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East of the Chesapeake
East of the Chesapeake continues the themes and story lines of Chesapeake Boyhood , William Turner's delightful account of growing up on the lower Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake during the years following the Great Depression. Here are Turner's singular accounts of curious characters, changing seasons, natural wonders, and small-town dramas. Once again, he brings the people and landscape of rural Virginia to life as no one else can. His own drawings illustrate the stories, and they, too, win us over with their honesty and charm. "Bill Turner writes about characters who might have inspired the likes of Damon Runyon or Erskine Caldwell. Not that Turner is another Runyon or Caldwell. He isn't. He's Bill Turner. An original."―Bob Hutchinson, Norfolk Virginian Pilot "Bill Turner has done it again! Another wonderful memoir of growing up and living in a place wonderfully out of sync with the rest of our one-size-fits-all world."―George Reiger, author of Heron Hill Chronicle
264 pages, Paperback
First published May 19, 2000
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August 7, 2024
The Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay is a region renowned for its beautiful scenery - and yet the Virginia portion of the Eastern Shore often goes overlooked. Virginia, after all, has only two counties on the “Del-Mar-Va” peninsula, in contrast with nine for Maryland. Perhaps it is for that reason that the Virginia portion of Delmarva makes its way into the public’s consciousness only occasionally, as when the wild ponies inside the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge are herded across Assateague Channel and auctioned off to raise money for the Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Department. Yet the Eastern Shore of Virginia has its own extensive lore worth sharing, as William Turner makes clear in his book East of the Chesapeake.
Turner is a sculptor whose studio is located in the small Accomack County town of Onley. Originally published in 1998, East of the Chesapeake is the second of two books of memoir and observation that Turner has written, both of them drawing upon Turner’s experience as an Eastern Shore native and lifelong Shoreman. With illustrations by the author, East of the Chesapeake provides a loving, down-home look at a region where continuity rather than change has been the norm for over 400 years.
Certain themes emerge in the 22 vignettes that make up East of the Chesapeake. The rural conservatism and traditionalism that are so characteristic of Eastern Shore life come through clearly in Turner’s work; he often writes of his disdain for city life, as when he describes how he responded to his parents’ wartime relocation to Newport News for work in the shipyard there: “I did not like the city (I like cities even less now) and spent all my summers, at a minimum, living with my country relatives. In fact, at times urban life would get to me so badly during the academic term that I would cross the Bay and move in with one of my country relatives to complete the school term….[I] actually learned more in the rural schools than in the city” (pp. 45-46).
There are times when Turner’s traditionalism makes him sound downright resentful of the changes in social norms that have overtaken the modern world. When, for example, chronicling his friendship with an elderly African American named Tom Skinny, Turner writes that the color of Tom Skinny’s skin “was similar to the hue of a new tin wood heater. Perhaps it is not good form to mention a character’s color in a story anymore; nevertheless, there are times when an imaginary blend of all hues into a homogeneous futuristic monotone person doesn’t allow for a proper telling. This story, however, has a direct legitimate relationship to color, so I must ask your forbearance, whatever color God made you” (p. 51). One senses that Turner would utilize terms like “political correctness” with profound distaste.
Turner’s conservatism comes through most clearly in a story titled “The Ultimate Bureaucracy,” his recounting of a 1992 encounter with representatives of the federal government’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Turner’s attitude toward this particular avatar of Big Government is well-summed-up when he declares that “one could take the OSHA bible of commandments and shut down any hospital, school or church in the United States without getting past the preamble” (p. 193). As Turner tells it, the arrogant OSHA operatives exhibit a cheerful disregard for both constitutional law and proper procedure; he says of one OSHA agent that “Although this bureaucrat had obviously committed to memory the voluminous OSHA manual, he did not know anything about the Fourth Amendment” (p. 195).
