Athol, Md. -- Moonlight bathes the sleeping Eastern Shore countryside. A truck, Hungry Neck Farm painted on the door, rolls into the Calloway brothers' farmyard, soon followed by a pickup, and then another.
It's five days until Christmas, half an hour until dawn, 12 degrees below freezing. The last soybeans are cut, and the poultry houses are dark -- catchers from Perdue have taken the latest flock to the processing plant. Many farmers might consider lolling a bit now, but the Calloways of western Wicomico County, two brothers, three sons and their families, are invested in this region to an extent seldom seen in modern times. For them, there is nearly always something to harvest.
Their lifestyle reflects a way of living all but gone from the 20th-century Chesapeake. They are both farmers and watermen, their existence tied equally to the Nanticoke River and the lands that border it.
This morning, the small caravan heads south from the crossroads of Athol, then west toward the Nanticoke along a broad peninsula called the Hurley Neck (Hungry Neck to locals since anyone can remember). Finally, it bumps down a long, dirt lane that ends where two outboard-powered skiffs, coated with frost glistening in the dawn, are tied to a dock on Rewastico Creek.
Few words are spoken. Everyone knows the drill. In minutes the skiff, with Billy, 57, his brother Eddie, 51, and Billy's youngest son, Clayton, 32, is skimming the creek's smooth surface, past banks of tall, brown cordgrass. The second skiff, carrying Billy's sons, Tommy, 36, and David, 33, roars past, bound for the main Nanticoke.
They will travel several miles to begin fishing the family's nets near the river's mouth in Tangier Sound. Working back upstream, they will meet the others, fishing their way downriver from near Vienna, where U.S. 50 bridges the Dorchester and Wicomico shores.
From September until May, the Calloways, who annually farm more than a thousand acres of grain and raise close to a million chickens, will also fish as many as 28 commercial fyke and pound nets along 12 to 15 miles of this tidal Chesapeake tributary.
In their "spare" time, they trap for fur and meat in the river's marshes, taking up to 5,000 muskrats, and drift gill nets for rockfish and white perch. They also grow and sell direct to city buyers enough vegetables and melons to keep their storefront -- a camping trailer -- manned by family members in New Jersey all summer.
At one time or another, the men say, they have tried about everything the region has to offer: oystering, eel potting, raising hogs and cattle, making sausage and scrapple, "turkling" (catching snapping turtles), trapping coons and foxes, deer hunting (they will take half a dozen or so a year for meat), making and selling wreaths of the crows foot they pick from their woods.
"To my knowledge, the Calloways are unique around Chesapeake Bay . . . the extent to which they live off the land and water," says Dale Weinrich, a state fisheries biologist. His crews go out with commercial fishermen, baywide, to survey spawning fish stocks. Since 1988 the Calloways have become, for the biologists, a valuable window into the life of the Nanticoke.
Working the water
On this December day, our first stop is near the mouth of Rewastico Creek, where an L-shaped layout of poles and netting intercepts fish and leads them into a fyke net anchored on the bottom.
A fyke is a long, mesh bag, held open by a series of hoops. Fish pass farther and farther into the fyke through an interior net that narrows to a "throat." Once through the throat, they cannot find their way back out.
Billy eases the skiff forward as Clayton leans over the bow and hooks a cork, whose attached line enables him and Eddie to begin hoisting the fyke's 6-foot diameter hoops and heavy mesh. Thick, black mud spatters on their oilskins as they heave.
The catch, a thrashing, squirming mass shaken down into the net's tail end, is small but of high quality: "White perch . . . the water has to get colder before they'll go good into a net, but this is the best we've done," says Billy. The fish are already forming roe, and will run up Nanticoke creeks to spawn come March and April. The market is sky-high right now, $1.20 a pound for big ones.
The fyke yields a variety: a few decomposing cormorants that dove into the net to steal its fish; a hefty, 12- to 15-pound rockfish that is out of season and goes back overboard; assorted species of catfish, perhaps the river's most consistent catch; also several gizzard shad, considered trash fish, but fetching a fair price in certain months as feed for Southern catfish farms.
As Clayton and Eddie sort and box the keepers, Billy drives the skiff downriver to fish a pound. This is a major net -- more than 100 poles, each the size of a small tree, pounded four to six feet into the river's bed. Attached to these, a complicated series of overlapping mesh panels, tensioned by myriad ropes, guides fish into an enclosure, or pound, again through a throat.
Such a net, to catch successfully, must be located and set up precisely -- fine-tuned to each part of the river. The Calloways are exacting, designing and building from scratch all the nets they use. Tommy, the family's master net maker, keeps cards on which he records the spacing of poles and layout of each net as it is taken up each season.
