Chesapeake Requiem

by Earl Swift

  The channel’s unhappy side effects didn’t end with rough water. Waves carried sand and silt ripped from Uppards into the passage, too. “It didn’t take long before the bars on either side of the channel started to get shallow,” Short Ed Parks told me when I visited with him in his home on the Ponderosa. “There was one man on the island who was against opening that channel. His name was John Parks, and just about everything he said would happen has happened. He said, ‘You build that channel, it’ll ruin the creek.’”

  That would be “Junk John” Parks, so called because he salvaged and recycled for his keep, on top of crabbing. He was Leon’s uncle. “He was right,” Ed said. “I didn’t think so at the time. When you were discussing things around the dock, as men do, he’d voice his opinion, and some would get hot about him. He was sure about it, though. He said it would make things shallow where you didn’t want it that way, and deeper where you don’t want it deep.”

  The Corps of Engineers recognized the channel’s vulnerability early on. Six years after the seawall’s completion, it had already devised a solution: a rock jetty extending from the southwest corner of Uppards and shielding the channel’s mouth. At the time, the corps reckoned that such a project would cost about $1.2 million, with the federal government ponying up $900,000 of that amount and the remainder split among state, county, and local governments.

  But like the seawall, the jetty project moved from conception to approval to financing at a glacial pace. Construction finally appeared imminent eight years later, in the spring of 2004. It didn’t happen. As islanders were to learn, whenever money seemed in hand for the jetty, the corps thought additional study was necessary, and whenever the corps’ penchant for study seemed sated, money was elusive. Years passed. The jetty’s price tag climbed to $3 million by 2007 and eventually to $4.2 million. At the same time, the shoreline at Uppards steadily eroded, changing the jetty’s design parameters, prompting more study.

  And along the way, a curious phenomenon unfolded. The jetty’s size and form shifted in the minds of many Tangiermen. No longer was it seen for what it was—a simple and rather limited ploy to stave off shoaling and protect the harbor from wind-driven waves. No, now it was conflated with other, grander schemes that had come and gone over the years, proposals that called for armoring much of Uppards and Tangier’s exposed southern underbelly. The jetty was reshaped in the public imagination into a seawall not unlike that guarding the airport—a seawall that promised the island’s survival.

  It is this mythical seawall to which Tangiermen seem to refer when they offer up prayer requests for “the seawall” at church, or when older islanders say they hope to live long enough to see “the seawall” built: not a jetty, but some amorphous product of wishful thinking, a mass confabulation of what has been considered, planned, hoped for, and promised for years.

  That might explain the euphoria that gripped the island when then-governor Robert F. McDonnell and corps officials pledged in November 2012, three weeks after Carol Moore stumbled on the sprung-open graves at Canaan, that the jetty would be built, and soon. The promise came at a ceremony on the Tangier waterfront covered by the Washington Post. A corps official told the paper he was “cautiously optimistic that construction will be finished in 2017.”

  Islanders were convinced that this meant construction would start in 2016, Ooker among them. They learned they were mistaken when the corps and representatives of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation met with townsfolk in the school cafeteria in December 2015. Yes, the officials told them, the initial phase of the project was funded and was ready to start—but that initial phase was more study.

  Those in attendance were shocked and angry, and a few of them were vocal about it. “We usually sit there politely and listen,” Principal Denny Crockett told me. “But when they said it wouldn’t start in 2016, that ruffled our feathers. Each year the channel gets wider and there’s less and less you can do with the money, and people were upset.”

  The stormy meeting ended with the corps assuring the islanders that they’d see physical work on the jetty begin in 2017 and could expect it to finish in 2018. “They said 2017,” Ooker told me. “They didn’t give an actual month, but they said in 2017 it would begin.”

  As it happened, the corps did not start the work in any month of 2017.

  “They do studies, then they study the studies,” the mayor complained as we fished up pots. “I know that’s their procedure, but it gets frustrating. We’re at the point now that it’s like me coming across a family in a boat that’s sinking, and I say, ‘I’m going to rescue you, but I have to study it first.’

  “They know we’re losing land and running out of time. Sometimes you have to just go ahead and do it.”

