THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, August 17, 1995 TAG: 9508170067
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY EMILY PEASE, SPECIAL TO THE DAILY BREAK
LENGTH: Long : 267 lines
FOR GEORGE MARSHALL - oysterman, crabber, businessman - life is a perpetual battle. Sometimes, it feels like war.
Federal and state regulations have got him in a stranglehold. And patrol officers for the Virginia Marine Resources Commission watch him from afar. ``I can't go out on the James River,'' Marshall says, ``or they'll put me in jail.''
His face tightens as he adds: ``The law's got so bad on you, you can't do nothing. They'll hang you right to death, and here you're just trying to make money, trying to make a living.''
At age 52, Marshall has been working on the water for nearly 40 years. ``I've never worked for nobody else in my life,'' he says. ``I've only worked the water. I'm probably the only waterman around here who's never worked on land.''
Which is not exactly true.
While it is true that Marshall quit school when he was just 13, pronouncing it too frustrating (``Dyslexia,'' he explains. ``Read everything back to front.''), and while it is true that Marshall went immediately out on the water with his father, working the Severn River, the James River and Mobjack Bay for oysters and crabs, it is not true that Marshall has never known anything else.
There was his boatbuilding business, Marshall Boat Builders, which he started out on Route 17 in Gloucester about 15 years ago. He designed his own boat back then, an 18-foot skiff he called a Work Mate. He kept the business going for seven years, then let it go.
And there was his marine consulting business, Marshall Marine Consulting. People used to come to him for advice on where the oyster beds are located in the waters surrounding Gloucester, where they could build a new pier.
And still there is the oyster house, Marshall Seafood. Marshall built it 20 years ago on a pine-covered point of land in Glass, Va., where he was born, and where just about every member of his family, father's side and mother's side, were also born and raised.
Nearly every one of them fought him the whole way, too. No one had ever put any kind of business in Glass, where 50 to 60 houses rise scattershot by the Severn River on land flat as a skillet. There had never been anything but houses, cars, boats.
``I had 92 people against me on it,'' Marshall says, looking out from the concrete porch of his oyster house. ``But I fought 'em on it. I was born and raised here. If I want to start a business, I'm going to do it.''
Marshall won his fight and built the shucking house along with his brother, Daniel, a clammer. But it wasn't long before George was running the shucking house by himself. His brother uses the house, and a few friends and relatives tie their boats up there, but the business is George Marshall's alone.
``It's better to do your own thing,'' Marshall says.
But the real reason Marshall built the oyster house, the real reason he went up against 92 of his friends and close relatives to build a concrete two-room building good for shucking and storing oysters, is something else entirely.
More and more, Marshall found that working the water was a battle. Supplies were going down, the laws were getting tighter and watermen were making less money than they used to.
``I saw this coming way before my daddy died,'' Marshall says. ``I didn't want to be like my daddy, depend on the other S.O.B. all the time. Someone pays you $15 for a bushel of oysters, and then he turns around and gets $75 for that same bushel.
``I saw that coming long ago. I said, `I'm going to build my oyster house so I won't have to depend on somebody like that. I got four or five acres of oyster grounds right here, so I won't have to depend on no one else but myself.' ''
Historically, watermen have been known for their fierce independence and their stubborn resistance to change. In the view of Herb Austin, a scientist and professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, a lot of watermen continue to live as if they're on the frontier. In the tiny communities along the York River and the Mobjack Bay, most roads weren't paved until the 1960s, and watermen remained as isolated as their forebears in Colonial times.
Driving his dark blue Chevy Blazer three miles south of Glass along the narrow roads of Guinea, a low-lying, notoriously tight-knit community of watermen, Austin points to blackened trees and fire-parched undergrowth. For 13 years, as fire chief of the Abingdon Fire Department, Austin has fought real fires of anger and revenge, waterman against waterman. And he has watched as a way of life has become increasingly threatened by change.
``A lot of these people are completely self-sufficient,'' says Austin. ``They repair their own roofs, and they fix their own cars. You can see a lot of people plant a garden in their yard. They're used to doing things for themselves.''
But lately, Austin says, he's noticed watermen beginning to take second jobs off the water. ``You see guys more and more doing carpentry, painting, mechanics - that sort of thing.
``The full-time waterman feels the strain. If he's crabbing, he's got to fish more crabpots to keep up. He has to pay more in license fees than he used to, and he has more regulations to deal with. Seafood is a dwindling resource, and watermen don't see themselves to blame. They get angry because they can't make a living like they used to.''
