Chesapeake Requiem

by Earl Swift

  As climate change emerged as a recognized crisis in the years after my 2000 Tangier stay, I found myself wondering from time to time how the islanders were faring. That was especially the case during the six years I owned a house near the water in Norfolk, sixty-five miles south of Tangier, and saw each successive northeaster bring higher flooding into my neighborhood. If things were this bad in the city, I couldn’t imagine but that the island’s situation was growing dire. Finally, in the late fall of 2015, I resolved to revisit the place and see for myself.

  Before I made that trip, the journal Scientific Reports published a study titled “Climate Change and the Evolution and Fate of the Tangier Islands of Chesapeake Bay, USA.” Written by three researchers associated with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, it compared maps dating back to 1850 to chart the island’s land loss. Using analytical software, it then extrapolated what Tangier might look like twenty-five, fifty, and one hundred years in the future.

  The view wasn’t encouraging. Modern Tangier had shrunk by two-thirds since 1850, the article said, from 2,163 acres to 789. That amounted to 8.43 acres per year, and this loss did not include uplands that had slumped into lower-lying marsh; this was island, wet or dry, that had turned into bay. Tangier seemed to have little of itself left to give.

  But give it would, the article promised. Uppards, which accounts for about a third of the remaining acreage, would vanish, leaving the town’s northern flank unprotected from winter storms. The marshes south of town would retreat and, with them, any shield against damaging summer winds. At the same time the village itself would subside until its houses were split among three islets. Not long after, the so-called ridges would turn to marsh.

  Based on their projections, the authors figured Tangier would likely be uninhabitable in fifty years. And that was an optimistic view, the paper acknowledged, because the authors had used three models of sea-level rise for their projections, reflecting best-case, middle-case, and worst-case scenarios. Their predictions were based on the middle model, which was beginning to look overly conservative: “A recent study has indicated that a higher SLR [sea-level rise] scenario is becoming more likely,” they wrote, “as humanity fails to take effective action to reduce carbon emissions.” Under the worst-case scenario, all of Tangier, including its three ridges, would be underwater by 2060. If that was accurate, the town didn’t have fifty years left but significantly less time. How much, exactly? Twenty-five years? Twenty? Fifteen? The article didn’t say.

  The authors suggested that the loss could be slowed by constructing stone breakwaters and sand dunes on Uppards’s east and west shores, and by blowing sand dredged from the bay’s bottom onto former uplands and planting the new ground with pine trees. They reckoned that such a project would cost roughly $20 million to $30 million—or somewhere between $41,000 and $62,000 for every man, woman, and child on the island. The article ended with a bleak forecast: “The Tangier Islands and the Town are running out of time,” it read, “and if no action is taken, the citizens of Tangier may become among the first climate change refugees in the continental USA.”

  I read the Scientific Reports piece shortly after it was posted online in December 2015. My first reaction was that Tangier didn’t have anywhere close to fifty years and that even twenty-five seemed fanciful. The bay had always done efficient work there, and layered on that physical plight were the town’s demographic issues. Even if Tangier somehow avoided drowning for, say, twenty years, there might not be anyone left to celebrate.

  I arranged with an islander to rent the second floor of her house on the westernmost of the three ridges, and dispensed of mainland obligations so that I might spend the six-month peeler-crabbing season, and months beyond, on Tangier—joining its watermen on their boats, absorbing its odd and long-standing customs to discern what we’d lose with its demise, and plumbing its collective anxiety over what the future holds.

  The three-hundred-mile drive from my home in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains took me across the state’s rolling Piedmont, over the fall line at Richmond, and down the broad, flattening coastal plain to the metropolis clustered around Norfolk and Virginia Beach. From there I crossed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, nearly eighteen miles long, over and under the bay’s wide mouth, the Atlantic boundless to starboard, the bay wind-roiled and heaving and only slightly less intimidating to port. Northbound up the Eastern Shore, I passed platoons of trees killed by trespassing salt water, their trunks stripped and bleached to a ghostly silver, and real estate billboards hawking bayfront property with HIGH BANKS—NO MARSH—SANDY BEACH. I drove past roadside stands selling fireworks and fresh crab, and restaurants touting crab cakes and steamed crab, and gift shops selling souvenir crab figurines. A few miles into Maryland I turned onto a doglegging two-laner for the final twenty miles into Crisfield, traversing vast fields of soybean and long, low-roofed chicken houses, and after parking the car walked two blocks to the mailboat.