What follows is a lively, energetic, almost Tom Sawyer-esque story of a plucky protagonist using his wits and street smarts to defeat a powerful antagonist. It is not surprising to see a business owner express resentment of a big federal government agency coming in and telling him how to run his business; and the way Turner tells his story of outwitting his adversaries in the local Virginia courts that he knows better than they do makes for fun reading. But I can’t help observing that, across the United States of America, there are thousands of people whose lives have been saved and made safer and healthier by U.S. government agencies such as OSHA, and whose feelings about the agency’s work might be quite different from Turner’s.
Turner is on firmer, less swampy ground when he eschews politics and deploys his considerable storytelling gifts in the service of detail-rich, human stories of everyday life on the Eastern Shore. In the process of reading Turner’s tales, one gets a sense of his philosophy regarding how any human being’s perception of life changes with the passage of time: “The fantasies of youth embellished by time may twist and bend reality, but the final perception is the important thing, and nothing else matters. The facts are the bones, and the feelings one gets from any setting create the less definite but more malleable flesh. When the immature mind is absorbing, weighing and absorbing a constant barrage of impressions, there is no delineation between fact and fantasy – it is only when older that reason and reality begin to dissect the memories” (p. 104). That tone of wistful nostalgia characterizes many of the stories in East of the Chesapeake.
Turner’s interest in the passage of time, and in the human stories that take place amid times of change, comes through affectingly in a vignette titled “The Final Crossing,” about the ferries that used to cross from Virginia’s Eastern Shore to the cities of the Hampton Roads area. Turner worked as a deck hand on the Kiptopeke ferry during the summer of 1954, after his first year at the University of Virginia; and when I read the title “The Final Crossing,” I thought that the story would deal with how most of the Chesapeake ferries have vanished from the scene with the building of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in Maryland and the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel in Virginia.
Instead, however, Turner provides a moving story of his conversation with an elderly passenger whose life has fallen apart: his wife has died from cancer, an accident has paralyzed his grandson, and he has lost his long-time job as a hardware salesman. Ostensibly, the man is on his way to move in with his daughter in North Carolina. But when the ferryboat arrives at its Hampton Roads debarkation point, it becomes clear that this unfortunate man had decided upon another destination:
“[W]e came upon a neatly folded pair of pants and a shirt lying beside the juke box….On these clothes was a pair of shoes and socks lined up as if they had been placed there by a gentleman’s valet. Beside the shoes were a set of car keys and a thin and worn wallet. I nervously opened the wallet, and the Pennsylvania driver’s license pictured my briefly-known friend. As is often the case in the Chesapeake Bay, his body was never found. I am sure that this weary man wanted it that way so as to trouble no one.” (pp. 165-66).
Republished in 2000 as part of the Johns Hopkins University’s series of Chesapeake-region books, with a foreword by veteran Baltimore Sun journalist Tom Horton, East of the Chesapeake provides an engaging look at life on an oft-overlooked part of the Eastern Shore.
Turner is a sculptor whose studio is located in the small Accomack County town of Onley. Originally published in 1998, East of the Chesapeake is the second of two books of memoir and observation that Turner has written, both of them drawing upon Turner’s experience as an Eastern Shore native and lifelong Shoreman. With illustrations by the author, East of the Chesapeake provides a loving, down-home look at a region where continuity rather than change has been the norm for over 400 years.
Certain themes emerge in the 22 vignettes that make up East of the Chesapeake. The rural conservatism and traditionalism that are so characteristic of Eastern Shore life come through clearly in Turner’s work; he often writes of his disdain for city life, as when he describes how he responded to his parents’ wartime relocation to Newport News for work in the shipyard there: “I did not like the city (I like cities even less now) and spent all my summers, at a minimum, living with my country relatives. In fact, at times urban life would get to me so badly during the academic term that I would cross the Bay and move in with one of my country relatives to complete the school term….[I] actually learned more in the rural schools than in the city” (pp. 45-46).
