These waters off Assateague have a grim old nickname among sailors — part of a stretch of coast that swallowed so many ships it earned a reputation as a graveyard. Shifting shoals, fog, storms, and a low island you couldn't see until you were on top of it. For a couple hundred years, wrecks piled up out there in the dark. And that's where some of the bravest men you never heard of come in.
Along this island the government built stations for the U.S. Life-Saving Service — the outfit that became our Coast Guard. The men who manned them were called surfmen, and their job description was just about insane. When a ship went aground in a storm, the surfmen didn't get to wait for good weather. They launched a wooden boat straight into the same surf that had just wrecked a full-sized vessel, and they rowed out into it — into the wind and the black water and the freezing spray — to pull strangers off a dying ship, one soul at a time.
They had an unofficial motto, and it tells you everything about them. The regulations, they said, state that you have to go out. They say nothing about having to come back. Think on that a moment. These were ordinary local men — baymen, fishermen — who walked the beach on patrol every night in every weather, and when the worst happened, rowed toward it while everyone else ran the other way.
So when you stand on this beach and it's calm and lovely, remember it wears two faces. On a black night with a nor'easter blowing, this was one of the most dangerous coasts in America — and the only thing between a wrecked crew and the bottom was a handful of surfmen and a rowboat, going out because that was the job.
Photo: P. Schmidt (publisher) · Public domain
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