  Which is what brings me, freshly unpacked, to the south end of the island, to the beach Ooker showed me in 2000—the sandy spiral that served as a landmark to mariners since the seventeenth century, the miles-long tail that gave Tangier its distinctive shape for as long as man had mapped the Chesapeake.

  About a mile into my hike, the sand simply stops. I walk past the point where the beach slips underwater, wade knee-deep into the shallows beyond, confused: Where is the hook? The spit should cut to the left, double back on itself. I should be able to look east across a cove of shallow, protected water, to see the end of the island’s tail.

  Except that I can’t. The beach ends here. Tangier’s tail has washed away.

  A westerly blows stiff and steady as breakers pound the stump.

  Ooker Eskridge aboard the Sreedevi. (EARL SWIFT)

  Two

  WELL PAST THE MIDDLE OF THE LAST CENTURY, TANGIER had more in common with the hollers of far Appalachia than with its neighbors on the Virginia mainland. Families were large, incomes meager, and the conditions rustic: Islanders cooked and washed with water fetched by the pail from a handful of community wells. Some used privies and slop jars into the late sixties. Food on the table was, likely as not, caught or shot by a member of the household. Visits to the Eastern Shore were special events, and as radio and television were slow to make landing, trends sweeping the country often passed unnoticed. The motorcar remade America’s cities decades before Tangier got its first.

  These days, though modernized in countless ways, the island continues to get by without many seeming essentials of contemporary life. Cell phone signals die halfway through the boat ride over. The tap water is unfit to drink. No doctor or dentist is in residence, and the nearest emergency room is thirty minutes away by helicopter—assuming, that is, the weather’s fair enough to fly. Eight months of the year, a visitor can’t buy much with the cash the lone ATM spits out: a meal at the one year-round restaurant, perhaps, or a room at the one year-round inn, or chips and a soda from the single small grocery.

  Cars and trucks remain so few in number that they’re easy to list: an ambulance, fire engine, and a subcompact police car, a few pickups used for hauling freight, three or four careworn sedans, a couple of thrashed station wagons, a Jeep, a Mini Cooper, and a Smart car. Most everyone gets around by bicycle, scooter, ATV, and golf cart, meaning there’s no demand for a traffic light—and not much attention paid to the few stop signs. Rare is a ticket from the lone cop.

  Trips to the shore are common enough but require forethought: The mailboat to Crisfield leaves at eight each morning, a smaller afternoon boat at four, and as one-way passage on either costs twenty dollars, seeing a movie or shopping at a mall is complicated and costly before it starts. All of which explains why first impressions of Tangier, and much that’s been written about it, tend to fasten on what the place lacks, rather than its one great asset—the geographic advantage defining its very existence. For all of its deprivations, Tangier could not be better situated to harvest Callinectes sapidus.

  E
ven if they’ve never heard of the island, millions have savored its catch. No other food is so instantly identified with Maryland and the Virginia tidewater as the blue crab. Bought by the dozen, steamed and sprinkled with Old Bay, it has been central to backyard crab pickings for generations. Its sweet, tender meat spawned the region’s famed crab cakes, which have inspired imitations around the world. And in its most adventurous form—as a newly molted softshell, eaten legs and all—it is perhaps at its best. Deep-fried or sautéed, as entrée or sandwich (always on white bread, and minus any garnish but a little cocktail or tartar sauce), the softshell’s juicy, flavorful meat and pleasing texture—firm, with a pleasant snap to the skin, not unlike a good hot dog—belie its admittedly challenging appearance. In the big cities of the East, a significant share of the softshells you find on your plate have been supplied by the small but single-minded brotherhood of watermen at Tangier.

