* ["Living on the Eastern Shore"]* * Wake up in the morning, the sun is in the sky.

* * Another day wasted, the day is half gone by.

* * I'm staring out my window, the fields they are so pure, * * such a beautiful place * right here on the Eastern shore * * Living on the Eastern shore, * * where the air is clean and pure, * * I'll never never leave the Eastern shore, * * I love... the Eastern shore * * JOHN BARBER: Willie is a unique person.

As you say he started off as a child on Tangier.

I believe at one point he was a waterman.

I believe he was also a preacher and uh, and now he's up in age and he's living there in Onancock and has that wonderful little gallery and it's also a studio.

He captures the bay and the scenery of the bay in his own style using generally watercolors.

He goes at it from a perspective of being there, doing it.

He's been in the marshes; he's worked on these boats.

Willie is the real deal.

He is a genuine guy.

He speaks from the heart.

He paints from the heart.

WILLIE CROCKETT: "I saw myself in Minnow ditches on the surface of a tide looking down to someone who is looking up at me and I guess I'll always be there no matter what success or failure fate may bring I'll be linked to those green waters to a sunburn face and the salty beginning of my youth.

I was so trusting to the ebbing tide a forever child looking to see if my reflection would predict some future on the flood.

Now I'm older but still reaching for myself and the broken image of my face keeps smiling through the ebbing and the flowing of the years.

Narcissist child always laughing yet never mocking me.

We have always been together, always reaching for each other, the forever child and me."

DOROTHY FIELD: Within his art he wants people to see what's special to him, what's special about the place and he's talking about his home place and his connection to that place which is so important and he wants to show people here we are, we're the Eastern Shore.

We're special.

This is our place.

We want you to see it.

Please come see it.

Please, but be gentle with it.

This is my place, this is my home.

He's welcoming them essentially into his home.

PAUL EWELL: As the director of a small museum, it's all about the story.

You know we have artifacts in here and they're just artifacts, if there's no story that goes with them, they're worthless.

A painting is worthless if there's not a story, so what Willie does is, he paints pictures of boats and marshes and creeks and that tells the story and that helps to perpetuate this wonderful heritage that is the Eastern Shore of Virginia, and every picture that he creates tells a story.

If you look at a lot of his- and we have quite a few of his paintings in here, if you look at a picture of a boat up on a marsh, that boat was more than likely a real boat with a real story.

It had a name, it had a builder and it had people that worked on her, so what I would say is the beautiful thing about the art is it tells a story, a story that we need to tell.

["Chesapeake High"] * O oh, watching the waves * * Hey hey on the Chesapeake Bay * * Not just a place it's a state of mind * * Ain't no coming down from a Chesapeake high * * Ain't no coming down from a Chesapeake high * * I spent a lot of time, down by the waterline * [guitar plays] * I spent a lot of time, down by the waterline * * CROCKETT: My basic philosophy is just to... we can only know certain things.

We can believe a lot of things, and um, so I don't believe much.

I only go by what I know and so... and I don't know much either, but I don't believe much of anything and I like to drive things into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms and find out what it is and what it's about and that's the way I approach life.

But I don't have any preconceived notions or preconceived doctrines in my head.

I don't have anything that's hanging on me that's forcing me to believe this because I don't believe anything.

You say you must believe in something, no I don't have to believe in anything.

Belief doesn't make any difference.

We can believe all kinds of things, that doesn't mean that they're true, but knowledge is something that you have to have in front of you.

You see it, touch it, feel it, smell it.

That's how we know things.

NARRATOR: Willie is an artist, a poet and a philosopher and has changed his beliefs over the years, having grown up on the small Chesapeake Bay island of Tangier, graduating college in South Carolina and meeting his wife Iris, he moved to Skykomish, Washington, started a church and continued to study painting.

IRIS CROCKETT: We graduated in June from college and by August or by July we were in Washington state.

He had a church there and the next year we went to Oregon and he had a church there and then he met some hippies and we started listening to them and that made sense and it was fun and interesting and then we came back to Virginia and it's just been a steady growth of wow.

CROCKETT: Then I got to know the hippies and I fell in love with the hippies.

I found out they were very worldly wise.