He will discourse without much prodding on the intricacies of proper throat design, as well as the "wings," "backing," "hedging," "nose," "lacing-in" and other terms that are more often the province of veteran watermen than of farmers. "A bought net," he concludes, "simply will not catch with ours."
The kind of fishing the Calloways do has declined, even among full-time bay watermen in recent decades. It has all but vanished from the rest of the Nanticoke, a river where old-timers can recall seeing 20 pounds lining a couple miles of river.
The decline of species such as shad and rockfish, hardhead and weakfish, is one reason; another is the near-impossibility of hiring labor anymore to mess with the heavy and unwieldy job of manually setting and taking up such nets.
The five Calloway men can handle the work, and the river's cycles, Billy says, "fit in well with our farming operations."
Fitting in, however, sometimes means days like the one where they finished cutting the last soybeans about 10 p.m. on a Saturday night, and left the dock around dawn, Sunday, to begin setting up fishing nets.
The money from fishing is not insignificant, perhaps $30,000 gross in an average year; but it is still a minor part of the overall operation of five families (the wives, in addition to helping with the farm work, have office jobs, and one has driven a school bus route). And all the Calloways say they would hate to figure what they are making from fish on an hourly basis.
At the heart of the matter, one suspects, is that they just love to fish. And maybe, too, the river plays a role. Indeed, if you came, unknowing, into Maryland searching for a place that would produce Calloways, it is here that you would eventually come.
The river's bounty
From around Vienna, where the Nanticoke leaves its wooded swamps and turns from fresh to brackish, it sashays for 15 miles in a series of great bends and straights to around Tyaskin, where its riverine nature broadens into a sub-estuary of Tangier Sound and the Chesapeake. In this middle distance, along the Wicomico shore, each curve of the river embraces vast marshes, run through by hundreds of miles of "cricks," "guts," sloughs, "dreens," ditches, canals, inlets, thoroughfares and assorted other drainageways. Jutting riverward behind these wetlands are series of farmed and forested "necks," or peninsulas, all with ready access to the main river through four major creeks -- Barren, Rewastico, Quantico and Wetipquin -- which run for miles into the county's interior.
There really is no place on the bay like these reaches of the Nanticoke, where fish and fowl, cropland, marshland and waterways are arranged so sympathetically. It is a place to be farmed and fished, hunted and trapped, plowed and timbered and netted.
Above all, the Nanticoke is a fish-netting river. High-grade water and wetlands, gravel river bottom, and the salinity mix around Vienna create, for miles upstream and down, some of the bay's best spawning habitat for ocean migrants such as shad, herring and striped bass. In the late 1700s, long after they lost their historic franchise on the river and migrated to Pennsylvania, remnants of the Nanticoke Indians were observed walking the old trails back into Maryland every spring to fish the shad and herring runs here.
Federal and state fisheries statistics from the 1890s ranked the river third in Maryland in its yield of shad, the premier commercial fish at that time. It was surpassed only by the larger Choptank and the mighty Potomac. More than 600 fyke, gill and pound nets operated on the river in 1896, taking upward of three-quarters of a million pounds of shad.
Billy and Eddie say their family's involvement in the region as farmer-fishermen goes back at least to Will Calloway, their grandfather. Those were the days when western Wicomico was still very much water-oriented, with steamers calling at wharves and landings up and down the main river and its deep tributary creeks.
"We have always heard the story of the sturgeon that got loose from our grandfather," Billy says. At that time, he explains, netters in July and August drifted gill nets of gigantic size (15 inches from corner to corner of each mesh; anything but the largest striped bass would simply swim through them today).
Their quarry was Atlantic sturgeon, which could reach 10 feet in length and weigh several hundred pounds. Will Calloway had three of these hitched live, by their stoutly forked tails, to the dock at long-gone Athaloo Landing to keep them fresh until the steamer came to take them to urban markets.
And they apparently slipped the knot.
Sturgeon are long gone from the Nanticoke netters' catch. Shad have been off-limits statewide since 1980, and their continued scarcity in the river has sparked talk in state fisheries circles of "jump-starting" the spring migrations with stocking from a hatchery. The Calloways think it could work. In their family's long experience, the river seems to have followed its own peculiar cycles.
Attuned to nature
"Our grandfather fished for rock [striped bass]," says Billy. "Our father, when I started with him out of high school in 1956, fished for shad -- you never saw a rockfish back then."
"But then I graduated in 1961," says Eddie, "and Billy and I bought a shad net and went drifting, and that week so many rockfish hit they tore the net apart -- and from then on rock were the big fish on the river."
A decline in rock baywide forced a ban on catching them in the mid-1980s. Those were lean years for fishing, but some of the best ever for trapping muskrats. Now, the rockfish have rebounded in the river to levels of abundance unseen in decades. Meanwhile, muskrat populations have sagged, apparently because of a disease that has yet to run its course among the aquatic rodents.