  Witness Ooker Eskridge, again off to his pots on a late May morning. For peeler potters, the season traditionally starts on the month’s full moon, which this year fell on the twenty-first. A cold front lingers over the bay three days later, however, and the water remains cool for this late in the spring; the peelers are dawdling in warmer deep water, beyond the reach of crab pots. But they’ll show up soon enough. Every waterman out here knows they pretty well must: The blue crab is a far-ranging creature, but its travels are choreographed by forces as old as time and as predictable as clockwork, and they’re bound to bring peelers to Tangier.

  A couple of lemons crouch in a pot Ooker pulls up. When they hit the culling tray, one assumes a fighting stance, holding her red-tipped claws wide and open, as if daring him to approach. Right she is to be agitated, for she’s being kept from an important task: riding the outbound tides to the saltier water at the bay’s mouth, to produce a new generation of her kind. She’d have reached the spawning grounds at about the time the orange sponge attached to her belly turned black, signaling that her millions of eggs had matured. Her babies would have hatched in an inky billow, each of them bug-eyed and shrimplike and not quite one hundredth of an inch long. These larvae would have drifted into the Atlantic to become part of the stew of planktons near the ocean’s surface and, in most cases, to become a meal for some larger species. The survivors would have fed on even smaller fare, however, and grown—and that means they’d have molted, because like insects, crabs get bigger only by shedding their hard exoskeletons. After a few molts they’d have caught flood tides back past the Virginia Capes into the bay and started toward Tangier. Only after eight or nine molts would they assume the blue crab’s familiar shape.

  From the boat I can see that form painted in silhouette on Tangier’s water tower: carapace, or top shell, shaped vaguely like a football, its front edge serrated with short spikes, its ends drawn into long, sharp points; five pairs of legs—the middle three for walking, the rear pair flattened into paddle-like swim fins, the much beefier front pair ending in powerful pincers. For some reason the Tangier water tower, like another that looms over Crisfield, depicts a cooked crab. In their natural state, they’re not the least bit orange. They’re a dark olive on their top sides and creamy white or pale gray on their bellies, with coloring on their claws that varies by sex—those of jimmies are a vibrant sapphire, while sooks’ are tipped in bright red.

  Those claws can deliver a nasty pinch. “They’ve got a good reach on ’em,” Ooker tells me. “And a crab’s very accurate, in or out of the water. They got good eyesight.” He moves in on the posturing lemon, feinting with one gloved hand to draw her eye as he snatches her from behind with the other, then tosses her in the basket. Lemons can be especially aggressive. “Very feisty women,” he says. “They might have fingernail polish on, but they’re still a rough bunch.”

  Another pot comes aboard. Several large crabs crouch inside, along with a sand mullet that’s been clawed to bits. Ooker grunts and shows off the mangled fish. “He went in the wrong pot.”

  BY THE TIME A BLUE CRAB looks like a crab, it has grown to ten times its original larval size, yet remains a tiny creature, just a tenth of an inch wide. It grows rapidly as it travels, however, molting another eighteen to twenty times before reaching adulthood, emerging a third larger with each molt. The process is perilous: A crab grows a complete new shell under the old before the latter splits at the rear and the creature backs out of it, but that new shell is as soft and pliable as skin for several hours and takes up to four days to fully harden. Until it does, the young crab is defenseless, and an easy meal for sea turtles and a wide variety of fish—striped bass, croakers, eels, rays, cobia, and red drum among them. “I’ve cleaned a rockfish before,” Ooker tells me, using the regional nickname for striped bass, “and found twenty-six or twenty-seven small crabs inside it.” It’s also fair game for other crabs. The evidence suggests that these merciless cannibals eat a lot of crab.

