniors will leave the island for college -- and none plans to become watermen like their fathers.

I rode back to the mainland, seated at the stern all by myself for the first 30 minutes or so, holding that old familiar feeling of a story in my catch and not enough time to write it. An older man came to sit down on the bench beside me -- and the two of us sat looking out to the faded island for the remaining hour of our trip  -- and we never said a word.  I'll call this "On the Stern":

Dazzled by pin pricks of light --

    this sun off the sea.

As though astounding me,

-- its diamond sweep, dust

    particles settling

    at peaks.