After a day's work, when watermen stop to grab a beer, the talk often centers on the regulations and those who enforce them. The regulations make work harder, adding tedious extra steps to the labor-intensive job of baiting, catching, culling and packing seafood.
Austin sympathizes, but he says regulations are crucial to preserving marine resources and keeping the seafood industry viable. ``Twenty-five years ago, it was felt that the oceans were an unlimited resource, but now we know there's just a finite number of species out there. Watermen will tell you they can conserve the resource themselves, but in reality, when a fisherman's out there on the water and he sees another fisherman, he tends to fish harder. He figures, `If I don't catch it, the other guy will.' ''
Yet it's not just the regulations that bother watermen these days. It's the ``inspectors'' - the patrol officers out on the water who inspect a waterman's catch and write out tickets - who cause tempers to rise.
For George Marshall, two incidents fester in his memory.
There was the time, just a few months ago, when he bought 30 bushels of small seed oysters freshly dredged from the James River. Wayne, a friend, took a truck down to Menchville Harbor to load up the oysters and take them back to Marshall's Seafood.
But he was met by the law.
Under the watch of patrol officers from the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, Wayne loaded the oysters and headed his truck up the highway toward Gloucester. The way he tells it, officers followed him from Deep Creek to the Coleman Bridge. They drove over the bridge in a convoy, with officers in cars ahead of him and officers in cars behind him. On the other side of the bridge, a new set of officers took up the escort as the jurisdiction changed, and Wayne drove his truck the final five miles to Glass.
Marshall recalls every detail of what happened once the truck pulled into the driveway at the oyster house: ``I was sitting here on a Friday afternoon, writing the payroll up, talking on the phone and they walked in the door and said, `Mr. Marshall, you've got to plant them oysters right away.' ''
Marshall remembers telling them he would plant them later. He told them he had the payroll to make out, and he couldn't get to those oysters right then. ``But he demanded me to plant the 30 bushels of seed oysters - not condemned oysters, but seed oysters - he demanded me to drop everything and plant them right then. He said he would call the sheriff and have me arrested if I didn't plant them right then.''
The story is legend by now, at least among the men who work around George Marshall. There were four carloads of officers, the story goes, all of them parked in the sandy, crushed-shell driveway by the oyster house. There was the highway patrol. There was the sheriff. And in the middle of it all, there was George Marshall, under orders to take the 30 bushels of seed oysters - by regulation too small to be sold straight from the James River - and put them overboard on his own oyster beds.
In the end, Marshall complied. It took him three hours to do it, he says, but he loaded the 30 bushels of oysters in a skiff and took them out to the river and threw them overboard.
According to state regulations, seed oysters may be dredged from public grounds only for re-planting on a waterman's private oyster grounds. In the public grounds in the James River, seed oysters include not only the tiny, thumbnail-sized oysters normally known as ``seed,'' but also oysters of various other sizes, even including large, market-sized oysters more than 3 inches long. According to Virginia code, watermen who work these grounds may not harvest those big oysters for sale. Rather, they must take the oysters - all sizes - to their own private grounds where they will grow.
The large oysters, even though they are market-sized, serve their purpose: to spawn more seed.
When marine patrol officers followed Marshall's shipment of oysters, it was because they suspected he planned to shuck the big ones right away.
But the Virginia code regarding the re-planting of seed oysters lacks teeth, since a waterman is not required to leave his oysters in his private grounds for any set length of time. Once the oysters are on his own private grounds, he may harvest them when he wishes.
How long did Marshall's oysters stay in the water before he pulled them back up?
``About 10 minutes,'' he says, with defiant satisfaction.
Even though the oysters were small, once they had been planted on Marshall's own grounds, they were legally his to sell. He just had to dredge them up again in order to do it.
The other incident that Marshall likes to recall, the one he likes to tell the way he might tell a joke, has to do with a fellow waterman named Jim Wesson. At least Wesson used to be a waterman - used to be president of the Virginia Working Watermens Association, in fact - before he went to the ``other side'' and joined the VMRC three years ago. Now he carries the official title of chief of conservation/replenishment, and his specialty is oysters.
What Marshall can't believe is that Wesson has been known to go out on the water and scatter empty oyster shells over active, living oyster grounds. Marshall finds this so baffling that he likes to tell anyone who'll listen that there is a scientist-waterman (Wesson has a PhD in biology) who actually puts shells on top of oysters.