  ONE LATE AFTERNOON, I climb into Carol Moore’s skiff and we speed away to Canaan. Carol noses the boat against the shore—a foot-high bluff of peat and oyster shell undermined by tide and currents—and I scramble out with a small anchor and drive its blade into sod that squishes and quakes underfoot.

  From here, our routine holds that Carol, seeking solitude, strikes off to the east, while I prog the scant remains of Canaan or wander down the island’s west side. So off she goes, eyes cast down, on the lookout for arrowheads, bottles, pieces of the past. I pick my way west along the water’s edge, swatting at flies, tracing a meandering route around mudholes and tidal pools as the coastline bends southward. Bright-billed oystercatchers alarmed by my intrusion circle, shrilling, just overhead.

  The shore consists mostly of sod bristling with broken stalks of spartina grass or smoothed slick into mudflat, and all of it carved into deep scallops. As I walk, waves roll into these concavities, leap their sides with loud slurps, and tear away chunks of soil. Now and then I encounter sod torn from the shore and thrown back in great lifeless blocks, some the size of ottomans.

  Later, as we motor back down Uppards’s west side, Carol points out a break in the shore that islanders call “the breach.” It looks to be about thirty feet wide and filled with water that runs well back into the marsh. I can make out an old boat abandoned on a muddy bank fifty yards in.

  It doesn’t much look it, but the breach signals a new emergency. Uppards has had inlets cutting into its marshes from the east for as long as the place has been mapped. The largest of these is a club-shaped body of water called Tom’s Gut. On maps of old, it traversed about halfway across the island’s width. But with the erosion of Uppards from the west, the marsh between gut and bay narrowed—and at the same time, Tom’s Gut ballooned in size—until the waters met.

  The gut’s expansion is a textbook by-product of sea-level rise: Upland turns to wetland, while marsh drowns, giving way to mudflats and, in time, open water. A 2006 article in the journal Global Environmental Change showed that what’s happening to Tom’s Gut also contributed to Holland Island’s demise. Between 1849 and 1989, some eighty-eight acres of Holland’s high ground was lost, the study found. Most of it—a little more than fifty-three acres—was obliterated by “edge erosion due to waves around the island perimeter.” But the remaining thirty-four acres of high ground turned to marsh.

  But back to this breach and what it portends: Uppards has been cut in two, and its interior is now exposed to the erosive action of the bay. It stands to be scoured away inside and out, and the damage will accelerate as the opening widens. As we eye the breach from the boat, Carol says it’s only been six or seven years since “it was still so narrow that we could barely get a skiff through it, and it was so shallow you’d get hung up every time. Now two workboats can go through there, side by side, it’s so deep and so wide.”

  The Tangier Town Council has been asking the corps since at least 2011 to plug the breach with dredge fill. To date, it hasn’t happened. Seeing how long it’s taken the agency’s other Tangier projects to become reality, it could be a while yet. Meanwhile, every day, Tom’s Gut grows and Uppards shrinks.

  A well-stocked aisle at Daley & Son. (EARL SWIFT)

  Fourteen


  HIS SKIFF’S OUTBOARD “AIN’T GOT A REVERSE OR A NEUTRAL,” so Cameron Evans has to cut the engine thirty feet from Ooker’s crab shanty and let the boat coast the rest of the way in. He’s earning pocket money by bustering up the mayor’s peelers this dark Saturday morning, and he’ll deserve every penny: Tangier is gripped by a blustery chill. Its water tower is all but invisible behind a caul of misty rain.

  The skiff glides alongside Ooker’s dock and thumps against a piling, which Cameron hugs to bring us to a stop. Shielded from the elements in a slicker and waterproof pants, he scrambles onto the deck and strides past the cats to the shedding tanks. In one, Ooker’s placed a flounder, olive gray and a foot long, that blundered into a pot. It spreads pancake-flat and motionless on the bottom, laying low among a gang of crouching peelers. Cameron plucks several crabs from the water and moves them to other tanks, then eyes the busters in the tank closest to the shanty. He scoops out two soft crabs with a hand net and carries them to the cooler, but opts to leave a third for his next visit; it just seconds ago pulled free from its shell and is too soft, too frail, to pick up and move.

