On The Mark

The hole-in-the-wall seafood place we love is run by two 79-year-old people. The male is the fisherman, maître de, waiter, bus boy, bartender, and maintenance man. He is up before dawn, going out in the Potomac in an open boat. He checks the nets, crab pots, and oyster beds before most of us are awake, filets and shucks the catch, and the results are on the tables by lunch. The Cap’n, as local watermen are known, is a wiry man with a shock of unkempt blond curls spilling out from under a trucker’s cap. His faded, restaurant-logo t-shirt is full of holes and his well-worn jeans are held up by a belt and a miracle, as he has no ass to speak of. Genetics and a lifetime of fishing has literally worked his ass off.

The Cap’n is an irascible Vietnam vet. One cold night, we showed up late. The Cap’n was sitting in the bar, so I stuck my head in the door and said, “Tommy, are you open?” The reply came delivered in the gruff, local waterman’s patois, “Julie will cook for you, but I ain’t waitin’ on you!” Some might have been put off, but we knew better. The Cap’n had been in the boat all day, pulling long net poles out of the muddy bottom of the river. I told Julie to make us two dinners, got us some drinks and setups, and we sat down with him at his table. When I became the waiter, his attitude improved quite a bit.

His wife, Julie, cooks using a small, dated kitchen to prepare the best entrees, including a striper the locals call rockfish, fried with a batter that is delightfully crisp, with zero grease. She works alone, moving around the kitchen like a dancer, which is fortunate because her tiny Filipino frame is about all that will fit between the huge gas stoves and the prep tables. She’s a 30-year breast cancer survivor with the energy and spunk of someone far younger, imbued with the same work ethic as her husband. She learned to cook as a caterer in DC, where she worked until she met a certain fisherman. They’ve been together 42 years.

We usually went there on Christmas Eve. Over the years, Betsy and I developed the habit of bussing our own table, taking our plates to the sink in the kitchen so the Cap’n didn’t have to. Late one Christmas eve, we were the only people there. It must have been a big evening, because every table needed to be cleaned. The exhausted Cap’n was asleep on a mattress behind the bar. I grabbed a pad and wrote up our order and Julie got to work on it. As a present, Betsy and I bussed all the tables and got the dining room ready for the next day. Unsurprisingly, they were going to be open on Christmas: the only time we were ever aware of them being closed was when the place was under water from Hurricane Isabel. One year they had a big group there on New Year’s Eve until 3 in the morning, but Julie opened for breakfast at 7 New Year’s Day.

Circumstances caused us to miss a couple Christmas Eves, but this year I had a feeling. Julie was at Tom’s table in the bar and she admitted to feeling OK, but when I asked about the Cap’n, she said, “He has leukemia.” It’s too long a story, but he’s currently in an ICU undergoing chemo. She would still have the restaurant open if it weren’t for the fact that, the day after Christmas, after serving a party of 20 in the afternoon, she fell and broke her hip. The repair was successful and when we took her for a follow-up ortho appointment a week later, she literally threw her cane to me, grabbed Betsy’s arm, and walked back to see the doctor.

Julie still hangs out at the (closed) restaurant and I went there today to visit. She gave me the latest on the Cap’n’s struggles with chemo, up one day and down the next. I spent some time looking around the restaurant, from the well-worn floor to the cracked bathroom fixtures behind doors marked with signs that say “Buoys” and “Gulls.” Old pictures adorn the walls, most featuring the Cap’n in his boat, surrounded by the fish that have been his livelihood. I tried to take it all in because no matter what happens, I have the sense that it’s the end of an era. There is no business like it in all of Christendom and there never will be. Every scratch, every photo, every tchotchke paints a picture of a place and a people so special that they’re irreplaceable. I wanted to save as much of it as I could to memory because time is cruel and inexorable. It’s not just a riding destination. It’s not just a business. It’s family.