Well, I'm from Tangier you know and I wasn't very worldly wise and we had eventually, we would have sometimes 12 to 15 people in our house at night and we'd sit around and talk about things and I loved that and I found in these people a hunger.

You know, that was a beautiful thing and I fell in love with those guys.

I remember I had a friend out west who was a minister himself and he had a very unique way of painting but he was good and I knew he was good, but he had a good grasp of art, what was art and what was not and so he really tried to help me and he did help me a lot.

And so I remember one day I went down to the dock and I did a painting of Winchester Bay Fish House and it turned out so good I said this is good stuff and I couldn't wait to get to show him.

So I went to his house and knocked on the door and I said I came to show you this picture and he said, "Willie you're an artist" and I'll never forget that.

That put the cap on it for me and from then on I considered myself an artist whether I was or not.

[laughs] ["Livin' on the Eastern Shore" plays] BARBER: Willy's art is unique.

He creates more than an image; he creates a sense of time and place... that is really unique in the art world.

It is moody.

It's sensual.

It's almost an image of something that can't exist but does exist.

It's uh...

It's muted colors, a moody scene, somber, maybe there's lonesomeness involved.

It's very rare that he can put those emotions together in a single painting.

There's evidence of life whether it be wildfowl, a person walking on the beach, a boat indicating human presence, but he does it in a beautiful way.

It's almost like looking at poetry.

It's...it's very poetic in its manner.

NARRATOR: Willie has painted over a thousand nature and maritime scenes.

He's sold paintings since high school.

When he lived out west he studied under Richard Yip, an art professor at the University of the Pacific.

Willie would toss paintings that were not quite up to par in a stack.

Folks would ask if they could buy them.

Willie would say sure but I'm not going to sign them.

Today he has a picturesque and always changing gallery in Onancock, Virginia with a studio upstairs.

I. CROCKETT: You know he just starts with a clean sheet of paper.

I mean all these years since '69.

I think it just comes out, whatever is just right there.

I don't know.

He's never said, well I thought of this what I'm going to do today, no... because I see him do so many pictures at charities and I mean he's just got the paper there in front of you and he just, whatever comes out is there and it's beautiful.

CROCKETT: I'm going to start with my lights and go to my darks.

I don't really try to do too much with this starting off.

I want to get me an idea of where I want that sky to go.

I'm going to lift those clouds with just nothing on my brush.

I'm going to put some nice reds and yellows in there and that'll make that a nice marshy dark marshy color.

I'm going to let that light go right behind those trees, so I'm not going to cover all that light area.

I'm going to let that blend right in, more and more becoming quite picturesque.

Alright... that is a sky and the beginning of a marsh line and some trees.

* NARRATOR: The Eastern Shore of Virginia is a magical place.

Surrounded by the Chesapeake and the Atlantic the natural beauty, history, and character of the region are unmatched and unique.

Preserving the shore for generations to come is important to the people living here.

You get a special feeling the moment you visit and it can last a lifetime.

CROCKETT: Well see I'm still on the bay you know and it is, it's good because I can in Onancock just like I do here, I can walk for hours and hours on beaches by myself and never meet anybody.

That's a great plus you know I can paint if I want, I can write if I want.

I love to write and I can do all of this.

A lot of people are stuck in a job uh... for so many hours and when they get out they're so tired they don't want to think anymore you know.

So I've been lucky, I've been able to avoid all that and I had my time working too.

See I was raised in a very religious home and religion, we were steeped in religion, I mean I could feel Sunday coming around Thursday, you know it was that way.

It was very religious.

Not that we didn't have a good home life, we did.

We had a very good home life.

We had, our house was full of music and full of missionaries and so I learned a lot from all of these people and that's the way I got started, but I enjoyed studying the Bible and I enjoyed teaching and I got very good at it plus I had a good memory and I memorized a good part of the New Testament and so it stood me well when I when I did get in college I had a good background before I started.

I. CROCKETT: He went to Bible College and so being in the church and being a deacon or a preacher or whatever his father was in the church, that was, that made everything okay 'cause then you're a preacher instead of a waterman.

But it was a different story when he came out of that just to be an artist.

But he never gave him a problem, he just understood, hey you love your family, you love yourself, you love your life and you're doing the best that you know to do.

