When the way ahead isn’t clear, the solution, sometimes, is to eat.
Words by Sarah Golibart Gorman | Illustrations by Ellie Skrzat
April 30, 2025
Eight months after doctors cut the cancer out of my mom, four months after her second surgery, three months after she closed the women’s consignment boutique she owned for 10 years, two months before her third surgery, and one month after my dad turned 60, my parents organized a family phone call. Those are rarely good. Considering everything that transpired over the past year, it was a call we should have seen coming. They wanted to sell the farm.
• • •
The Eastern Shore of Virginia is the southern-most tip of the Delmarva Peninsula, a hunk of land under joint custody of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. The Virginia portion is a serrated slice some 5 to 15 miles wide and 70 miles long. The bayside looks west across the Chesapeake Bay to mainland Virginia, while the seaside is shielded by barrier islands, the longest stretch of coastal wilderness on the East Coast.
Known as “the Shore” to those who either can’t wait to get back or are itching to leave, the area may be Virginia’s best kept secret — many maps of the state leave it off entirely. It’s easy to pass through without a second thought, but if you slow down and look closely, you’ll find a tight-knit rural community rooted in aquaculture and agriculture, with a distinct culinary tradition featuring some of the best food you’ve never tasted — skillet fried clam fritters, Hayman sweet potato biscuits, and fried black drum ribs.
My parents purchased a 60-acre farm on the Shore in 2000 when I was seven years old. Let’s get one thing straight. My parents are not farmers, though my dad has tried his hand at growing cannabis and figs. They leased the fields to a neighboring farmer and rented the barns and pastures to folks who showed horses, two gleaming Tennessee Walkers named Thunder and Beauty and one Appaloosa named Jack, speckled like a quail’s egg.
Perched on a spit of land at the edge of Barlow Creek, the farm is at the end of a winding, single-lane road. By creek I don’t mean a narrow stream, but instead a wide expanse of shallow, brackish water stitched with oyster and clam beds that became a playground for my two brothers and me. We occupied ourselves with collecting driftwood and sunbleached buoys, digging clams and devouring them raw with our feet dangling from the barnacle-encrusted dock, writing messages in bottles that never made it out of the creek. We buried ourselves in marsh mud and watched fiddler crabs scuttle by, wide-eyed at our joy.
Weekends were for the sandbar, a meandering ribbon of sand appearing at low tide, the place to be on Saturdays and especially Sundays. Families and friends up and down the Shore have specific spots they return to season after season, pulling up skiffs, pontoons, jon boats, and bowriders, creating an Eastern Shore version of Craig Morgan’s early aughts country hit, “Redneck Yacht Club.” In the early years, we’d load up kayaks with beach chairs, coolers, and toys and paddle out. Then, we graduated to a used, green aluminum jon boat lined with AstroTurf that leaked despite all attempts at patching. In 2006, my parents bought a brand new Carolina Skiff, a flat-bottomed boat perfect for navigating shallow bay waters. We loaded up the whole family, including grandma and visiting cousins, aunts, and uncles, and set out to christen the new boat with a bottle of Chandon. Everyone, even grandma, had a sip right from the bottle, the riot of bubbles mirroring the excitement we felt. We’d play on that temporary island until the tides erased it, sending us home sunburned and smiling, the rock of the boat lulling us close to slumber.
We didn’t live at the farm right away. After six years of weekend visits and sandbar summers, we moved from Northern Virginia to the Shore full time. Not being born there made us “come here’s.” “From here’s” can trace family lineage back through generations of watermen and farmers, with an accent that’s not quite a deep Southern drawl, but rounder and softer, drawing from lifetimes living in harmony with the tide’s ebb and flow. The dialect has a British tint to it, a bit of a closed-mouth mumble. Oysters become “orsters,” driving south becomes “goin’ down de royd.” The moment boats can navigate shallow waters becomes “hoi toide.”
My brothers and I let that softness season our own speech, but after college, we moved away — me to teach middle school, my brothers to build furniture and work other people’s farms. The rhythm of our visits home began to mirror those of our early childhood, weekends and holidays sweet enough to sate us before we returned to our chosen communities.
In mid-April, as my brothers and I journeyed home in response to our parents’ announcement about the farm’s potential sale, the black drum fish — Pogonias cromis — was also migrating, from as far south as Argentina back to its spring spawning grounds in seaside inlets on the Shore, and inevitably onto plates at local eateries. As we drove, I was oblivious to drum’s trip up the coast, riding currents, following the magnetic pull of its birthplace. But we too sensed a magnetic pull toward home, knowing this spring would mark a new chapter for our family. And, surprisingly, the fish would come to consume my consciousness even as I devoured it, attempting to hold on to home, or at least a taste of it.
