Chesapeake Requiem

by Earl Swift

  It’s a reminder that the effects of rising seas are not limited to the Chesapeake’s islands. It has fueled erosion that’s stolen vast acreage from the bay’s edges, from the Susquehanna to the Virginia Capes. Since the mid-nineteenth century, it has chewed away bluffs, erased beaches, and undermined forest. Up in Maryland, the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, created as a layover on the Atlantic Flyway for migratory waterfowl, saw five thousand of its nearly twenty-nine thousand acres of marsh turn to open water between 1938 and 2009. The loss is significant: The refuge contains one-third of the state’s tidal wetlands.

  The northernmost mainland community on Virginia’s piece of the Eastern Shore, a low-lying watermen’s village called Saxis, is flooded by even minor storms, and high water has carried off many of the crab houses that lined its waterfront for generations. With their destruction, Saxis lost its commercial heart. It’s pervaded today by the unmistakable air of a ghost town in the making: The principal road snaking through town dead-ends at a business district consisting of a coffee shop, a tiki bar, and a cinder block crab-picking house.

  Sixty miles to the south, at the Chesapeake’s mouth in Hampton Roads—a metropolitan area of 1.7 million inhabitants that includes the state’s two biggest cities, Virginia Beach and Norfolk—high tides routinely submerge neighborhood streets under water deep enough for motorboat traffic, and northeasters sometimes maroon entire sections of town. Photographs of cars stranded in water up past their windows have become a post-storm cliché in the Virginian-Pilot.

  The region’s relative sea level is rising even faster than Tangier’s, because the much larger population there has tapped an underground aquifer for its water, and draining it has hastened the subsidence of the land above. Among the properties at risk is the mammoth Norfolk Naval Base, home to the Atlantic Fleet. Its aircraft carriers, guided missile destroyers, and submarines aren’t at risk—they’re built to float, after all—but the piers where they tie up, the pipes and utilities that supply them, and the streets their sailors travel to report for duty are in serious peril. The Hampton Roads Transportation Planning Organization, a panel of local, state, and federal officials and leading citizens tasked with adapting the region’s highways to the looming crisis, reckoned in a May 2016 report that the bay could rise two feet there by 2045.

  All of which is to say that Tangier Island is not alone in its struggle with the sea. It’s just furthest along in the battle and the worst for it. The problems there will soon be felt elsewhere, just as Tangier is now vexed by challenges similar to those of Holland Island a century ago.

  And we know how those turned out.

  COOK THROTTLES BACK the engine and we chug past Crisfield’s city dock, where the Courtney Thomas ties up. We veer through a narrow passage into the vast Somers Cove Marina, the biggest haven for boaters in this part of the Chesapeake, with more than five hundred slips, a big dockmaster’s office, and a busy Coast Guard station lining its edges. Cook leaves the cabin for the stern steering station and, with typical Tangier nonchalance, spins the boat and backs it into a slip in a single fluid maneuver. It’s all the more impressive because Cook’s virtually blind in his left eye, thanks to a childhood accident, and as Leon has advised in the Situation Room: “If you ain’t got both eyes, you got to be real particular if you’re bringing a boat into the dock, because you can’t tell how far away you are. You’ll run into it.”

  We tie the boat in place and walk up the dock and across a parking lot to a black Ford F-150 that Cook uses when he’s on duty. He’s in his ninth year with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the bay and its drainage. It traces its beginnings to 1964, when a handful of Baltimore businessmen worried over lunch that people were overusing and underloving the bay, which was degrading its water quality, disrupting its wildlife, and spoiling its quiet beauty. The humble group they founded has grown into a noisy and effective advocate for restoring the Chesapeake’s health, with a cadre of scientists, lawyers, and educators, backed by a committed army of volunteers.

  Its mission has at times put the foundation at odds with Tangier’s crabbers. Islanders will allow that the CBF has done a lot of good, particularly in raising public awareness about the bay’s fragility. But in its past dealings with commercial watermen, the foundation could come across as high-handed and smarter-than-thou. It seemed quick to dismiss the wisdom that crabbers had gleaned in decades of working the water. Its fresh-scrubbed activists talked about the bay as if they knew all about it. Tangiermen lived in it. The activists, they argued, were often flat-out wrong.

