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This article appeared in the March/April 2005 print edition of PL. For more than thirty years, Dr. David Nichols has piloted a plane or a helicopter across the Chesapeake Bay on his day off each week to provide medical care to Tangier’s community of 500 that has no resident doctor. On August 29, the island celebrated the opening of a stunningly modern clinic dedicated to Dr. Nichols. The clinic is the realization of Nichols' dream and the culmination of a remarkable fundraising effort that spread far beyond the island.
But the joy of this occasion was tempered greatly by the knowledge that the island's family doctor learned in July that the cancer diagnosed last July had spread to his liver.
We honor Dr. Nichol’s for his unwavering dedication to the care of Tangier’s residents.
For the full article that appeared in the Virginian Pilot online last August, visit Pilotline
For the Southside Sentinel article that appeared in September, visit ssentinel
“There it is!” says our helicopter pilot. Sure enough, a tiny strip of land floats between us and the line on the horizon that is Crisfield, Maryland. Dr. David Nichols is piloting Kim Clarke, whom he calls his “right arm,” and me in his Robinson 44 helicopter from White Stone to Tangier Island. Like an island Brigadoon*, the tiny one-by-three mile bit of land rises just five feet above the sea. On this clear cold morning in December, the Chesapeake Bay is Caribbean blue.
As thrilled as I am to be flying at one thousand feet on this spectacular winter day, I can hardly wait to meet the Tangier residents scheduled to see the doctor. Dr. Nichols has given me permission to sit in the waiting room and chat with the patients, and even though I know many residents of Urbanna whose roots are in Tangier, I have no idea of the heartwarming visit that is in store for me.
From the first person to the last, we participate in a day-long drama. Conversation is punctuated by rolling melodious vowels, and patients are concerned for each other’s health. They have a life-long familiarity with their stories, an abiding faith and a quiet acceptance of how geography influences their lives. Sarah Crockett, in a FEMA report after Hurricane Isabel, describes the Tangier community perspective. “If I hurt, my neighbor hurts; if my neighbor hurts, I hurt.” This village defined by narrow streets and set on an island with the Chesapeake Bay washing all its shores has developed a close-knit, sturdy and many-faceted culture.
We are witnessing the last month of a year-long celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Dr. David Nichol’s family practice in White Stone and on Tangier Island, on the Eastern Shore. Every Thursday during this time, he has flown, first by airplane and now by helicopter, to take care of the medical needs of the Tangier Islanders. Everyone on his staff is involved in this extension of the family practice. Two other doctors, Richard Bagnall and Keith Cubbage, and two physician assistants, Robert Duffer and Michelle Hass, take turns holding office hours on the island. Today, Dr. Nichols and Michelle Hass will see more than thirty patients by the end of the day.
Providing medical assistance for these islanders has become a long-time passion and mission for Dr. Nichols. The need is so great that since August 2004 he has flown another doctor or physician assistant to see patients on Mondays, thus offering medical service two days a week.
Built in 1957, the Gladstone Medical Center (named for a former doctor), used extensively by Dr. Nichols and by the Eastern Shore Social Services, is barely adequate for the demand. Its plywood cabinets, water-stained ceilings, worn vinyl flooring and peeling wallpaper cry out for refurbishing. The dentist’s chair is piled high with the staff members’ winter coats, and lunch cartons and water bottles jam the counters.
I congratulate Dr. Nichols on being able to work in such an environment after seeing him and his staff at work in the state-of the-art facility in White Stone. He explains, “There is such a great need here. There are the old folks, as you see by the retired watermen and their wives who have come in; there are children like the seven-year-old with the infected eye. There are babies with fevers, and on and on.”
Need for space is apparent in the waiting room where Cindy Parks, the receptionist, places the files of incoming patients on the floor between her desk and the filing cabinets. I sit with today’s patients on vinyl couches that need new springs and engage in conversation that revolves around everyone’s concern for each other.