We rode three across in the front seat of a borrowed Chevy 2500, toying with the idea of uprooting our lives and moving back. An empty 18-foot trailer bumped behind us as we crossed over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, rolling down the windows to let the salt air and sulfur smell of marsh welcome us home.
We arrived, passing the farm fields now turned to meadows, barns empty of animals, the horses who previously boarded there long gone to the great pasture in the sky. As we crunched down the crushed oyster-shell driveway we learned to drive on, the ash trees and monstrous pecan tree the squirrels always beat us to were silent witnesses to our homecoming. Climbing roses wrapped the white columns on the wide front porch, threatening to explode their springtime buds into color. A sign reading “Laughing King Retreat,” reminded us that dad has run the house as a bed and breakfast for the past six years, eager guests enjoying the serene beauty that was our everyday.
My parents are proud to say the farm was not a property passed down through generations, but one they sweated for — my mom teaching, tutoring, and later running her boutique, my dad doing time in tech sales during the boom of the late 90s and early 2000s, with equal parts charm and relentless work ethic. “Never give up” and “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” were family mottoes he drilled into us.
To my dad, the farm represented a kind of redemption, a replacement for a large tract of land in Maryland once farmed and lost by his ancestors. Family lore has it that my great-great-grandfather forfeited the property after defaulting on a loan from his brother, a banker, to fund a failed corn planting. Through a series of additional bad business decisions, my paternal ancestors gradually lost their wealth until it was little more than a memory. As a child, my dad would occasionally make family pilgrimages there to gawk at what was lost. A deep-seated resentment for that banker brother and shame for the farmer brother concentrated through generations, leading to a burning desire in my dad to avoid following in his family's footsteps.
The farm also became a balm after my dad’s father died of cancer, just months before my parents purchased it. It was his way of rewriting his family’s history and forging a new legacy. Hearing my parents say they wanted to sell it just didn’t make sense. But the mortgage and maintenance were getting to be too much. My mom’s cancer treatment — ultimately a victory — prompted my parents to trim down their lives, admit their limitations, and prepare for the day when my dad could no longer wield a chainsaw to cut storm-felled limbs or repair the riding lawnmower engine for the umpteenth time.
• • •
My brothers’ and my visit home was both practical and emotional. We needed to be there, right in front of our parents, to understand, to hear the news directly from their mouths. But we also needed to clean out the attic and barn in preparation for a future sale. For our entire lives, my mom had squirreled away artifacts — elementary art, school certificates, toddler pajamas too sweet to throw away. Those bins were stacked in the attic amid relics of our 90s childhood — a Fisher-Price pirate ship and boxes of Lego. We sat together on the floor combing through totes of mementos, pausing to show off forgotten rock collections, laugh at old family photos, try on high school baseball gloves, rediscover a forgotten chess set, and read excerpts from old diaries. The five of us, restored to the family home, worked together to sift through the accumulation of our collective lifetimes.
It took all day to sort through what to keep, what to give, and what to throw away. Weary yet determined, we loaded up the trailer, drove to the dump, and unceremoniously launched our cargo into the trash. I don’t remember whose idea it was to eat dinner at Yuk’s that night, but it seemed like the exactly right idea. Covered in dust and heavy with memory, we settled into a booth.
In 2000, Kathleen Peirson, a transplant from Philly, opened Yuk Yuk & Joe’s Restaurant and Bar, a dive known for its seasonal seafood and bar food classics like onion rings and cheesesteaks. Yuk’s interior is one open room, divided by activities — eating, drinking, and pool. Two pool tables, lit by low-hanging green lights, occupy one half of the restaurant. Taxidermied fish of all types oversee games with their glassy eyes, backs arched in one final battle against hook and line. The back wall of the restaurant is covered in pictures of over two decades of patrons, grinning and gripping pool cues or brown beer bottles. Tiffany-style hanging lamps illuminate the booths and tables. A jukebox with a single speaker pumps out classic rock or current country hits. The most popular place to sit is the bar, with maps of the Shore fixed in resin for watermen to point to while telling stories of the day’s catch.
Peirson, known to everyone as Yuk-Yuk or simply Yuk, earned her nickname from a lifetime of making others laugh, clowning around in restaurants. Despite her 38 years on the Shore, locals frequently remind her she’s “still a damn Yankee.” Her son, born on the Shore, has tenuous “from here” status. A local told her, “Yuk-Yuk, just because the cat has kittens in an oven, you don’t call them biscuits.”