  The islanders, on the other hand, didn’t always come off as wise or reasonable. They sometimes seemed to think they had a God-given right to plunder the Chesapeake as they saw fit, and that their heritage granted them immunity from laws and regulations. They denounced the science that CBF held dear if it didn’t square with their more anecdotal learning. They invariably referred to the group by its motto—“Save the Bay”—and they often said it with a sneer. When relations were at their worst, in the mid-to late nineties, the island was pretty much at war with the outfit. Tourists pulled into a harbor lined with signs denouncing the CBF as an enemy to people who depended on the bay for their living.

  These days the two are getting on better. The foundation has made a heartfelt effort to seek the advice and input of watermen—to treat them as valued players in the bay’s culture and health—and to do a better job of explaining its research and aims. Tangiermen have tried to squelch their distrust of scientists and regulators and to treat Save the Bay as neighbors, especially the young staffers who spend summers on the P’int, at the Port Isobel education center. As they achieved a cautious détente, the foundation took to boating groups of students and teachers to Tangier to visit with crabbers and watch them work, giving both sides more time in each other’s company. That helped, too. Ooker’s crab shanty is a regular tour stop.

  At first inspection, Cook Cannon might seem an odd fit with the organization. He is a man of strong opinion and very loud volume—even in private conversation, he tends to speak in a near shout—and while he’s prone to smiles and devoutly religious, he also has a quick-flaring temper and little fear of an argument. Like most Tangier men of his generation, he quit school at fifteen to work the water with his stepfather, and he doesn’t necessarily agree with the foundation’s science. “The company I work for believes in global warming,” he’s told me. “They know how I feel about it, too. I don’t believe in it. I think it’s a load of crap.”

  But consider: When Cook was seventeen his stepdad was hurt aboard their boat, and the boy became his family’s breadwinner. He chased work wherever he could find it—crabbing, naturally, but also building and remodeling houses, laying phone cable, honing his skills as a plumber, electrician, and mechanic. He spent six years in the engine room of an Army Corps of Engineers dredge. Then, in 1988, he landed a job as supervisor of the town’s sewage treatment plant and trash incinerator, a $3.5 million facility that had quit working after just five years of operation. Few had faith that he’d be able to fix it. Gases from the plant’s sludge tank had chewed through wiring and control panels and had so corroded steel catwalks and ladders that they couldn’t support his weight. Failed pumps had spewed sewage ankle-deep on the concrete floor.

  Mainland experts wrote off the mess as unsalvageable and talked about spending millions of dollars to replace it. Cook got to work. He cleaned out the sludge, rewired the controls, rebuilt the pumps, and returned the plant to full operation, mostly by studying each component and sussing out what made it work. “I’m not naturally smart,” he said, “but I was determined.”

  The Tangier Town Council was so awed and grateful that it voted to grant him the job for life. All of which made him, twenty years later, a peerless candidate for the job of caring for the CBF’s four educational facilities on the bay: a couple of big, old houses in Tylerton; a former hunting lodge on Fox Island; the big complex of dorms, docks, and a conference h
all at Port Isobel; and a mainland outpost at Bishops Head, Maryland, near the Blackwater refuge.

  WE ROLL OUT of Somers Cove and onto Crisfield’s Main Street as Cook rails about Tangier’s boat channel, which opens the harbor to westerly winds and agitates the water around the crab shanties. “You talk about a rough harbor,” he says. “We’re the only port on the whole bay that ain’t got a good harbor. And we’re the seafood capital of the world. You know that ain’t right.” Talk has bounced around for years, he says, about building a stone breakwater on the island’s western shore to protect the channel. But every time it’s appeared about to happen, either the money has fallen through or the Corps of Engineers, which oversees such projects, has opted to think on it a bit more. “They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to study it, and they never get around to actually doing anything,” Cook roars. “I say it’s time to stop listening to politicians and take action ourselves—if it’s right or if it’s wrong.” One grows accustomed to hearing such talk from Cook, though that’s all it is. If Tangiermen could take action themselves, they’d have done so years ago.

