Voyage to Cobb Island

Mum and Dad were already lying in the bottom of the boat when Captain Jack Brady cut the engine and started scanning the 360 degrees of horizon for a hint of where we might be. “I don’t wanna worry you,” he said in a hoarse Virginian drawl, “But I think I missed the channel… That there’s white water and we don’t wanna get amongst it.” It was approaching six in the morning and the November sun was breaking through the clouds just enough to turn the surrounding water from black to liquid metal. The mainland was miles of choppy sea behind us, and we three landlubbers were soaked to the skin. Given the circumstances, I didn’t want to get amongst it much either. But the barrier islands of the West Virginia Coast, and the channels of water that run between them were known only to me by legend, and not by hard topographical fact, so in true Odyssean style I groped in my pocket for my iPhone and opened Apple Maps…

That Captain Jack Brady – a Virginia native, who’d lived all 89 years of his life amidst this archipelago – found himself disorientated, is a testimony to its ever-shifting nature. We were drifting amongst sand banks and dune systems thrown up by the roiling waters of the Atlantic Ocean, unchartable in any lasting way, subject as they are to storms of devastating force. And it was to one such weather-whipped landmass that we were ultimately bound, a desolate strip of sand seven miles out from the mainland, given its name, Cobb Island, by the family who’d made their livelihoods there until being finally driven off by a hurricane in the 1890s. Captain Jack and I hunched over the glowing screen of the phone, me realising I was no longer quite sure which way the mainland was, and hoping that Jack was having better success matching the featureless mounds that surrounded us with the deceptively clear delineations of the map. Mum and Dad were still rolling around on the floor of the boat, Mum racked with situational giggles, all of us wondering how in the hell we’d got ourselves into this mess, and hoping we’d get ourselves out.

All things considered, we had to blame Dad. It was he who’d fallen prey to the siren call of Cobb Island, drawn here by his long-time obsession with the Cobb family and the wooden decoys they’d carved and hunted over on the very waters on which we now found ourselves contemplating possible shipwreck. He’d been here twice before, back in the seventies, and its desolate song had threaded through his veins and pulled him back all these years later, this time with Mum and me in tow.

And so it was that we’d pulled into Oyster, a little town nestled into the Eastern shoreline, bleak in the wintry drizzle. After gingerly stepping round a pile of eviscerated, limbless deer that had been dumped on the water’s edge by local hunters, Dad flagged down a man who was about to gun his boat up the channel. Could anyone could get us out there, to Cobb Island? The man pulled his boat in against a wooden jetty; I couldn’t blame him for looking a little surprised. But yeah, he knew a man, although he mainly did summer fishing charters, a young guy who lived up in Wachapreague. I wrote down the details, while Dad told the man he’d been taken out to Cobb before, by a guy who must be dead now, Captain Jack Brady, he’d lived in this town. Still did, the man said, up there on Crumb Hill, you know, he’d probably take you, he’s 89 now but he’s still got a boat…

And it was by means of this beautiful symmetry that we’d found ourselves cast momentarily adrift in this vast network of tidal channels, with Captain Jack at the helm, weathered and elderly, but still in command. “That there’s Wreck Island” he said, pointing at the glowing map in my hand, “Cobbs’ up above it.” He started the engine and swung the boat round. By the time we first sighted Cobb island, the sun had burned through the cloud, and it appeared as a long scrubby strip on the horizon, its flat expanse broken only by a triangular metal tower and the two collapsed silhouettes of what once had been buildings. Captain Jack tried to dock us at the old jetty, but the sea had engulfed it, and we took off our shoes to wade there instead.

I’d grown up hearing tales of the legendary Cobbs, of their family, their decoys and of the hotel they’d improbably built on this far out stretch of sand, a high-end establishment that played host to hunting parties in the summer months and boasted such luxuries as a ballroom complete with a full-size gilded harp. I thought of that harp as I took in the desolate belt of sand we now stood on; nothing could have seemed more incongruous to this barren landmass, current population: 3 (we’d left Captain Jack fishing from the boat). It was impossible not to admire the tenacity of a family who’d thrived for over half a century out here, carving decoys, salvaging wrecks and hunting for wildfowl; all the while envisioning this storm-wracked atoll as the perfect place from which to run a hotel.

We began to pick our way along the seaward side of the island, the damp grey sand clammy against our bare feet. It felt like we were walking along the outer reaches of human habitation; we were the outliers, the last people until God-knows-where. The beach was strewn with oyster shells, horseshoe crabs and banks of twiggy flotsam that stretched off in front of us to where a broken building bent to wash its wooden roof tiles in the lapping waters of the sea. I watched Dad make his way along this transient promontory, watched him as he silently communed with this last tangible vestige of the Cobb family era, an old lifeboat station gently giving itself up to the sea in a simultaneous admission of timelessness and impermanence. And then Dad took off his trousers and waded out to it; laying his hands against its wooden carcass, pilgrim and relic leaning against each other, thigh deep in the winter cold sea.

Homage paid, we walked back to where Captain Jack was fishing, and again clambered with some indignity into his little boat, looking out over the stern at the small deserted island, struck by how wholly it inhabited its isolation. Jack started the engine, the sudden noise putting up a dark mass of shorebirds, and the sky was momentarily filled with the wheeling forms of plovers, oystercatchers, godwits and turnstones, all calling to one another as they circled round and flew off out to sea. We set off landward then, carving a white wake into the water, and sending, by way of farewell, a string of waves that surrendered themselves against Cobb Island’s cold and lonely shore.