Growing up, our home phone number was one off from the restaurant’s, so we’d often get calls from hungry neighbors ordering pizza, my dad pretending to take orders before redirecting callers. Throughout middle and high school, we’d occasionally stop by Yuk’s for Thursday Wing Night, ordering two-and-a-half pound baskets at a time. Mom’s favorite — Buffalo sauce with blue cheese — always took center stage. When dinner plans at home fell through, Yuk’s veggie pizza — loaded with black olives, peppers, and mushrooms — was just a call away.
After a marathon day of cleaning, I was hungry, scanning the paper specials menu for seafood. Listed among hamburger steak with gravy, fried shrimp, and scallops was a drum dinner. I’d heard of drum before, but never tasted it. When I asked the waitress about it, her eyes lit up, and she suggested I try the drum ribs. Fish ribs? Intrigued, I placed my order. They arrived in a red plastic basket lined with parchment paper, nestled beside thick cut fries and a bowl of sweet and tangy coleslaw.
In A South You Never Ate, southern folklorist Bernard Herman writes about a conversation he had with Violet Trower, a Shore native who grew up eating drum head stew. Trower said, “That’s where the sweetness is, next to the bone of a fish.” And Trower was right. Underneath a fried, golden crust lay sweet, juicy fish. Needing no dressing, the tartar sauce stayed lidded. Perfectly salty, reflective of the bay and the ocean from which it came, the drum was a taste of home I tried to memorize, allowing its briny flakiness to anchor me.
That moment might have been the first time I deviated from the usual wings or pizza at Yuk’s. Throughout my teens, it’s almost as if seafood didn’t exist for my family — unless it was a crab feast held in our backyard or oysters we scooped out of the bay. Or maybe we only looked for it at certain restaurants — crab dip at Kelly’s Gingernut Pub, flounder stuffed with crab meat down at Sting-Ray’s, or fried oysters at the Oyster Farm, where one night I nearly cracked my tooth on a pearl. Outside of that, we simply weren’t paying attention to what seasonal catch was on specials menus.
And there’s a reason for that. Herman cites several interviews placing drum ribs, along with drum head soup, as a soul food tradition originating in African American communities. Local folk artist Danny Doughty recalls watching customers in his family’s fish house, noting “the greatest pieces,” fins, head, and bones, “were the pieces most people would throw away — the white people would throw away.” Drum ribs are a newer culinary tradition for “born here” white folks, so it would take even longer for a “come here” like me to catch on. H.M. Arnold, owner of the Bayford Oyster Company, similarly remarked, “Most people that I knew who bought [a side of drum], they’d always cut the ribs off. Never ate them. In the last 10 years, everybody’s fighting for them now.” Though late to the game, I was quick to embrace the springtime delicacy. It was like finding a hundred dollar bill in a pair of old jeans I had to give away. It was there all along, I just didn’t look.
Yuk’s is one of a handful of spots that serve drum each spring. Sean Hart, a seasoned waterman and second generation owner of the Exmore Diner, another Shore staple since the 1950s, is a no-nonsense homestyle chef with a passion for drum, admitting, “My heart gets fluttering when my fish guy shows up or texts, ‘Hey, I caught some drum.’” For many, drum season is a sign of renewal, of another winter thawed away. For Hart, who learned how to cook from his mother and the “old school ladies” who worked in the diner kitchen, it’s a taste of home that’s signature to the Shore.
This fish that set grown men’s hearts a flutter is not a pretty beast. Juveniles, called footballs by locals, have broad vertical stripes across their, well, football-shaped bodies. Black drum can live well into their 50s. As the fish ages, the stripes dissipate to a muddy grayish, greenish, brownish color perfect for blending into the bay floor where it uses its powerful jaws to crush and eat crabs, clams, and oysters — shell and all. Pogonias, meaning bearded, refers to the goat-like beard of barbells that black drum uses to find its prey.
The black drum earned its other name, cromis, meaning to croak, due to its ability to use its large, resonant swim bladder to announce its arrival with a steady, thrumming beat audible above water on a calm day. One of the largest fish in the bay, black drum can grow to over 4 feet. Cape Charles angler Betty Drummond Hall set the world record in 1973 with a 111-pound catch. Two years later, she was surpassed by a 113 pounder that holds the current record.
How had I gone my whole life without learning about this fish that loomed large, not just in its size, but in regional history and culinary traditions?