  He makes this judgment without touching the crab. At sixteen, Cameron has already developed a waterman’s almost extrasensory ability to appraise crabs with a fleeting glance. Few other Tangier teenagers can boast his level of skill. But then, few others share his interest in the island’s chief industry—or, for that matter, his passion for much of the life that his father and grandfathers enjoyed as boys.

  While some other island youngsters sit indoors, entranced by TV and video games, Cameron is almost always outside, using a compound bow to hunt stingrays down off the spit with his classmate Isaiah McCready, or roaming the island with his camera, or casting for rockfish off the docks. Hunkering down in duck blinds in the cold and dark of winter. Digging for clams in the mudflats. This kid’s a true Tangierman. Has mud between his toes, as islanders say. Lives for the place.

  Two busters have hung up and died while shedding. He separates them from their old shells. A quick examination determines they’re recently deceased, so he carries them into the shanty, wraps them in plastic, and places them in an enormous chest freezer almost brimming with similarly wrapped softshells—hundreds on hundreds of crabs that Ooker will provide to his buyers over the winter, when live animals can’t be had.

  I ask Cameron what he plans to do once he graduates with the class of 2018. “I really don’t know anything as of yet,” he says. He pours dry cat food into small mounds on the floor. Sam Alito, John Roberts, and Ann Coulter are blurs crossing the room. “I’m keeping my mind open.”

  “Do you think you’ll go to college?”

  “Yeah, I think I want to go,” he replies. “But I really don’t know what I want to do. I’d like to have a job that’s outside and all—I wouldn’t want to work in an office.”

  Around us is the closest thing to an office he’d likely occupy on the island. Coils of rope and piles of rusty netting. A strong bouquet of brine. Walls decorated with a horseshoe crab a foot across, fading Eskridge family snapshots leached of their reds, and a bumper sticker that gives away its age: NEW CENTURY. SAME GOD.

  Back outside, Cameron scoops six dead peelers from a tank and piles the corpses on its wooden edge. They’ll make good fishing bait. The breeze stiffens. A gull on the shanty’s roof struggles, feathers splaying, to keep its perch. Cameron scans the tanks a second time. “Not much else to do,” he says. “There’ll be more later.” We head back to the skiff.

  “So, would you like to stay on Tangier?” I ask once we’re aboard.

  Cameron shoves us away from the pilings and starts the outboard. “I guess if I could, I probably would,” he answers. “I’d like to stay in the state, I know that much. But I really don’t know much more than that.”

  We putter from the shanty and into the harbor. Of all the kids I’ve met on the island, here is the one I can most imagine choosing to take up the work of his forebears—the one I can picture as a boat captain, chasing down pots in a deadrise. I am not alone in this assessment. Ask old-timers who among the island’s boys reminds them most of themselves coming up, and they’d tell you it’s Cameron. Ask them whom of those nearing graduation they could imagine forgoing the mainland and still doing well for himself, and they’d tell you: Cameron Evans.

  Yet there’d be wishful thinking to their answers, because everyone on Tangier knows that Cameron has the potential to succeed wherever he goes and in whatever he chooses to do. He’s gregarious, funny, and kindhearted, a deeply decent kid who’s active in Sunday school and the youth programs at Swain Memorial. His lean, square-jawed features should season well. And he’s sharp: He posts good grades while shouldering an ambitious load of classes—physics, dramatic lit, Advanced Placement psychology, third-year Spanish.

  In fact, if Cameron were to announce that he’d decided to remain on Tangier, I believe that many island adults would urge him to reconsider. It would hurt them to do it, but as much as they appreciate a teenager who shares their love for the place, and as much as they’d relish seeing their work and traditions passed along to so capable a successor, they’d know he was making a mistake.

  They face an uncomfortable reality: Their island’s future depends on young people remaining here, working the water, raising families. But few islanders would wish the hardships and uncertainties of their own lives on the children they love—especially those children, like Cameron, with almost unlimited options.

