A former artist-in-residence tells of changing times on Tangier

KEN CASTELLI

Former artist-in-residence talks life on Tangier

Ramble: You’re not a Tangier native, then?

Ken: I’m originally from the Eastern Shore. Up by Chestertown. I moved down here in 2007 to start working on the museum and stuff. ... And they wanted a guinea pig for this residence program, so we just kind of sat down and figured out what, like, an ideal residency would be.

So I lived in a little house behind the museum (The Muddy Toes Library). And I’d work on setting up all the displays, and doing a bunch of research in there – which was awesome because I got to use my art degree and my history degree. I went to St. Mary’s. And they’re two of the most unemployable degrees out there. ... It’s definitely provided a good opportunity. It was only supposed to be a one-year stint over there, but no one applied for two years. …I think every single article in the museum I had to read. And I just love doing that stuff anyway.

R: You’re 27 – does that make you one of the younger people on the island?

K: Yeah. There’s not many. Once they get out of high school they pretty well leave. ... There’s just no jobs, really. Like, there’s plenty of jobs, but none of them are, like, very high-paying. Like I’ll dig ditches and shit like that to make ends meet when nobody buys any artwork or boats or whatever.

Then in wintertime I’m just working the railway...fixing boats and stuff. But there’s extremely limited job options for all the kids here.

For some reason when they opened this school, they did away with shop class, and they went all to typing. Like – typing’s great and all, but there’s nothing out here that you need a typing skill for… Like, ‘OK, we’re gonna teach you to be secretaries and stuff.’ What do you need with secretaries around here?

So that pretty well forced them to look elsewhere. Once they graduate high school it’s either college or military. A lot of them go to the army or navy or marines, and stuff.

And then when the state did away with giving out commercial fishing licenses, it’s really hard, like - you have to have it passed down to you or pay an arm and a leg to get one.

R: We’ve heard some about that.

K: The state’s doing a pretty good job of – they throw us a couple bones, every now and then. Like with the health center, which we desperately needed. The old one was falling apart. And then they paved the roads, and the air strip back there because they needed it really bad.

But for some reason the state’s dragging its feet on building the sea wall, which would protect the

ormer artist-in-residence Ken Castelli currently makes a living on the F island doing odd jobs for his neighbors, selling paintings and other artwork, and making model boats – a popular Father’s Day or birthday gift for Tangiermen.

Castelli, a native of the Eastern Shore, served as Tangier's official artistin-residence until 2010.

millions of dollars that they pump into this place every year, to keep it going. It just blows everybody’s minds out here, like – why would they spend ten million dollars drudging the harbor or, you know, doing the road, but they’re not putting anything here to stop it all from washing away? ... There’s gonna be a little like, stump, that’s all washed away, and it’ll have a hazard marker over it in 50 years.

But I’m gonna stay until the government forces everybody off. ’cause I’m sure they’re gonna reach that tipping point, where it’s cheaper for the state to buy everybody out, be like ‘Arright, er’body git yer shit and move off. Don’t care where you go. We’ll buy yer property.’ R: It sounds like you’ve come to like the place. K: Oh yeah, I love living here. Once you figure out, like, how to get stuff from off of here ... Like, for a while, there was this Chinese restaurant in Crisfield that would put stuff on a mailboat for you if you called up, so you could in theory get Chinese takeout on the island. It would be stone cold by the time it got here, but yeah. ... It ain’t for everybody. R: What did the locals think of having a museum dedicated to Tangier history? K: After a while, I guess there was a little bit of fear, because ... when the idea for a museum first come around, people weren’t all about it, because they were like ‘oh, people who come here are just gonna make fun of us.’ No, they’re not. Quit being paranoid.

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PEOPLE SHOULD BE REAL PROUD OF THIS PLACE AND EVERYTHING THAT’S COME OUT OF IT AND WHAT’S HAPPENED HERE.”

R: What made them think they’d be made fun of?

K: A lot of them are really self-conscious about, like, the accent and the dialect. And a lot of them admit, like, a ton of people around here never finish school. I know a ton of people who dropped out in like eighth grade and went to work. One of my friend’s dads, he dropped out in seventh grade, just because he had to be the one to work and feed his family.

And when they took away the ability to get a waterman’s license, that was ... stupid. ’Cause that just doomed everybody for the most part out here.

R: Have you gotten to hear any stories or folk tales the people here know? ever been out here – supposed to have been a really mean, crotchety old horse. It used to live down by the road to the beach.

I guess at one point the horse died. The owner told three of the teenagers around here that he’d give them fifty cents apiece if they buried it somewhere. So they dragged it down to the beach and they dug a big hole – super pumped for their 50 cents, which in the Depression was like a billion dollars. ... So they pushed the horse in. But rigor mortis had set in and the hole wasn’t deep enough, so all the legs were sticking out of the top, so they built these little mountains of sand all the way up to the hooves.

When they went to go get paid, the guy was like, ‘Nope. Didn’t do it right. Gotta do it again.’ And they were like, ‘There’s no way we’re getting this horse out of this hole. It’s like six feet deep and none of us are strong enough to yank this giant dead horse out.’ So they went to the guy’s shed and got a hacksaw and just cut the legs off. So it’s probably out in the bay now, but somewhere there’s a horse grave down there. One of the kids found the skull pretty recently and it’s awesome. R