• • •
The next day, we woke determined to tackle the barn. Once the horses left, the space became dad’s domain. Stalls were full of tools, lawn mower parts, rusty crab pots, old furniture, my brothers’ home-built rock wall, a lathe and woodworking tools, bins full of dad’s musty years-old cannabis harvest, his kiteboarding equipment, broken washing machines, old bikes, wood scraps. One stall contained leftover hay and grain that mice had nested in and feasted on for years. We dragged everything out, again sorting, organizing, and loading the trailer destined for the dump.
Toward the day’s end, a return to Yuk’s was on everyone’s mind. We slid into the same booth. This time, when the waitress arrived at our table, we knew better than to ignore the local catch. Everyone — except for dad who inexplicably ordered a cheeseburger — was looking to shore up on flavor, to root ourselves to the sandy loam, to reach down into that gritty soil that made us and hold on to what we could.
I don’t know why my dad didn’t order drum. Maybe he couldn’t bring himself to taste what he was letting go of, admit some sort of defeat. Or maybe, as he casually began to mention some ideas for the barn we had just cleaned out, in some shadow of his mind my dad had decided to actually not sell the farm, seeing its potential restored after we all came together to care for it. When the way ahead isn’t clear, the solution, sometimes, is to eat. Our orders were a chorus of drum ribs with coleslaw and mac and cheese, drum ribs with ham flecked green beans and collards, a drum sandwich.
Herman describes drum as the “pigs of the sea,” with ribs just as large and maybe even more delicious. Curtis Badger, another Eastern Shore writer, extends that porcine comparison to the flavor profile: “Imagine a cross between pork loin and fish; that would be fresh drum.” Sweet, salty, fatty, and flaky, we used each rib as a handle to devour every last bite.
Hart watches the Exmore Diner’s numbers like a hawk, comparing the report to a heart monitor going up and down throughout the seasons. Jokingly, he sent a copy to his Cisco rep saying, “Based on this graph, can you tell me when we started getting drum in?” According to Hart, the answer is obvious. The graph jumps about two inches and stays there, with some ups and downs, for the entirety of drum season. “As the word gets out that we have drum, it’s nothing to do 100 dinners in one day. As a matter of fact, our biggest day was 207,” said Hart. For his classic Silk City Diner built in the 1950s with just 44 seats, those numbers are impressive. Locals love their drum.
The Shore’s penchant for drum is not shared by its Atlantic neighbors. “The northerners won’t have nothing to do with it,” says Yuk. “They will not eat it. And we can’t keep it in.” Herman backs this up, quoting H.M. Arnold: “Nobody eats drum north of the Maryland line or south of Virginia Beach, hardly. Even in Carolina, they don’t eat black drum.” Badger has a theory that the Shore’s “affinity for strange seafood is a matter of evolution,” curated out of necessity when watermen would sell their best fish — “flounder, striped bass, trout, and bluefish” — and bring home the less gourmet “spot, pigfish, hardheads, and drumfish.” In their thrift, they found treasure, a tradition I’m grateful to finally join in.
That night, after our final dinner, my brothers and I loaded the trailer and set off west to the Shenandoah Valley. Ten minutes in, the truck ran out of gas. My brothers knocked on doors until Arthur, who just so happened to be a chef at Yuk’s, lent them a gas can and gave them a ride. As we left, the frenzy of the spawn continued, the shallows churning with drum driven to ensure the continuation of their species. Among millions of eggs, some survive to hatch. Though they’ve taken the shape of adults, they haven’t yet left the security of swaying marsh grass beds and craggy oyster rocks. But they’ll go into the bay, the indigo depths of unknowns. They’ll make their journey, carrying with them a memory of the brackish bights where they grew strong. Brimming with this new knowledge, my brothers and I carried the drum’s rhythms within us. Come next spring, or even before, we’ll feel the pull to return home, whether to a physical place, our family, or a flavor. Just like the drum, we’ll always come back. ◊
Sarah Golibart Gorman is a writer and educator with one foot sunk in the marsh mud of Virginia’s Eastern Shore and the other planted in the Shenandoah Valley food scene. She contributes to Garden & Gun, C-VILLE Weekly, The Harrisonburg Citizen, Madison Magazine and Edible Blue Ridge where she was named a 2024 Best of Edible Award finalist. Her first documentary, ¡Hola, paisano!, will premier September 2025. She currently lives in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
Ellie Skrzat is an artist & writer/director in Brooklyn. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, TASTE, Eaten, and Kitchen Table Magazine. She loves John Waters and chicken fingers.