There are times when Turner’s traditionalism makes him sound downright resentful of the changes in social norms that have overtaken the modern world. When, for example, chronicling his friendship with an elderly African American named Tom Skinny, Turner writes that the color of Tom Skinny’s skin “was similar to the hue of a new tin wood heater. Perhaps it is not good form to mention a character’s color in a story anymore; nevertheless, there are times when an imaginary blend of all hues into a homogeneous futuristic monotone person doesn’t allow for a proper telling. This story, however, has a direct legitimate relationship to color, so I must ask your forbearance, whatever color God made you” (p. 51). One senses that Turner would utilize terms like “political correctness” with profound distaste.
Turner’s conservatism comes through most clearly in a story titled “The Ultimate Bureaucracy,” his recounting of a 1992 encounter with representatives of the federal government’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Turner’s attitude toward this particular avatar of Big Government is well-summed-up when he declares that “one could take the OSHA bible of commandments and shut down any hospital, school or church in the United States without getting past the preamble” (p. 193). As Turner tells it, the arrogant OSHA operatives exhibit a cheerful disregard for both constitutional law and proper procedure; he says of one OSHA agent that “Although this bureaucrat had obviously committed to memory the voluminous OSHA manual, he did not know anything about the Fourth Amendment” (p. 195).
What follows is a lively, energetic, almost Tom Sawyer-esque story of a plucky protagonist using his wits and street smarts to defeat a powerful antagonist. It is not surprising to see a business owner express resentment of a big federal government agency coming in and telling him how to run his business; and the way Turner tells his story of outwitting his adversaries in the local Virginia courts that he knows better than they do makes for fun reading. But I can’t help observing that, across the United States of America, there are thousands of people whose lives have been saved and made safer and healthier by U.S. government agencies such as OSHA, and whose feelings about the agency’s work might be quite different from Turner’s.
Turner is on firmer, less swampy ground when he eschews politics and deploys his considerable storytelling gifts in the service of detail-rich, human stories of everyday life on the Eastern Shore. In the process of reading Turner’s tales, one gets a sense of his philosophy regarding how any human being’s perception of life changes with the passage of time: “The fantasies of youth embellished by time may twist and bend reality, but the final perception is the important thing, and nothing else matters. The facts are the bones, and the feelings one gets from any setting create the less definite but more malleable flesh. When the immature mind is absorbing, weighing and absorbing a constant barrage of impressions, there is no delineation between fact and fantasy – it is only when older that reason and reality begin to dissect the memories” (p. 104). That tone of wistful nostalgia characterizes many of the stories in East of the Chesapeake.
Turner’s interest in the passage of time, and in the human stories that take place amid times of change, comes through affectingly in a vignette titled “The Final Crossing,” about the ferries that used to cross from Virginia’s Eastern Shore to the cities of the Hampton Roads area. Turner worked as a deck hand on the Kiptopeke ferry during the summer of 1954, after his first year at the University of Virginia; and when I read the title “The Final Crossing,” I thought that the story would deal with how most of the Chesapeake ferries have vanished from the scene with the building of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in Maryland and the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel in Virginia.
Instead, however, Turner provides a moving story of his conversation with an elderly passenger whose life has fallen apart: his wife has died from cancer, an accident has paralyzed his grandson, and he has lost his long-time job as a hardware salesman. Ostensibly, the man is on his way to move in with his daughter in North Carolina. But when the ferryboat arrives at its Hampton Roads debarkation point, it becomes clear that this unfortunate man had decided upon another destination:
“[W]e came upon a neatly folded pair of pants and a shirt lying beside the juke box….On these clothes was a pair of shoes and socks lined up as if they had been placed there by a gentleman’s valet. Beside the shoes were a set of car keys and a thin and worn wallet. I nervously opened the wallet, and the Pennsylvania driver’s license pictured my briefly-known friend. As is often the case in the Chesapeake Bay, his body was never found. I am sure that this weary man wanted it that way so as to trouble no one.” (pp. 165-66).
Republished in 2000 as part of the Johns Hopkins University’s series of Chesapeake-region books, with a foreword by veteran Baltimore Sun journalist Tom Horton, East of the Chesapeake provides an engaging look at life on an oft-overlooked part of the Eastern Shore.
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