For me, the effect of the Chesapeake Bay on the lives of these Tangier inhabitants is dramatic. I learn that the term “waterman” as an occupation has many faces. There is Allen Thomas, a thirty-three-year crewmember of the Express Explorer, a 110-foot tugboat (as long as the Tides Inn’s Miss Ann). When I ask in which harbor he works, he says, “I work the ocean.” His schedule is two weeks on and two weeks off at six-hour shifts as the tug plies the ocean between Newport News and New York. He says it takes two weeks off to recover from being at work every six hours. He admits, though, that while on board he is well fed twice a day with good food like steak, crab cakes, soft shells and beef roast. Allen gives me permission to watch Dr. Nichols remove a cyst from the corner of his eye. After it is removed, Dr. Nichols asks if he wants it. “No, thanks,” he says. “You can have it.”
A couple waits for the husband to get a booster shot because he is going, as his wife says, “on another mission.” He tells me that he has been on two missions this year in West Virginia and Alabama and that he expects to go on another in January to the hurricane torn area of Florida “to work in Jesus’s name.” His wife confides that he needs a hip replacement and will not take time for it. She thinks that she will schedule it between the Florida mission and the opening of hard crabbing in April.
Another waterman, now retired from tugboat life, is Danny McCready. His career was with U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on a three hundred foot ship out of Philadelphia that dredges ports like Philadelphia and New York so the big ships can come in. When I ask about his family, he says he has a son who also works for the U.S. Army Corps out of Philadelphia.
Danny is getting the last of a series of shots in preparation for going on a seventeen-day mission to India “to spread the gospel to the lepers.” He belongs to the New Testament Congregation, and he says there is no animosity between them and the Methodists. Pretty courageous, I think, considering the long tradition of Methodism on the island that began in the early nineteenth century.
I chat with Debra Karnes Landon and we discover that she is a relative of sisters, Catherine Via and Beatrice Taylor, who live in Urbanna. Indeed, she did know that the sisters are well known for their fresh soft shells (which they catch) and crabmeat that they sell from their little seafood house tucked beside Urbanna Creek. “In fact,” she says, “we call them ‘the waterwomen.’”
At this point, I must add that I taught school in the now defunct Urbanna School in the early 1950s. Among my happiest memories are getting to know the children of the Tangier residents who fled to Urbanna when the Great Flood of August 1933 inundated Tangier Island. Many of them became permanent residents of Urbanna and have maintained close ties with their Tangier relatives ever since. Beatrice was one of the children who came to Urbanna School when I was there. Presently, she is a member of Urbanna Town Council.
Little Joseph Tuttle is squirming as he waits his turn. He has a sty on his eye and tells his mother that it looks like spiderman when he opens his eye. He is seven and a half years old and wants to get out of this office in time for lunch at school.
After I mention Urbanna, Beulah Wheatley, who is here because she’s having shortness of breath, asks if I know her nephews, the Crocketts, who live just across the Rappahannock River in Irvington. Yes, I know Jimmy Lee because he talked to me about the founding of the Steamboat Era Museum there. I know his wife, Edwina Pruitt, because I taught her in Urbanna School. Did I know that they have sold their Sears and Roebuck house in Irvington and are building a new one? Did I realize that Jimmy Lee’s brother is sheriff of Irvington?
Dr. Nichols observes when I express concern about Beulah’s shortness of breath, and comments that he sees lots of heart problems on the island. He does not know whether it is genetic, smoking or diet.
Barbara McCready, the next patient, has to go to Crisfield for an ultrasound. She explains that she can leave on the mail boat at 8 a.m. and return at 4 p.m. or at 5:45 p.m. She, like others on the island, keeps her car parked at Crisfield to go to the grocery store or to Salisbury to shop. This time she will use it to go the Crisfield hospital.
Betty McMann, who looks like everybody’s beloved grandmother, has been patiently waiting. She seems to know exactly what is going on with everyone. Cindy, the receptionist, tells Betty about her daughter’s pregnancy. They think that she had better expect a boy because this pregnancy has come before her first child is one year old.
We talk of the prominent family names in this community. Names like McCready and McMann are a surprise, I observe. I thought everyone on this island was descended from the Cornwall Englishmen who first settled here. I expected names like Pruitt, Crockett, Shores, and Parks. “Oh, once in awhile, we jump around. If you go far enough back, we touch each other,” Betty explains.
Betty was nursing assistant for Dr. Nichols for years and says that his reputation as diagnostician among emergency room doctors in Crisfield and Salisbury is outstanding. “I would like to know how many lives he has saved. He is very endeared to our people.” This comment confirms my own conclusion—that the Tangier community highly values and respects Dr. Nichols, because as Betty adds, “We have had doctors come and go, but he has stuck with us.”
