Chesapeake Requiem

by Earl Swift

  But saying I hope the place is saved is not answering the question. Whether it should be saved is a far more difficult matter, because it requires some national consensus on how we address the changes wrought by sea-level rise in the coming decades. Those changes are already happening—the good people of Tangier will see that, in time—and as they accelerate they will affect thousands of American communities.

  We will not have the money, the physical means, or the time to save them all. So we as a people will have to develop a rubric for deciding which towns and properties we save and which we surrender to the sea. Should we restrict our efforts to the places with the greatest populations? Some of the country’s biggest cities face inundation, and government spending to protect them would certainly be put to its most efficient use. If that’s our yardstick, however, we’ll have to agree on a baseline population for intervention. A million people? Half a million?

  Whatever the number, that criterion would doom Tangier and thousands of localities important to our history and culture. Assuming we’re unwilling to sacrifice smaller places we hold dear, we’ll have to come up with other measures of value. We must devise means to quantify the intangibles that make a place special.

  In the vast sea of styles and experience that constitute American culture, Tangier is an island both literal and metaphorical. We must decide whether such cultural outliers are as worthy of salvation as the mainstream, whether a circle’s circumference is as essential as its middle. Or, to couch it in everyday mainland terms, whether the mom-and-pop restaurant that the locals cherish should be preserved along with the much busier chain eatery out by the interstate.

  Tangier forces us to confront some of these questions now. How we choose to respond to its plight will speak to what we hold important and how we tackle the more complex rescues and retreats to come. In one respect, it’s a perfect candidate for so key a role, in that it is a place of insignificant population and is unquestionably unique—a word that’s tossed around a lot but here really means something. In another respect, it’s a rotten candidate, as its demographic issues raise the possibility that, ultimately, it cannot be saved, even by heroic intervention.

  We don’t get to pick our first test, however. Nature has done that for us. So in answer to whether we should save Tangier, the responsible citizen in me says we have to decide how to decide and proceed accordingly.

  But as one who’s been allowed, for however brief a time, to pretend he’s a Tangierman, it would pain me deeply to see the place disappear. I’d hate to see its people forced to the mainland. I’d mourn losing this direct connection to the past. The world would be a little less interesting without it.

  So again, I hope we intervene.

  That I do.

  LATE AFTERNOON, EARLY AUTUMN. I’m in Carol Moore’s skiff, idling beside the dock it shares with Lonnie’s Alona Rahab. Carol is at the stern and consulting her husband, who stands above us on the decking.

  “Lonnie, what do you think?” she asks. “East side or west side?”

  Lonnie cocks his head as if listening hard and holds the pose for a couple of seconds. “Way the wind’s blowing, I’d go east.”

  “Then we’ll go east,” Carol says, and with a twist of her hand, the outboard’s putter turns to a loud buzz, and we jet away into the harbor. Out past the docks and parked boats we race, into the channel, among the shanties. The town recedes behind us—the steeple and water tower, the clustered houses, all balanced on a wafer of green so slender that they appear already part of the bay.

  We sweep wide into Tangier Sound, bucking on its riffled surface. At Canaan, Carol noses the boat against the peaty shore, and we step onto ground turned gelatinous by the recent high tide. Every footstep leaves a puddle. Carol carries the skiff ’s anchor ten feet from the water and drives its blade into the boggy turf. It gulps the steel down.

  Uppards is silent under a sky blazoned with bowl-shaped clouds, the breeze too mellow to tousle the marsh or to waken surf. The shore here has changed profoundly since my first visit seventeen months ago. The land that held the anchor that day has been carried away by the Chesapeake. The beach on which the headstones lay has retreated fifteen feet, and in places, twice as far. A dense tangle of bleached tree limbs, which in the spring of 2016 blocked our eastward progress along the water’s edge, has been overtaken by the bay. New beach has taken shape behind it.

  For the first time in our many visits to Uppards, Carol lets me join her as she progs. We tread east from the boat along the tide line, alert for arrowheads and bottle glass. “There’s got to be something good in here,” she murmurs, scanning the ground. “Got to be.”