CROCKETT: Like Onancock is a beautiful little town and the Eastern Shore is growing and little towns like Onancock and like Cape Charles now is a city and Cape Charles has grown to such an extent.

Well Onancock is growing much slower, more slowly than that but it's becoming an artsy crafty little town which it should be, you know because we have people coming in by water and a lot of people come down to Onancock.

FIELD: My favorite place, my absolutely favorite place on the entire Eastern Shore is Savage Neck Dunes.

That's another one of my preserves, my pre- another one of our preserves, that I'm responsible for.

It's on the bay side of the Eastern Shore.

It's down in Northampton County.

It's right on the Chesapeake Bay.

It has a mile of protected beach and it's unique because it is on the Chesapeake Bay but it's sand, it's not marsh.

It's a sandy beach.

It has 50 foot high dunes, a whole dune ridge not just along the coast but goes back behind so there's dune ridges.

Some of those dunes are about fifty feet high with an ancient maritime forest.

I. CROCKETT: Growing up on Tangier as a little boy, as a teenager until he grew up and went to college that was his life, was going out and hunting for ducks and going out with his cousin who was close to his age with a boat by themselves, hunting and loving it, crawling through the marsh to get to a pond with some ducks in it.

Messing with crabs, going crabs, playing with crabs, in their little boats along the streams with other friends, it was just that was nature was all around him on Tangier, that's all they had to play with.

That was what, that's what they did.

They...

They were with nature all the time and loved it.

CROCKETT: We spent all of our time um, shoving our little boats up those long narrow ditches that ribbon through the marshes and um... catching crabs and crabs were our whole life when we were kids.

I mean this is what we did every day except Sunday.

I mean we'd chase crabs and we'd sell a few of 'em to Miss Hilda who owned the hotel and we'd eat a bunch of them but we didn't make any money doing it not much, but we had a great deal of fun.

NARRATOR: Watermen in Virginia have a legendary sometimes glamorous image but growing up on the water with a family of watermen is really hard work.

Whether you're out on Tangier or on any of the creeks along the Chesapeake you'll find watermen that have had very few jobs on dry land.

EWELL: Most grow up on a creek and they start around the water when they're very, very young.

You know I grew up on a creek.

My whole family were watermen.

My uncles were watermen, my father, my brother, and so it's just a natural thing that you're going to be around boats and you're going to be on the water.

So you end up with a skiff, that's where it all starts.

I had a skiff when I was very young.

I didn't have my drivers license until I was 18.

But you start with a skiff with two or three of your own pots, because we're entrepreneurs even at a very young age and very independent and that's consistent and a lot of watermen work until they can't work any longer.

I grew up around a gentleman from, who is originally from Tangier but settled many years ago on Hunting Creek and he was in his 80's when his family finally said you can't work on the water any more.

They were worried about his life.

So most watermen work until- because that's all they know how to do, it's all they want to do, so it could span easily 70 plus years.

CROCKETT: It's one thing to see, to see something in nature.

You look out in nature and you see this large expanse and you say okay what is it that I like so much about this?

You know, what am I seeing here you know and then I'd look at that sky and it's such a beautiful sky and those clouds are so beautiful, but I didn't know how to arrange it.

So I arranged it exactly the way I saw it but the way I saw it wasn't right.

It was right for nature.

Nature can get by with that.

For instance if you ride down Onancock Creek you've got trees and they're all the same size pretty much and they just- they look like just one well nature can get by with that and it's beautiful, but an artist has to do something else.

He has to make different shapes and sizes.

He has to make your eye go in and out and he can, and an artist can force you to see one thing.

FIELD: What Willie has captured is one, the beauty of the place.

He also captures kind of the isolation and many times I look at Willie's art and it's... wow this is really beautiful, but there's a little bit of sadness there to me, because it is just uh, something that is- could be so fleeting you know and I guess that's where we intersect, in that I'm involved in the protection of this special place.

He's involved in the culture and capturing that culture and capturing the traditional ways of life here.

And we both want to save it in some way.

You know despite everything else around us, so I think we mesh in that, but his art kind of conveys that to me.

I see his art and I say this is a picture of what I'm trying to protect.

It makes me feel good but I also see the kind of wistfulness for what was at one time and still is many of these places and hopefully will be.

