Fishing had been our family’s life for five generations, going back to the great Virginia oyster wars of 1878. Back then, our great-grandfather would end the crabbing season in October, refit the boat with a culling board, pull his hand tongs out of the barn, and spend the winter oystering. Even at the young age of 31, Jimmy had given up the oysters. Too much strain on the shoulders. Instead, he crabbed in the morning, took tourists fishing in the afternoon, and made enough money to give up oystering completely. Next season, he planned to give up crabbing as well, especially if he could convince me to help him buy a new boat. And I probably would have helped, just because I knew how much he loved being a waterman.
Jimmy and I spent our youth on the crab boats of the Bay, helping our father run his trotlines or harvest his crab pots. We liked leaning over the gunnels of our dad’s deadrise, the Martha Claire, hooking the float lines as the hydraulic winch pulled the crab pots from the bottom of the bay. We eagerly grabbed the pot as it surfaced and pulled it into the boat. The “pot” is a square wire mesh cage that lets crabs check in but they can’t check out. They are trapped. As teenagers, we Shannon boys were solid and our shoulders offered the power of a diesel winch. A full crab pot can weigh forty pounds or more and Dad ran nearly three hundred of them. Jimmy and I would flip the screen of the pot open, tip it and shake it until all of the sideways scavengers could scramble onto the deck and into bushel baskets. I used to imagine that every bushel basket was a hundred dollar bill, and that helped ease the shoulder ache as the stack of baskets grew over my head. Then I would shove an alewife or handful of razor clams into the bait box and slide the pot over the side. With the same motion Jimmy would reach for the throttle and power the boat on to the next pot. We loved it when Dad let us drive the boat and help with the catch.
It was a simple repetitive exercise that mirrored assembly lines the world over, except that it was on the water, in the midst of a lonely yet beautiful theatre where you paid the price of admission with every pot lifted. And the old men of the Bay whose bodies were scraped and twisted by the sharp edges of crabbing, could never turn their backs on the delight, regardless of the cost. It was their stage, their sense of freedom and independence, their manhood and their pride.
I never quite inherited those qualities, but my brother did. He absorbed all the family instincts for the water, rowing into the fog on a dreary day, just so he could meet the challenge of a safe return. Our mother would stand on the family dock, watching for Jimmy to come back out of the fog with both oars slowly moving the water, while his head and shoulders were stretched over the side as if he was smelling or listening to the water. His eyes scanned low, under the fog, following the surface and searching for birds, or boats, or landmarks or whatever it was that always brought him safely home. He scared our mother to death, and she told him stories of ships lost in the fog to discourage his interest. But instead of being afraid, he loved the stories and begged for more, until mom finally gave up. She knew he was a waterman.
When I left for college, my family walked me to the car. They stood in the yard like soldiers, with their arms around each other, as if I might never return. Yet all my life my mother had urged me to stay off the water. Even my father, who loved the Bay, lectured me on the magnetic pull of easy cash from a day of crabbing, and urged me not to yield to it. He had given up on Jimmy. But he never stopped urging me to seek another life, away from the water.
Today, when I get really sick of the law library and the pompous clamoring of my partners at Simpson, Feldstein and James, I look back at those wonderful days on the water, colored by the distance of time and the glory of youth. I forget how much I wanted off the water, out of the Town of Parkers, and into a white collar world of fancy cars and exotic travel. I look back at a culture that honored truth, loyalty and the absorbing drama of a sharp bow on a silent bay. Then I remember the cuts on my hands from the crabs, and the heavy rubber gloves that were caked with salt, brine and mud and hung like barbells from my fingers. They never kept out the cold, the water, or the crab’s bony pinchers. I had worked for years to escape that occupational fate. So why would my brother’s death now draw me back to the water? Why would it start me thinking about the glories of a simpler life and a different culture?
My brother’s body didn’t come up. The old watermen around Parkers said the tuna no doubt figured out his predicament, and wrapped the line around some bottom debris until it broke, leaving my brother tethered to a fate I didn’t want to contemplate. Jimmy’s death left me shattered. I could not shake the idea of young life ended, fatherhood extinguished, all the dreams of a wife and daughter vanished. I also felt great guilt for all the inequities of life that my brother faced, and for my treatment of him. He was two years younger, and not nearly so competitive. I would force him to play basketball with me, and then beat him in every game of one on one. I would ridicule him for not wanting to play baseball with me, even though I would always hit the ball over his head and make him run for it. We would argue, get angry, and he would run from me. When I think today about the competitions of youth, and how much I owe him for the normal inequities of youth, my guilt is overwhelming. And sometimes in the days since his death, I mourn so violently that I lose my breath and have to stand up to breathe. Then I walk to the refrigerator, lean against the door with my arm under my forehead, and cry out with pain and anguish for my lost brother, and for myself. I intended to make it up to him. But now I can’t. He is simply gone forever.
We had a memorial service at Christ Church, a quaint little wood frame structure built in the 1800s of heavy timbers from nearby trees. The sanctuary looked like the hold of an ancient schooner. It was built on the crest of a hill, surrounded by tall pines, with a sloping graveyard on three sides so steep that you wondered how the dead could possibly get any rest. As a boy, I dreamed that the bodies behind Christ Church were all buried with their heels dug in to keep from sliding down the hill. Surely not a peaceful recline. The stone markers were mostly from the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, often with short biographical references, or poems, about the deceased. Many carried the title of “Captain” as a tribute to their life’s work. If you owned your own boat, no matter the size or condition, and it worked the waters of the Bay for livelihood, then you were a Captain for life. Most of the crab boat captains had a crew of one, usually a son, sometimes an old partner who had shared the catch and all their troubles for decades. There were a few “big boat” captains behind the church, men who had guided the tall merchant ships for long months at sea, out of Baltimore or Annapolis. I noticed their headstones often looked like the Washington Monument, with small cast iron fences around the graves. Some of those fences had been standing, by the way, for 200 years, as compared to my townhouse fence in Washington that was knocked down about three times a month. The measurements of life are different in Parkers, Maryland, and the monuments are respected.
I bought a burial plot and small headstone for my brother that was still being chiseled with the appropriate dates. As I wandered among the markers after the service, I noticed dozens of flat stones with the simple etching: waterman. Some with flat bottom work boats drawn below the name. The watermen always had been on the lowest wrung of the economic scale, even below farmers, who at least could rise to the top by accumulating enough land. It appreciated. There simply was nothing about crabbing that would appreciate in value. In the area around Parkers, by the year 2009, the farmers had become owners of horse farms or at least landlords and real estate speculators, while the watermen were still struggling to find markets for their ever dwindling catch. Although a crabber who had graduated to using his boat for charter fishing, with some skillful internet marketing, could do pretty well. But the crabbers’ fiercely independent trade, involving the lone captain who secured his catch and delivered it directly to market at a local pier, was the occupation most pure and true to its origin, and a source of great pride to the watermen families. I was proud of my dad and my brother.
At Christ Church the watermen of Parkers all stood together and lamented the passing of their friend, Jimmy Shannon, taken by the sea as so many of their brothers and fathers had been. They saw no humor or irony in the tuna’s action, only the terribly fine line between life and death that is drawn every day on the water. For them, Jimmy’s death could just as easily have resulted from storm, or cold, or a fall from the rigging of a skipjack. I was appalled when the Old Bay Circular, Parkers’ weekly newspaper, reported my brother’s death with the headline, Fish Catches Man. But the watermen seemed to ignore it, as if the frivolity of a newspaper account had little value or consequence anyway.
There