  The sand is soon replaced by ancient oyster shells, and we crunch over monsters that dwarf those I’ve seen pulled from the bottom. In time the shells give way to the pulpy roots and stems of drowned water bushes, then to a thick mat of rotting marine grasses. “My nana used to always tell me, ‘Don’t walk in the sea oats, because you don’t ever know what’s under them,’” Carol says. “Boards with nails in them, that sort of thing.” She veers clear of the stranded plants and splashes ankle-deep in the shallows, pausing to scoop a half-inch-wide jimmy out of the water. She opens her hand to show it off.

  “A baby,” I observe. “Hey, little fella.”

  “He’s dead,” she says. She slings him into the drink.

  We press on. The shoreline transitions to soupy mud littered with water-smoothed brick and old timber veneered in slime and tunneled by worms. The mud is loose and gluey underfoot and emits a flatulent stink. Unbothered, Carol slops through it to a knee-high escarpment where beach meets marsh. “Look there,” she says, pointing.

  Beyond a narrow strip of spartina and sand is a huge pond in Uppards’s interior. It is separated from the sound, here and at numerous other points, by slivers of ground that barely clear high tide. “That’s just happened recently,” Carol says. A year ago, the pond was smaller, shallower, farther inland. Another breach, this one on Uppards’s east side, seems imminent.

  We turn around, having found nothing in our beachcombing but the broken necks of a few old bottles. As Uppards retreats, the wreckage of Canaan fades farther offshore, as do its relics. “Not finding anything up here anymore,” Carol says, and sighs. “I thought we would, with all the wind we’ve had. But no.

  “One day last winter I came up, and I think I found seventeen bottles. The water was clear and the tide low. That it was.” She shakes her head. “It makes me sad, because that part of history is gone. It’s hard to tell somebody about Uppards if you can’t bring them up here and find something. But it’s just gone.”

  Maybe progging here runs in cycles, I suggest. Maybe she’ll return in a month and find the beach littered again with remnants of her forebears.

  “Maybe,” she says. “Maybe. But I’ve been coming up here religiously for twenty years.”

  “And you’ve never seen it like this?”

  “No. Never,” she says. “I mean, the land loss is just unreal.”

  We’ve backtracked to the oyster shells. I spot a dark sphere among the piled white and come up with a fat nugget of coal, from a cookstove in an Uppards home, perhaps. Carol gazes over the water as we walk. “You’ve lost the will to hunt,” I tell her. “You’re not even looking.”

  We complete our crunching traverse of the shells and return to the quiet of the sand. “When you come up here,” I say, “do you think about people coming to Tangier in the future, and progging the beach for signs of you?”

  “Well, if we get a seawall, they’ll be able to look,” she says. “If we don’t, there won’t be an island left to prog on.” She sighs again. “I don’t know why I come up here. I mean, it’s peaceful. And it’s pretty. Just look.”

  We stop. The breeze has stilled. Tangier Sound is slick calm and deep blue. The sinking sun tinges the shore a warm amber, burnishes the water’s placid surface, reflects off the condos at Crisfield, twelve miles away. The Chesapeake seems so deceptively benign on this
tranquil evening, so lovely.

  “It don’t get much better than this,” Carol says.

  I look down at my feet. We stand on a shallow crescent of beach. Where it meets the water, the sand is discolored by deposits of granulated wood, seagrass, seeds, and fine black soil, all left by the retreating tide and forming a mash the color and consistency of coffee grounds.

  Pieces of Tangier Island, minced by the bay to near nothing.

  Acknowledgments

  This book is the product of the many months I spent in one of the most isolated, tightly bound communities in the Lower 48, and as such owes much to the people of that place: Had they decided they wanted no part of me or this project, I’d have little to show for my time there. As it happened, all of Tangier made me feel welcome, and more than sixty islanders agreed to sit for interviews with me. I thank all for their hospitality and patience and for trusting me with their stories.