  THE LAST TANGIER BOYS to follow their fathers onto the water as a group are nearing forty today. Islanders blame a state clampdown on crabbing licenses nearly twenty years ago for the dearth of young captains since. That seems a reasonable view, until you consider that Tangiermen were later exempted from the license freeze’s most bothersome particulars and that young people were fleeing for the mainland years before the new regulations came along.

  What really seems to be at work is far more basic: The island’s boys want no part of crabbing’s long hours, physical demands, and financial instability. As for Tangier girls, what waits for them if they stay? Marriage, perhaps, though that is not the sure thing it was in their parents’ time, for available mates are few. Raising children, if they do marry. Keeping house. A job at one of the restaurants, maybe. Driving a tour buggy. Cutting grass.

  Both boys and girls have grown up watching their fathers grow old before their time, their parents fret over disappointing harvests, their mothers’ lives stunted by the absence of meaningful opportunity—and they’ve grown up, too, witnessing the wider, faster, more glamorous world on satellite TV and the internet. Which is to say, the currents tugging at Tangier’s young people are much the same as those that have emptied rural towns across America, from farm burgs in the South to Native villages in bush Alaska. A kid doesn’t have to see much of the world beyond the town limits—or the water—before concluding that he’ll miss out by staying put. Island kids have an additional impetus in their home’s ongoing destruction: Even if they wanted to stay, could they realistically expect to live out their lives here? And if not, wouldn’t they waste valuable time by investing, even for a few years, in a place where they were doomed to have little to show for their efforts?

  Though older Tangiermen lament the diaspora, they have quietly encouraged it. “Go to school as long as they’ll let you go”—that’s the advice that my landlady, Cindy Parks, and her late husband, Charles, gave their two sons. The decades that Charles spent crabbing were never easy. “Charles used to tell the boys growing up, ‘If you can do anything other than what I’m doing, do it,’” Cindy told me. “He knew how difficult it can be to keep a roof over your head. You come across two or three days of good crabs, and something goes wrong with your engine. You try to put aside a little bit, and a storm takes your crab pots.” A lot of money passes through a crabber’s hands, but even in a good year, he doesn’t get to keep much of it.

  Principal Nina Pruitt, married to a waterman-turned-tugboater, recognizes that a lif
e on Tangier might not have the appeal it did when she graduated from high school in 1980. “I get asked a lot whether I encourage my students to stay on the island,” she said. “And the answer is no. Just because I’ve chosen this life for myself and decided to stay doesn’t mean I think they should do the same, to keep this island afloat.

  “I encourage them to do what they want to do.”

  IN THE SPRING of 1914, journalist J. W. Church and a photographer stepped ashore at Tangier half expecting to find “a striking case of inbreeding” in the population. The two were on assignment for Harper’s Magazine and knew little of the place except that hundreds of islanders shared a handful of last names. The mainland oystermen and villagers Church consulted before their trip described Tangiermen as “mighty cur’us folk” and spoke of “queer goin’s-on over yonder.”

  The reporter’s fears were only bolstered when the islander who put them up, Captain Ed Crockett, told them, “Once in a while one of our boys goes over to the Eastern Shore for a wife, but most generally we Tangier folk kinda like to flock to ourselves.”

  “My thoughts,” Church wrote, “went back to the succession of graves we had passed, and now I wondered if we would not find a densely populated asylum for defectives tucked away somewhere on Tangier.”

  The journalists found no such thing. Close cousins surely married in the early days of settlement, but by 1914—when the head count was nearing its peak—a great many islanders were the children or grandchildren of come-heres. The gene pool has broadened further since: Though virtually everyone born on Tangier can trace his or her lineage back to the original Joseph Crockett, he or she can also trace it back to a large and varied cast of mainlanders.

  But not because the island attracts many outsiders who choose to stick here. Rare are those come-heres who put down stakes without an existing family connection, and those who do rarely stay for long. For some, Tangier’s unbuffered weather and austere landscape prove depressing, especially in the winter. The island’s gossip can wear. Some simply grow bored. “Folks will come here and have their island experience. They’ll be attracted by this idea that it’s an idyllic place,” Jean Crockett explained to me. “And the truth is that it is not an idyllic place, and they won’t stay. People have to have a reason to live here. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be willing to put up with the stupid mess. Because there’s quite a bit of stupid mess.”