  We motor on. As Ooker hauls in the next pot, I’m surprised to find that I can see it coming up from the bottom. The wind’s calm today, the water glassy and exceptionally clear, and I now notice dark splotches on the bay’s floor, six feet down: marine eelgrass, which grows in large underwater meadows off Tangier’s east side. Such subaquatic vegetation is vital to crabs—for hunting, mating, and, most especially, hiding, because it’s in these grasses that they hunker down until their shells harden and it’s safe to move on.

  Their travels take them up the bay until the late fall, when they burrow in the mud and sand on the bottom to wait out the coming cold. They neither molt nor eat during this hibernation; they spend it in a senseless torpor until the following spring, when they’re on the move again, migrating into the lower-salinity waters of the middle and upper Chesapeake. There, they reach adulthood and pair off to mate. Afterward the jimmies, which prefer a less salty environment, stay put and continue to molt. The sooks hang around to build their strength before heading back down the bay to spawn—a journey that sees them again burrow into the bottom to wait out another winter. When they emerge from the mud a few months later, they use the sperm they’ve carried since mating to fertilize their eggs and acquire a bright orange sponge.

  Tangier watermen thus have a shot at them both coming and going: They catch peelers and newly matured crabs as they move up the bay and lemons on their way down. Jimmies and “clean” sooks—mature females that haven’t yet produced sponges—are in residence all summer long.

  Ooker and his kin catch just a fraction of the hundreds of millions of crabs that happen by the island each year, but even so, their haul is impressive. A hard crabber with a top-level license can put out 425 pots and can legally catch forty-seven bushels of crabs each day, six days a week. Each bushel contains roughly five to six dozen number ones or six to seven dozen number twos. Assuming an average of six dozen per bushel, that’s 3,384 crabs per crabber per day, so that over a typical season, from mid-March to November, a single waterman catching his limit could theoretically haul aboard more than 660,000 crabs.

  Peeler potters catch far fewer—their season is shorter, they’re limited to a maximum of 210 pots, and only some of those pots will yield crabs approaching a molt; a bushel or two of peelers marks a decent day on the water. But they land a “by-catch” of hard crabs, too, and over the summer those by-catches add up. Today, Ooker has amassed four bushels of sponges, two bushels of number ones, and a half bushel each of clean sooks and number twos. Each crab has defied one-in-a-million odds to find itself aboard his boat. Of the two million eggs in the average sponge, only one or two will reach maturity. The murky world beneath the bay’s surface is a stew of tiny life, and all those critters down there are trying to eat one another.

  Amid all this drama, it can be easy to overlook the important link that underwater grasses represent in the food chain. When the grass beds off Tangier are big and lush, they offer the island unparalleled advantages in chasing the blue crab. But lose the grass beds, and you lose not only crabs but many of the smaller creatures they feed on. The island itself is an e
ssential element in the health of those underwater meadows, which thrive in the calm of leeward shores, shielded from the winds and waves that create turbulence on the bottom.

  Ooker is keenly aware of this interdependence. “I’m not a scientist or highly educated, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure some of this stuff out,” he’s told me. “When we lose this land to erosion, we’re not only losing land, we’re losing the wetlands and the seagrasses in the shallows just offshore. Crabs need those grasses. We lose ducks, shorebirds, blue heron, egrets. When you lose the habitat, you lose all of them.

  “I throw that out there because some people who aren’t interested in saving people are interested in saving wildlife,” he said, winding up to a pitch that many Tangiermen hurl in discussions about the island’s physical dilemma. “The government has the money. That’s one of the frustrating things. They have the money, and they waste so much. A lot of it is spent overseas on people who don’t really give a crap about the United States.”

  The mayor knows that by any conventional measure, his island is hardly the most important place in America imperiled by rising seas. It’s statistically insignificant next to big coastal cities where millions of lives and properties are at stake—such cities as New York, much of which risks being underwater by the century’s end, and New Orleans, which seems doomed to a watery grave without vastly expensive intervention, and the metroplex around Miami, where storm sewers have been known to run backward, spewing water into the streets during astronomical high tides. Boston, Norfolk, Jacksonville, San Diego, Los Angeles—all stand to undergo profound and painful change, along with scores of other cities and towns.