Fur markets have also fallen worldwide, maybe permanently, to where muskrat pelts fetch only about $1 apiece. But there is an enduring local taste for the meat, and each carcass, no larger than a frying chicken, commands about $2. "Every year people start calling their orders in as early as August [trapping season runs January through March]," Eddie says. "Some will buy 20 or 30 and freeze them. Even when we caught 5,000, we sold every one we could get."
The nets this day are quickly fished. This is the lull between fall rockfish and spring herring runs -- the time of year, the Calloways say, that "tests your nerves." In the weeks ahead they will have to choose between leaving their nets in the water for the chance of lucrative white perch, or taking them out to avoid risking destruction from ice, which can cover the creeks in as little as three days.
They return to their 450-acre home farm at Athol to plan the rest of the day -- readying chicken houses for the next flocks, and making gill nets, which they call "hanging twine." The nets will be drifted with the tide for rockfish in January and February. Every "reach," or driftable straightaway between the Nanticoke's great bends, has its own name and stories of big catches and events. It is by reaches that Eddie and Billy usually refer to the river: Moving from above Vienna south there is Riverton, the Stumps, Chicone, Barren Creek, Tide Mill, Steam Mill, Peach Orchard, Short Reach, Shallow Ground, Long Reach.
The Calloways are aware they have become about the last repository of the Nanticoke's rich fishing tradition. They have known all the old netters, mostly gone now, and incorporated their techniques and designs into their own nets. An uncle, the late Allen "Peanut" Calloway, taught them most of what they know about fishing fykes and pounds, they say. Some of the nets they use were given to them by old-timers for the price of taking them up at the end of the previous owner's last season on the river.
In contrast, their farming headquarters at Athol is a thoroughly modern agribusiness, its jumble of equipment and facilities a testament to all that it takes to survive in today's agricultural environment in Maryland. "Complex" describes the place far better than "barnyard."
Trucks, from 18-wheelers to pickups, are parked next to two huge harvesters and five tractors. There is a machine shop and a net shed, a vegetable grader, a pumpkin patch, a shed for spare net poles, and three long, low poultry houses that each hold 27,200 chickens. A large building nearby is devoted to storing irrigation systems.
Much of the complex is occupied with systems to protect the environment: a barn-sized structure used to shelter mountains of poultry manure until it can be spread on crops ready to absorb the bulk of its nutrients; a composting facility that turns dead chickens into usable fertilizer; a manure spreader that can be calibrated to dispense no more per acre than the crops need.
Fighting pollution
As concern about the Chesapeake Bay has risen in the last decade or so, the runoff of manures and commercial fertilizers has connected the Calloways, along with most farmers, to their local waterways in a new way -- as pollution threats. The bay's declines in oxygen, sea grasses and fisheries have all been linked to nutrients in farm runoff, along with similar nutrients discharged in urban sewage, runoff from fertilized suburban lawns, in underwater seepage from septic tanks -- even in polluted air that falls on the bay and its watershed.
The Calloways have become advocates of their new manure systems, which are being heavily promoted by state farming and environmental officials.
"Like everyone else, we used to think you had to put it on the fields butt-deep," says Billy, "and with the older spreaders, you couldn't calibrate them down -- about the least you could put on was five tons to the acre. Now, we're doing more like a ton to the acre."
Storing the manure under roof, the family says, has not only cut down on polluted runoff, but seems to improve its quality as an all-purpose fertilizer. They have also been able to cut their use of commercially purchased fertilizers by more than half, they say.
"Surely, all that has been done to help the bay must be helping with the fish," Billy says.
A tougher threat to both their fishing and farming is likely to come from the rapid sprawl development that is gobbling up the state's countryside and putting pressure on its waterfront. Wicomico County is no exception. Though local master plans call for the bulk of development to occur around Salisbury and
existing smaller towns, new housing -- everything from house trailers to mini-estates -- is spreading even to the county's more remoter sections, such as the rural Nanticoke necks.
"I think development is going to take the whole Eastern Shore," Eddie predicts. The only defense they can see is a state program -- chronically underfunded until recently -- that pays farmers the difference between development and agricultural land values if they agree to keep their property in farming. They say they are seeking to involve their home farm in the program, but have no definite deal yet with the state. Around three-quarters of all the land they farm is leased, owned by everyone from real estate speculators to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.
But if the forests and fields in the "Hungry Neck" and environs hold firm, and the Nanticoke's fish cooperate, it appears the Calloways will be up to continuing their traditions. There are several youngsters, the great-great grandchildren of Will Calloway, and another on the way. Tommy plans to begin taking his 8-year-old son fishing in the spring. Another boy, 4, already likes to arrange pillows on the carpet and pretend they are the fields he is going to farm.