  Crisfield is quiet this morning. We encounter few other vehicles along the mile and a half to the hardware store and lumberyard where Cook is to pick up a pile of posts he’ll use to build osprey nests on Smith Island. Cook’s boss, a fit CBFer named Paul Willey, is waiting in the parking lot in a Patagonia ball cap and cargo pants. He and Cook venture into the store and emerge with a load of salt-treated four-by-fours. The three of us drive back to Somers Cove, passing under Crisfield’s water tower, the orange crabs on its tank faded to a pale pink, and through a downtown of scattered restaurants, a shuttered bank, a stately but long-abandoned customs-house, and an abundance of vacant lots. Main Street dead-ends out at the end of the city dock, which is wide enough to accommodate a lane of traffic, angled parking, and a covered waiting area beside the mailboat tie-ups, and which is flanked by large condominium blocks built on stilts at the water’s edge. All’s quiet down there, too. Loudspeakers over at the Coast Guard station sound reveille as we haul the wood across fifty yards of lawn and dock to the boat. Sweating, we untie from the slip and motor out of the marina, passing a line of old brick crab-packing plants—relics of days when this waterfront was far too occupied with the business of picking and packing seafood to leave room for condos.

  In the cabin, conversation centers on the meager number of peelers in the water off Tangier and the season’s slow start for hard crabbers. “For the last three years,” Cook says, “things been different. The crabs have been acting different. I think they got smart. I think they figured it out.” Meaning, presumably, that the crustaceans have developed higher reasoning skills and are consciously outmaneuvering the island’s watermen.

  Willey, a boat captain in his own right who has worked on and around the water for CBF since 1989, sounds like a doubter: “You think they got smart just in the last three years?”

  “Let me tell you, every spring we’ve always had two runs,” Cook says. “For the past three years, those ain’t happened.”

  Willey cocks an eyebrow. “So you think that in the last three years, the crabs got it all figured out?”

  Cook nods vigorously. “If you can train an alligator, you can train a crab.”

  Willey throws up his hands. “Cook, nobody’s training the crabs!”

  Out on Tangier Sound, the subject turns, inevitably, to erosion. Cook rants for a few minutes about the longed-for Tangier breakwater, and Willey acknowledges that the Corps of Engineers is a tough organization to read. “One thing that’s been a tough nut to crack, even though we have a good relationship, is getting them to tell us exactly what stage the breakwater is in,” he tells me. “We try our best, but we always seem to be waiting for information.”

  The shriveled marshes of Smith Island slide past the boat’s windows as Cook notes the sorry state of Uppards and the shoreline’s retreat all around Tangier. Willey nods sympathetically. “The natural process of the bay is erosion and filling in,” he says. “But it’s tough when it affects critical pieces of the bay, places that shaped the bay—and, of course, people’s homes.”

  Well, Cook says, one solution might be to take dredge spoils from elsewhere in the bay and blow them onto Tangier. Build the island up. Replace what the bay steals. Buy it more time. It worked at the P’int, he says—before the foundation moved onto the islet, it was owned by a fellow who dumped a mountain of fill there, then planted hundreds of trees, stabilizing what might otherwise have washed away. “That was marsh,” he says, “and ain’t that the prettiest place now?”

  “But that’s a slippery slope, Cook,” Willey counters. “That’ll give people an excuse to use fill to make uplands from marsh that they ought to just leave alone. When it’s going away, you want to lash out at everybody, but sometimes you have to just accept that this is the natural course.” The CBF’s belief in that principle likely will doom its Fox Island education center, Willey tells us. The center occupies a rambling, wood-frame hunting lodge built in 1929, when the land on which it stood was still called Great Fox Island—to distinguish it from Little Fox, off to the south. Since then, Little Fox has disappeared completely, and its big sister has eroded to a whisper of marsh. The lodge is unprotected, wide open to the weather, its demise only a matter of time. “And it’s a shame,” Willey says, “because Fox Island is such a powerful place. Imagine being a kid from Baltimore and being out on Fox Island, in a place so remote, with no lights around. It’s fantastic.”