  A few played key roles. James “Ooker” Eskridge put up with my company on close to a daily basis—on his boat, at his crab shanty, in the Situation Room, at Fisherman’s Corner, and in his living room. He must have grown sick to death of me over fourteen months, but he always treated me well. His help was vital.

  Likewise, Carol and Lonnie Moore were essential to my research. Carol let me tag along with her to Uppards on numerous occasions and impressed me with her thoughtfulness and intelligence. Lonnie took me crabbing and oystering and answered my wearying questions about both, proving himself a smart, funny straight shooter in the process.

  Cindy Parks Walter gave up half of her West Ridge house to me, shuttled me and my luggage back and forth to the docks, and let me tap her filtered water supply. Logistics are a real challenge to any reporter on Tangier, and without Cindy’s help I’d have had a much harder time of it. I’m mighty grateful to her.

  I looked forward every day to the ninety minutes I spent in the Situation Room. I thank the regulars for letting me play fly on the wall during their sessions: Leon McMann, Jerry Frank Pruitt, Allen Ray Crockett, Ernest Ed Parks, Richard Pruitt, Cook Cannon, John Wesley Charnock, Hoot Pruitt, Danny McCready, and Bobby Crockett.

  Bruce Gordy, another of the regulars, introduced me to the group. He and his wife, Peggy, also provided a refuge of calm and good conversation during my frequent visits to their home, and treated me to a couple of crab boils that were highlights of my stay.

  I thank John Flood of Swain Memorial and Duane Crockett and the other elders of New Testament for making me welcome in their congregations. Captains Mark “Mooney” Crockett, Mark Haynie, and Brett Thomas delivered me safely to and from the island over the course of my stay. After my car was destroyed at the Onancock town wharf in July 2016, Devi Eskridge drove me 250 miles home, and from that day on, Jack and Carolyn Chandler let me park my replacement car in their yard, high on a bluff over the creek.

  I owe as much or more to numerous people on the mainland. My agent, David Black, supported this book from its conception, helped shape it, advocated its merits with ferocity, and encouraged me through the reportage and writing that followed. He is the best in the business, and our every interaction reminds me just how fortunate I am to have him.

  This is the second book on which I’ve worked with my editor at HarperCollins, Peter Hubbard, and on both we’ve enjoyed the kind of collaboration a writer can only hope to have with his publishing house. Peter brings a big brain and ravenous curiosity to his projects, and he has invested himself fully in this one. It’s his baby as much as mine.

  The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities at the University of Virginia was my professional home while I reported and wrote Chesapeake Requiem, as it has been for five years. My fellowship there has surrounded me with a smart, nurturing community—and in the solitary business of writing, that’s a gift of incalculable value. I thank everyone there, but especially the foundation’s founding president, Rob Vaughan; its executive director, Matthew Gibson; and the assistant director of the Fellows Program, Jeanne Siler.

  At the Virginian-Pilot, research librarians Maureen Watts and Jakon Hays opened the paper’s files to me, made for good company as I pored through hundreds of old stories about Tangier, and suggested strategies for tracking down more elusive source material. At the Corps of Engineers, Mark W. Haviland let me loose in the Norfolk District’s library, which contained a wealth of useful information. I’m grateful to all. I also owe a huge debt to the corps’ Dave Schulte.

  I owe thanks to several writers who read behind me. John Pruitt, a Tangier native and old colleague of mine at the Virginian-Pilot, read and corrected an early draft, and his insights were invaluable. He also brokered my housing arrangements and had me over to his family’s homeplace for food and conversation whenever he was on the island.

  Kyle Langston and Cindy and David Fuller read pieces of the story and offered helpful comments.

  And without five others, this book would not have developed as it did, and might not have happened at all. Maria Carrillo read and critiqued the manuscript, as she has every one I’ve written. This time she did it while changing jobs, moving halfway across the continent, and wrestling with hurricanes at both ends of the trip. I can’t thank her enough.

