I had never lived on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, but it’s a place that I grew up with. My grandfather had moved down from Laurel, Maryland, to the nearby town of Wachapreague, to give my ailing grandmother a good place to retire while he worked. The flat land, battering winds, abandoned towns and churches, and every roadside Stuckey’s stand advertising fireworks, peanuts, and country ham. The salt air, expansive views, and rows upon rows of soy, corn, and tobacco fields have always had a deathly cast over them.
The Eastern Shore has always felt empty and dead to me. It was certainly beautiful, and the air felt fresh. But it also felt mildly depressing. The towns were empty, businesses would open and close in the lifespan of a mayfly, and the inhabitants were almost a part of the landscape. There didn’t seem to be any place for a kid like me, growing up, mostly because there were very few kids, and even fewer places for them to go. But something was drawing me back. There was a certain desire to revisit these memories with an adult eye, and since starting college and regular work, I’d not been for a visit. Additionally, my grandfather’s health was fast failing, having taken a sharp downturn after my grandmother’s passing. I traveled there, went to all the same places that I’d frequented growing up, and for the first time, honestly, carefully looked for what exactly gave me that empty feeling.
There was nobody here. I walked around Chincoteague town, between the tourist shops that sold overpriced towels, beach chairs, t-shirts with raunchy slogans such as “support single mothers” (with accompanying silhouette of a stripper), and Ballpark hot dogs served in a paper boat at $10 per. Then there were the various maritime-themed shops, the stores that only sold paintings of the sea, the anglers tackle shops (Advertising “live bloodworms!”) and the marinas for all the rusting fishing crafts. On a Sunday afternoon, just as church would be getting out, and in the balmy-for-October beach weather, there were flocks of late-season tourists milling about, but there was nobody local here. The people working in the stores were elderly, the seasonal employees having mostly gone back to Old Dominion University, Salisbury University, or any of the other local schools. There was a certain lethargy taking hold of the town, as the few tourists moved in family groups, speaking quietly, and traveling in their vehicles to a destination, going in on foot, and leaving shortly thereafter.
Most of the traffic had gone with the summer, when people came here to see the wild ponies. On Pony Penning day, massive crowds would gather to watch wranglers, who would gather ponies from the herd of the descendants of Spanish war horses who’d swam ashore hundreds of years prior, running wild on Assateague island. For a brief moment, Chincoteague came alive with fairs, heavy traffic, and tourists with large pocketbooks. Other towns were not so fortunate. In Wachapreague, the local Island House restaurant tried their best to support local fishermen by featuring fresh, locally caught fish on their menu as “The Catch of the Day,” brought in from the bay or deep sea, and varying from day to day, as the name would suggest. I stopped for lunch and tried it. Locally caught deep-sea yellowfin tuna. Grilled and served with vegetables. $14. I hate tuna. Even then, I forced myself to finish my lunch, thanked them, and left. I suppose I could retroactively rationalize it as “going towards a good cause.”
At least Chincoteague had either the natural capacity to attract tourists or the wherewithal to change to do so, and Pony Penning was never going away. But Wachapreague, the town where my grandparents had lived for the longest time, couldn’t even boast of a healthy tourist industry. The town was mostly dedicated to fishing tourism, or for rich people to moor their boats at the local marina. The town was flat, and just at the water level. So when hurricane season was around, and the tide came in, the entire town would flood. Nearly every house was therefore built, not on stilts, but on an elevated foundation. Nearly every one of them had water damage, or at least a permanent mildew patina on the 60’s-vintage siding. Sparsely populated, flat, and run by the Drummond family and the roads and businesses named after them, as well as the local farm owners and their big luxury cars and trucks. The neighbors didn’t talk to my grandfather much, and the largest gathering of local people that I’d ever seen at his house had been my grandmother’s funeral reception.
Wachapreague hadn’t changed much at all, and the only thing that had changed dramatically was that a new family owned The Island House, and the corner store where I’d go to get giant ice pops as a kid had closed down. My grandparents’ old house was for sale, again, and the other large houses, battered year in and year out by storms, and rarely repaired if at all, were largely rotting and abandoned. The fact that this perennially underpopulated town hadn’t changed much since 2003, as well as the usually-gray skies by the shore only amplified the empty feeling that permeated me as I walked back to my car by the “Zeal” buoy in the Island House parking lot.
My parents, growing up, had been church-going types, and so every visit to Wachapreague, and later Onley that coincided with a Sunday had led to a trip to St. Peter’s Catholic Church, right across the train tracks on the way to the Onley post office. It was a small church, perpetually under construction, and one that could be mistaken for a funeral home from the outside, if not for the statues of saints and the lettering on the side of the church. The congregation, like every town nearby, was aging. The choir had a mean age of 65, it seemed, and the only people under the age of 50 were the families of local law enforcement, who’d moved to the area for work. But every year, another member of the congregation would approach us and tell us that so-and-so had died. And so it was when I stopped in at my grandfather’s house. “Oh by the way, the lady who read at Mass, Donna? She died back in April. I read now.”
The economy of much of the Eastern Shore is farming and fishing. For the longest time, farmers and fishers were the primary industry. Sure there was the Tyson’s chicken factory farm, with its horrendous smell and milling flocks of seagulls circling above, but nearly everyone of working age either lived off the land or sea. With the modernization of both industries, and the exploitation of migrant workers, and the aggressive use of “long line” fishing, these industries have been decimated.
Retirees live there, either moving to the ESVA after retiring, or retiring in place, and the impoverished simply cannot leave. The old retire from the harsh manual labor and the young, unable to find gainful employment, move to Norfolk or Richmond after college, and all who are left are those who don’t want to leave, and those who can’t. The new migrant workers were were blamed for being the displacing factor for local workers. They were favored for hiring by the farm owners due to loose labor laws and their low hiring cost. The changing face of the Eastern Shore was one that changed with the economy, and if the crops could be picked cheaper, then they’d be picked cheaper. The aforementioned St. Peters Church had a considerable Spanish ministry, and my grandfather, a native speaker, heard the worst of the invective. Not directed at him, of course. He was “one of the good ones” in spite of his heavy accent, but told to him as if he was supposed to understand why the locals hated the migrant workers, and as if he’d somehow understand why they were “taking the jobs.” I understood now what made the place so depressing. This was the urban versus rural debate happening nationally but on a small scale
Perhaps things had to change, and people had to leave, whether to the next town or the next life. Chincoteague remained relevant due to the nature of what made the town a town in the first place, but the population of the towns surrounding grew thinner and thinner, summer houses occupied only part of the year, and stubborn occupants bitter that the farming and fishing jobs simply didn’t exist for them anymore.
This was the new Eastern Shore. If it were the Midwest, it’d be called “flyover country” but in this case, “drive-past country” could be more accurate. Except for the people who lived there every day, and whose mood gave that dark cast over the region. Nothing really happened, and not much changed, but the vibrancy was absent as always, and that’s nothing new.