  Later, as Cook and I cruise back to Tangier, having left Willey in Tylerton, we can see the Fox Island lodge a few miles off to port, a big white rectangle that seems to float on the water. The clubhouse, as mariners know it, is such a familiar sight that it’s difficult to imagine this part of the bay without it. But the day is coming—and soon.

  Erosion devoured not only Fox’s uplands and marsh, but the sandbars that for centuries cushioned it from the worst a storm might dish out. Within the memory of older Tangiermen, the shallows south of Fox were shallow indeed. At low tide, only a film of water covered the flats of sand and mud all the way down to Watts Island. Jerry Frank Pruitt, born in 1944, has told me that he can remember “seeing the tree stumps under the water” down that way. “They were big old round stumps, big trees.

  “It was so shallow, all you could get through there was a skiff, at low tide,” he said. “That’s how it was when I was a teenager.”

  No longer. Winds and currents have scoured the bay’s floor, robbing Fox of the speed bumps that softened the effects of wind and tide. A single hard blow will finish the place. The clubhouse and Fox itself are, as Tangiermen say, “going away from here in a hurry.”

  THIS WOULD HAVE been unimaginable when the Fox Islands were inhabited, and Watts, too, and thanks to the oyster business, Tangier’s head count was growing by leaps. By the outbreak of the Civil War the wintertime oyster harvest was Tangier’s “main dependence,” Adam Wallace wrote in his 1861 biography of Joshua Thomas, The Parson of the Islands. Even then it was “conjectured that the supply, in the Chesapeake waters, must soon fail, in view of the immense quantities taken up annually, and the increasing facilities with which (the oysters) are obtained.”

  War’s end only intensified the oyster harvest, with boosts from several simultaneous developments. In 1866, the Eastern Shore Railroad pushed a line into the small, sleepy waterfront village of Somers Cove, and instantly the oyster trade had a way to get its catch to the big cities of the East. Shucking and packing houses sprouted along the water’s edge by the dozens, and in 1872 the fast-growing burg renamed itself Crisfield, after the railroad’s president. Enterprising townsfolk filled the marshes at water’s edge with mountains of oyster shells discarded by the industry; over time they created a peninsula jutting into the Little Annemessex that became the town’s business district. Crisfield was literally built on the oyster.

  Canning plants followed not far behind the railroad, and soon diners a thousand miles fro
m the sea could enjoy the fruits of a Tangierman’s labor. The more available the oysters became, the greater the public’s demand for them grew, and Crisfield boomed. Its register of sailing vessels grew to be the biggest in the country. Even today, older Tangiermen can remember it as a town that supplied virtually all their needs. Its business district boasted department stores and five-and-dimes, along with dress shops, shoe stores, places that outfitted kids for school, and a slew of restaurants, some catering to families, others to watermen. It had an opera house and, later, movie theaters. Grand churches. Big neoclassical and Romanesque banks equal to those anywhere. And rightly so, because the oyster catch landing at Crisfield ran into the millions of bushels a year, which brought money and lots of it.

  That would soon enough cause trouble, as money will, between the watermen of Virginia and Maryland—and, in particular, the populations of Tangier and Smith islands. But in the meantime, the Civil War’s end brought a more immediate crisis. Cholera arrived in October 1866. It was Tangier’s first epidemic, and although there’d later be outbreaks of measles, tuberculosis, and smallpox, none exacted so high a toll or excited such panic. “The first case occurred on Tangier Island on the 10th instant,” the New York Times reported on the twenty-seventh, “and from that date to the 21st, there were thirteen deaths.” The paper advised that most cases “could be traced to some imprudence in diet,” adding: “One or two ate watermellons [sic] and many others oysters.”