  Laura LaFay has been my dear friend for more than thirty years, over which I’ve benefited from her keen intellect, boundless heart, and fierce loyalty. I’ve long admired her prowess as a storyteller. Over the past year, I’ve come to recognize that she’s an equally skilled editor. This is a very different and far better book for her contributions to it.

  I met Mark Mobley, to whom this book is dedicated, at about the time I did Laura, and he’s been a wonderful friend to me since. His roles in this project go far beyond his careful hand as an editor, though that was considerable: He’s been my cheerleader, strategist, and confidant throughout the adventure.

  My daughter, Saylor, managed our mainland home, wrangled our pets, and generally kept everything running during my long stints on the island. She also kept my spirits buoyed wherever I was. I could not have attempted, let alone finished, this project without her.

  Finally, my fiancée, Amy Walton, recognized this as a story worth another, deeper look, fifteen years after I’d last written about Tangier. She encouraged me to propose it, was my unflagging supporter throughout my months of reporting, and several times brightened my stay by venturing across the bay to join me on the island. She has believed in this book, and in me, from the start.

  As they say on Tangier, I ain’t lucky none.

  Notes

  The bulk of this story is based on my firsthand reporting on Tangier Island over a period of nearly two years, beginning with reconnaissance visits on December 24–26, 2015, and February 10–12, 2016. On May 18, 2016, I took up full-time residence on the island, which continued into November; during this period I made only occasional, brief trips home to see family, cut the grass, and catch up on mainland business. From December 2016 through March 2017, I spent about a week per month on the island, and from April through June 2017, two weeks per month. After that, I made another two reporting forays to the place, each of several days, in September and October 2017.

  The result is a roughly chronological account of life on Tangier during the 2016 crab and oyster seasons, and of events that drew international attention in the first half of 2017.

  I’ve relied most heavily on scenes that I witnessed. In those, I recorded what was said electronically or in handwritten notes and typed them into my computer very soon after. Those scenes that I did not see and hear for myself are drawn from multiple sources.

  My long stay on the island put me in several conversations on the same topic with some of the story’s main players. I’ve tried to distinguish those comments made “live”—that is, within a particular scene—by writing them in present tense. Those comments that inform the subject, but were spoken at other times, are in past tense.

  Where I have placed quote marks around a comment, I’m confident that I have captured verbatim what was s
aid, either because I heard and recorded it, or I reconstructed it with the help of multiple participants who agree on the particulars. If quoted speech is included in a larger quote—if I quote a character recalling a conversation, for instance—I’ve punctuated the interior quote, regardless of my confidence in its veracity, simply for clarity’s sake.

  In spots I’ve recounted exchanges without the use of quote marks, meaning that I’m reflecting the gist of what was said, rather than the exact phrasing. In some cases I’ve chosen this device to distill a long back-and-forth into its essence; in others, I’ve done so because the participants did not remember their exact wording but agreed on the content and character of what was said; and in a few places I’ve done so because corroboration was impossible, and I’ve thus relied on a single source.

  All the characters had at least one birthday during the course of my reporting, and many have had another between my last trip over and the publication of this book. Whenever possible, I’ve thus used years of birth in place of ages. When that approach hasn’t fit comfortably into the narrative, I’ve used a character’s age at the time of the scene in which it’s mentioned. So it is that Leon McMann is eighty-five early in the book and eighty-six later in the story.

  INTRODUCTION

  A day after the storm: My description of Carol Pruitt Moore’s October 31, 2012, visit to Canaan is based on interviews I conducted with her on February 11 and October 30, 2016.

  Skip ahead to a clear: This scene unfolded during a visit to Uppards on September 27, 2016, on which I was accompanied by Carol Moore, James “Ooker” Eskridge, and a team of researchers from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Then, starting about 1900: My account of the abandonment of James and Sharps islands was informed by William B. Cronin, The Disappearing Islands of the Chesapeake (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), and Michael S. Kearney and J. Court Stevenson, “Island Land Loss and Marsh Vertical Accretion Rate Evidence for Historical Sea-Level Changes in Chesapeake Bay,” Journal of Coastal Research 7, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 403–15.