April 27: Sunay, To Tangier Island

This morning broke with overcast skies, and Tom and I took the short walk down Market Street to the historical, white shingle- sided Onancock Baptist Church. We were surprised to discover that the front door was locked even though there was a sign promising an 11 AM worship service right next to it. As we were deciding what to do, we noticed couple of kids going around the side of the church and decided to follow them. We went around the corner, down the side of the church and across a parking lot to a large building. There we received a friendly greeting at the door, and inside found a contemporary Sanctuary filled with families with young children, older couples and youth. Based on the variety of acceptable dress, I decided to slip off my dress shoes and put back on the black tennis shoes I was carrying in a bag (relief)! The service included baptism, a message on Jonah (getting a second chance to do what God told him to do) and lots of singing Christian praise songs we knew, so we felt right at home. It was uplifting to go to a strange place and find such assurance that God was working there.

We shared our pew with a young family, daddy, expectant mom and two little boys. The daddy of the family knew all about the tomato farming in the area. The fields we saw yesterday, he told us, were planted by hand by workers sitting on platforms hung out over the rows from a large vehicle. He also explained the hideous smell in the neighborhood where we saw the spreader was chicken fertilizer. Wow... only breathe out. He also said that the harvesting was all done by hand in the same manner as the planting (the pickers ride). Since lots of tomatoes are left in the field, there is a lot of gleaning done (this reminded me of the story in Ruth where Boaz told his workers to make sure they left enough for the gleaners). I really love tomatoes- too bad I don’t live closer!

After church and a plate of lasagna at Stella’s Restaurant, we headed back to the boat to shove off. The Bay was rough today, more like I had expected it to be, and it was about an hour and a half cruise to reach Tangier Island. Here we took a step back in time.

The uninhabited island was first visited by Capt. John Smith (British adventurer and Virginia colonist) in 1608, and he named it Tangier Island. It was used by the British as their sea headquarters during the War of 1812. The British fleet attached Fort McHenry from here in 1814, and that battle was immortalized by Francis Scott Key in the athem, “The Star Spangled Banner.” Our first view of the island was rows and rows of little white fish houses built on stilts over the water. The houses were flanked with docks overflowing with crab pots and mooring white low slung crabbing boats. Over 90% of the income of the island depends on crabbing. We were greeted at the Park’s Marina by Mr. Park, a native of the island and he helped us tie up on the T-head. It was interesting to find that the docks were filled with frisky kitties, that were decrying the fear of water by leaping on and off of the fishing boats, obviously very comfortable with there home here. Mr. Park said that they occasionally fell in the water and “cussed and grumbled as they swim ashore”. One of them was a tortoise-shell cat that made me miss our Sabby cat at home and Tom found one jumping off of our boat later that evening.

Mr. Park was nice enough to give us a ride around the island’s single lane road in his golf cart (the normal mode of transportation). We saw the local school house (1^st – 12^th grades), several sea food restaurants and neat little homes some of which had graves in their front yards. The homes are built at ground level, not like our beach houses at Emerald Isle, NC, and do flood when hurricanes come through. We saw a “crabbery”, or crab prison, which was dock enclosed with fence wire and boxes where they could pump water through them. When they sorted the crabs, they put the peelers in the “crabbery” to fatten up until they shed their shells and could be sold as soft-shelled crabs. Soft shelled crabs are the most lucrative way to market crabs. Mr. Park was impressed that my Momma served us soft-shelled crabs at home, but I confessed that it was a delicacy that I passed up, choosing shelled out crab panned in butter instead. I felt very much at home with all the crab industry discussion, having caught my own blue crabs on a dock on the Trent River in New Bern as a child. All you needed was a chicken neck, a piece of string, a long handled scoop net and a basket. The basket was really important, because no one wants to share the dock with a loose blue crab with his pincher raised.

Back at TNTY, Tom is cooking waffles for our dinner, and Mr. Park has promised to give us a ride to Mrs. Crockets (the famous) for breakfast in the morning. There is not much cell phone signal strength here... not sure when this will get to the blog.