BARBER: But in Willie's case he clearly had a vision of, he saw a higher level perhaps of that scenery and it inspired in him... he was inspired to take it a step beyond simply working the water, but capturing those images for others to enjoy as well.

And he did so very, very well and continues to do so.

I. CROCKETT: We have a boat and that's where he was raised was on a boat.

His father was a crab potter and so he was out with him every morning and memorizing Bible verses with every crab pot they pulled up.

He loves learning.

He loves a new, a new thought.

So you know we'll just be watching TV and if there's somebody that said something that's wonderful to him, he'll, (gasps) that was wonderful.

He just loves thoughts and his thoughts are so different from what they were as a child growing up on Tangier in the church, and so when he left that and saw that you know hey you know what?

Everything is amazing out there doesn't have to be... CROCKETT: I wish I had the focus when I was young that I have now.

You know I can focus on a thing like for instance I have studies going on all the time.

Okay, so here I am.

What do I know about quantum physics?

I don't know, I mean nobody knows a whole lot but I don't know a damn thing about it but it frustrates me that I don't understand it, so I try to get some grasp of it.

Well their's things I like that way, you know and I like the sciences and I like physics and I love poetry and I love philosophy and I love to read those things and that monopolizes my whole life.

FIELD: There are places within driving distance of me that are special and unique and almost lost in time, and I think that's captured in Willie's art, and that's captured when you come out here.

That just this... this is a place that... that kind of imparts a feeling that... some places may not change that much, even though it's constantly changing but there's a feeling of just... there's still places out there, are still places there, are still ways of life.

There are still things that were as they were.

CROCKETT: This is the Crockett graveyard.

This is the Crockett graveyard.

How you doing?

I'm Good.

I'm Willie Crockett.

This is the Crockett, my Liz, Elizabeth my sister, you remember her, Elizabeth.

She said," we got you a lot saved".

I said all I need is a little hole in the corner.

A post hole digger and we'll drop it right here and when my wife dies we'll drop her right on top of me, yeah, Iris and Willie.

JAMES ESKRIDGE: Out here I mean, like I said, it's about the seafood business.

But then we have so much wildlife around here and the water fowl, and that's part of Tangier.

That's part of Tangier, and Willie's capturing that, and like when I see some of his artwork and other folks, Tangier comes to mind and this Chesapeake Bay area, it's part of the Eastern Shore.

So when I look at his artwork I see Tangier and what's around us.

NARRATOR: Willie knows almost everyone on the island and it's like homecoming when he visits.

* ESKRIDGE: Tangier, it's the people.

It's the people and our way of life, the culture.

Like whenever we talk about, you know, we have an erosion problem, and when we talk about saving Tangier, we're talking about not just a piece of land we're talking about saving the people, our culture, a way of life, and Willie's, Willie's part of that, Willie's part of that.

CROCKETT: Little did I realize how good this island was going to be for my work, because before I was a teenager I knew every fish, I knew every bird, I knew every crab.

I knew so many things and I had shot more ducks than most people had seen, and so I learned how they fly, I learned how they came in, I learned how their wings set, and so all of that translated.

I knew how these boats looked on the water and so it was all there in front of me.

And it was, it was... Well, it was perfect for me.

FIELD: One word for the Eastern Shore... Um... Hm.

Salty.

It's salty.

It has an edge.

Okay, so if you want to talk about somebody being salty, the shore is that way.

It has an edge.

You have to be prepared to hear, to get a little ribbing, to hear you know so, and that saltiness reflects in the vegetation.

'Cause it's unique.

It reflects in the lifestyle, it reflects in the traditional ways people live.

It's salty.

It's just got that little edge.

* ["Take me Back"] * Come on lets' leave town this weekend... * * * Got some clothes and go like we did back when * * Watch the leaves as they fall off the trees * * And fall in love again * We could go down to the seashore * * Grab a picnic basket at the old general store * * Spread a blanket out on the sand * * and fall in love again * We could take the time to reignite * * The spark that changed our lives * * So take me back to where it all began * * Let's fall in love all over again * * Take me back to you and me * Take me back to yesterday * Before the world got in the way * * Take me back, way, way back when * * Let's fall in love again... *