``He piles them this high on the bottom,'' Marshall says, measuring about 18 inches in the air in front of him. ``Shells on top of oysters, have you ever heard of that?''
But if you get the story from Wesson himself, he'll describe the way oyster grounds used to look 200 years ago, protruding through the surface of the James River, forming real reefs. Oysters were so plentiful that Indians along the James River walked on them. And they were healthy. So Wesson has been building up an oyster reef in the Piankatank River near his home, dropping shells on top of oysters, just as Marshall says.
``What we're finding,'' Wesson says, ``is that the oysters are growing there. And around the reef, there are crabs and fish, which makes sense. Fishing charts show us that the fishing was once best on the oyster reefs.'' Those reefs, Wesson says, were Virginia's own version of coral reefs - full of marine life.
Rebuilding reef conditions could help bring the oyster back to the rivers and the Chesapeake Bay, Wesson contends. But it won't happen overnight. ``If we can get oysters in the right habitat, they'll survive better against diseases. And if we can let some of them grow large, 5 or 6 years old, they can produce multimillions of larvae, which means more spawn for the harvesting areas. But it's a long-term proposition, and watermen think in the short-term.''
To which Marshall says simply, ``That's stupid and stupid.''
And then an echo comes from the porch at the oyster house - it's Franklin West, a friend who's come to sit awhile and smoke his pipe. ``Yep,'' West says, ``that's foolish and foolish.''
By all accounts, the oyster harvest in Virginia has nearly died, falling from its heyday in the late 1800s, when 7 million bushels a year were pulled from the bottom of Virginia's rivers and bays, to just 35,000 bushels last year.
It is now often cheaper for a waterman to buy oysters from the Gulf of Mexico, shipped to Virginia in refrigerated trucks, than it is for him to dredge the oysters himself.
So Marshall is now in the business of shucking Louisiana oysters, packing them in jars and selling them locally. He can't claim they're from Virginia waters. But if no one asks, he won't say where they come from.
And Marshall now pulls crab pots, 200 of them, from the Severn River nearly every morning. His friend Al Smith, 65, calls from his house in Guinea at 3 a.m. each day to wake Marshall, then he drinks four cups of coffee and waits for Marshall's truck to arrive. On most mornings, Marshall takes Smith to a Little Sue market to grab a sandwich, and then they head out on the water to pull pots.
Crabs seem plentiful enough, but the catch is still lower than it once was. In five hours, Marshall and Smith pull anywhere between six to eight bushels, which they sell to Colley Avenue Seafood in Norfolk. Some of them are small - less than 5 inches from point to point - but Marshall keeps them anyway.
``I figure they have four ways of getting in the pot and six ways of getting out. If they don't make it, tough luck.''
At the end of each day's haul, Marshall takes a portion of the harvest to give away to friends or family. On a recent Thursday morning, he took a half-basket of peelers to a cousin. ``He helped grade my parking lot, put shells down,'' Marshall says. ``I treat people like I want to be treated, offer them a little something in return. You've got to do that to stay in business these days.''
Marshall spends a lot of time thinking about how to stay in business now. He's not alone. All along the water, watermen are quietly worried, and little things touch them off.
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Times have changed so much, in fact, that he feels justified in discouraging his only son, Michael, 21, from becoming a waterman. ``I don't want him to have no part in it, not a bit,'' Marshall says. ``A young man going into it now has got a hell of a job ahead of him.''
So Michael Marshall is studying at Virginia Tech to become a psychologist, and his father is proud to say so. ``I don't mean to brag,'' Marshall says, ``but he's been three years on the dean's list.''
For George Marshall's line of the Marshall clan, the tradition of working on the water might be coming to a close. He grew up sitting on furniture his mother bought from the money she made fishing for croakers with a hook and line. The first time she let him fish as a child, she held him by the diaper to keep him from falling overboard.
With a history like that, Marshall couldn't leave the water even if the harvest dried up altogether. ``I want to go just like my daddy did,'' he says, ``go out on the water in the morning and die in my sleep that night. I've had a good life on the water. I can't complain.'' ILLUSTRATION: BETH BERGMAN/Staff color photos
George Marshall, who has been working the waters in Gloucester
County for nearly 40 years, fishes crab pots out of the water as
storm clouds loom overhead.
Al Smith, left, relaxes while Marshall makes some calls regarding
his oyster shucking business, Marshall Seafood in Glass.
Photo
BETH BERGMAN/Staff
Watermen George Marshall, front, and Al Smith pull oysters in the
waters around Gloucester County.
by CNB