A tall ruddy waterman waits long enough for me to ask about their seasonal working cycle. In May the watermen begin shedding the soft crabs; that continues through the summer. In September they put out crab pots and catch hard crabs until December. From the first of December until March they dredge for oysters in Tangier Sound and off Cape Charles, and in April they go hard crabbing again until the soft crabs come in May. And so the seasonal cycle goes.
We do not have time to discuss the workboats and the equipment required because I find out that he is first cousin to Larry Shores, another Urbanna School student of mine, one who was restless and inquisitive. He grew up to become a successful Urbanna businessman. David and Richard, two of his brothers, became college professors. Richard is now retired, is chairman of Middlesex County Museum Board and serves on the school board.
Jack Thorne, a retired waterman, quietly accepts condolences because this time last year he lost his son in an automobile accident. One neighbor says that on this date last year, “Your son didn’t have but four days left.” As he rises to leave, he wishes me luck in getting some good pictures with the helicopter doctor.
Encouraging news about the state of the oyster industry comes from a working waterman just in from Crisfield. He predicts that on a good day like today the Tangier watermen will gather two hundred to three hundred bushels of oysters from Tangier Sound. They sell the oysters to the market boats that come from Crisfield and Reedville. When I express surprise at the size of one day’s harvest, an older lady responds, “The scientists don’t know everything. We understand the rhythm of nature. One year can be bad and the next year can be good.”
Toward the end of the day, Miss Ruth arrives in a wheelchair that her son positions in the middle of the tiny office, and Jack, her neighbor, pushes her chair forward to make room to sit. She acknowledges the move by saying, “If you live long enough around here, that’s what will happen to you—either you’ll walk with a cane or be setting in a wheelchair like I am.”
Before we leave, Kim, Anna Parks (the island nurse) and I take a golf cart ride along the narrow dirt streets to see the post office, the Methodist church, the school and tombstones in the yards of the homes. Folks are walking, riding bicycles, mopeds and golf carts as they collect mail at the post office. No one is hurried. They stop and unzip the transparent curtains around the golf carts to visit with neighbors who stand beside the bicycles.
There is a bicycle rack at the school. Children either walk or ride a bicycle to the one school where grades one to twelve are offered. The Methodist church, prominent because of its size and tall steeple, sits in the midst of the houses. One brick house on the island is lost among the white clapboards. Along one street we see a pickup truck that is used to deliver groceries.
We pay a call on Elizabeth Pruitt, one of Dr. Nichols’s oldest and most devoted patients. Sitting in her motorized chair, she speaks in a scholarly cadence tinged with the rolling vowels of Cornwall Englishmen, her acquired accent. She has lived here ever since she arrived for her first job just out of college. She came from her native West Point—not yet a Pruitt—to fill the home economics teacher’s vacancy at the school. She boarded with Miss Mandy Pruitt because she “took teachers.”
Miss Mandy insisted that Elizabeth go to church the first Sunday after she arrived. She sang in the choir because she had told Miss Mandy that she sang in her choir at home, and it was there that Charlie Pruitt saw her. When he came for a date, the only place she had to entertain him was her bedroom! Elizabeth soon became Mrs. Charlie Pruitt. They were married in the parsonage and Ruth Pruitt, mother of my ex-student Edwina, sang “I Love You, Truly,” accompanied by a pedal organ. As I chatted with Elizabeth Pruitt, the connections continued to astound me: the house where she now lives is the house Ruth and Paul Pruitt lived in when they were first married. I knew Ruth and Paul because they were among the first to escape to Urbanna from the Great Flood of 1933.
As we gather our coats for the return trip, everyone is energized. Laurie Steen, Dr. Nichol’s nurse, eats the last of her lunch and settles in to wait for the second flight, as does physician assistant Michelle Hass. After another golf cart ride to the air strip, Kim and I put on our life jackets, step into the helicopter, place on our earphones and wait for the doctor pilot to take us home.
We are airborne for the twelve-minute ride into the cold clear sky above the blue water ruffled now by a slight breeze. The setting sun highlights the clapboard houses tucked among the winter bare trees and grasses and, like Brigadoon, Tangier Island recedes from our view. Rest assured that after today’s visit, I am very much aware of the special charm, the stories and the needs of the residents of this island village.
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