THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, December 22, 1995 TAG: 9512200156
SECTION: PORTSMOUTH CURRENTS PAGE: 04 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Olde Towne Journal
SOURCE: Alan Flanders
LENGTH: Long : 103 lines
His kind are gone now, but when I think back to those childhood Sunday afternoon visits with my great-grandfather Isaac Thomas Pearce at Deep Creek, the stories he told of the old days seem more real than ever.
Already a legend by the 1950s, he was known from the Portsmouth waterfront to the North Carolina line as ``Captain Ike.'' Raised on the coastal rivers of eastern North Carolina and Virginia, he drew his story material from working dozens of fishing boats and skipjacks, and producing ``truck'' crops of corn, collards and tomatoes from his own fields. He was every bit a man of the soil and the river.
During his youth, he had been a helper on several family-built and family-operated coasting schooners that carried fresh cut local timber to larger boats for shipment to New York and Philadelphia. As a young boy, he apprenticed in the mutually supportive trades of house and boat carpenter.
Born in 1875, ``Captain Ike'' was a living history lesson, who talked tall tales from another century as if they were yesterday. He could tell you firsthand accounts of Civil War battles that were told to him as a boy by veterans, recount days when horse and buggies ruled the dirt and shell roads of Norfolk County, and men of his ``ilk'' struck out on their own to live free and independent lives. Even his personal records and account books carried the penciled names of sailing ships and masters like the J.H. Potter and his ``Uncle Frank'' that have long since disappeared.
He had the outdoorsman look of a Robert Frost. A shock of pure white hair, piercing hazel eyes and hands that bore the weathered appearance of someone who had spent the majority of his life in the sun gave him the looks of a man to be reckoned with. His uniform of the day was a thick flannel shirt and heavy canvas or khaki pants held up by suspenders that were no more than twists of leather strands. I never saw him in a pair of dress shoes, even on Sunday afternoons. Work shoes were his chosen tread.
Once we arrived at his small farm house on the banks of one of the many branches that fed the Dismal Swamp Canal, we gathered around the stove in the front parlor as he found the rocker from which he presided over our reunions.
I knew he was getting warmed up when he took out his pocket knife, always razor-sharp, and cut a chew of tobacco, then slid his spittoon to his side.
No one moved or talked when ``Captain Ike'' got started on a story about his fishing and truck boats days. The least inattention could earn a sharp tap at the ankle from his cane or a pinch that left its mark as a reminder that you didn't want to feel the true strength of his waterman hands.
According to family legend, after serving in the Spanish-American War, he was processing out of the Army at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, N.Y., when he ``sweet-talked'' an immigrant girl, Alice Moss of County Cork, Ireland, out of her convent school to be his bride. After a stint on the Washington police force and some time working ferry boats, he returned to Deep Creek. During interims as a farmer and truck boat captain, he was one of the first bridge masters of the new drawbridge at West Norfolk.
As he rambled on, his words were like magic to me. Hearing him talk about Roosevelt - Teddy Roosevelt, that is, not Franklin - was for me getting it directly from the source. He had lived in the age of canvas sail, steam engines and ironclad ships. He had been in Hampton Roads to see the Great White Fleet form in 1907 off Sewells Point for their epic cruise around the world and seen horse cavalry and Zeppelins. He could tell you stories about getting oysters out of the shipyard drydocks and friends who brought their work boats into the yard for overhaul when Navy business was slack.
But more than anything else, he had lived the life of a waterman, a hard, stubborn life, but forever free of the shackles of the time clock and the restrictions of a boss other than himself and Mother Nature.
At the end of my Sunday afternoon visits, I was cut loose to explore the back of his farm house and make my way through his plowed fields to find such boyhood treasures as arrowheads and raccoon skeletons. The soil turned as white as granulated sugar as it sloped slowly down to the banks of his branch that emptied into the Deep Creek Canal. In those dark and murky waters that looked to me like a giant ditch filled with ink, generations of my family learned to swim and held picnics beneath the willows and junipers that once lined its banks.
Depending on the season of the year, ``Captain Ike's'' untended gardens offered a variety of wild grapes of every description, watermelon and cantaloupe. They were a virtual feast to those like me who pretended to hunt Davy Crockett style - crouched low to the ground and hoping to see the imprint of a single Indian moccasin. Muskrats and owls guarded my final descent to the water's edge. There the remnants of boat-building ways and piers protruded from the mud, still reeking of creosote and rotting wood. The ribs of long-ago forgotten skiffs appeared and disappeared as apparitions with the tide.
I remember the cold winter Sunday afternoons as I stopped to breathe deeply the cool air that came up in wisps from the water. As the sun set behind the barren trees, I could see the world that ``Captain Ike'' painted in words. It was a world of tough, tobacco-chewing men, cutting wood into shingles, loading them in heaps on the backs of the coasting schooners. He knew the ribald songs and stories, guttural in their narrative, punctuated by grunts from the strain of the former Norfolk County slaves and their masters working side by side along the timber wharves of Deep Creek.
Those scenes he described so vividly are real to me. Steamboats still ply the Elizabeth River and the Chesapeake Bay, Deep Creek is still a small country village and men who carve a living from the river and the land of old Norfolk County are as real as ``Captain Ike''. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Isaac Thomas Pearce was a legend by the 1950s. From the Portsmouth
waterfront to the North Carolina line, folks knew him as ``Captain
Ike.''
by CNB