Chesapeake Requiem

by Earl Swift

  His tone softens. “We haven’t had to sit in the dark, in the heat, or in the cold yet. The Lord will provide,” he says. “I want to ask you to do an unusual thing, and that is to pray for the person who did this, because that person clearly needs our prayers.” He then offers up a prayer. “We pray for the person or persons who did this,” he says. “We pray for the investigators who are looking into this.”

  A few minutes later, when the pastor solicits prayer requests, a waterman suggests that perhaps Swain’s best course of action is to put the theft behind it, to forgive what’s happened. Marlene McCready, Jackie Haskins’s wife, voices her agreement. “Yeah, we want to be Christian-like in this,” she says, though she adds, “This is a hard blow on our church. This is what we need to get us through the winter, even.”

  Ginny Marshall, Carol Moore’s aunt, is sitting in the pew behind me. “It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened on Tangier,” she whispers. “There’s been other things, but this is the worst, in my opinion.” It strikes me as an overstatement, what with the cholera, the deaths of islanders in boats and in combat, and myriad other tragedies that have befallen the place over the past two centuries. But then, I reflect, the church has always been the rock on which the island depended in hard times. The church, whether Swain or New Testament, has been a refuge against all the uncertainties of life on a tiny island isolated and buffeted by big water. Church has been central to the essence of Tangier, and Tangier central to church.

  Perhaps erosion threatens both.

  Part Three

  Eyeing the End Times

  The wave-ravaged western shore of Uppards, April 2017. (EARL SWIFT)

  Uppards, as seen from the northeast—an angle that clearly shows the islet to be nearly as much water as marsh. The breach is visible as a gap in the far shoreline. (EARL SWIFT)

  Thirteen

  ASBURY PRUITT WAS THAT RARE MAN ABOUT WHOM NO ONE, it seems, can muster any comment short of praise. He’s rarer still for another reason: He was the first Tangierman who thought to track and record his island’s disappearance. When he took up this task in 1964, his neighbors viewed it as a mild curiosity, an eccentric hobby. Ultimately, it proved indispensable to understanding the forces at work on his home and the relentlessness of the encroaching bay.

  A quick portrait of the man at the time he launched his research, the consensus of those who knew him: of average height, with a bit of a belly, but physically strong and graced with preternaturally youthful skin that masked his age. Humble and sweet tempered. So slow to anger that few recall seeing it happen—when displeased, he’d merely hum to himself. So opposed to gossip that if he sensed its approach, he’d turn off his hearing aids. So deeply sentimental that he often wept in conversation. A teetotaler and a serious student of the Bible. An elder and preacher at New Testament who illustrated his messages with examples drawn from island life.

  He was forty-five when he took up his measurements. By then he’d married an eighth-generation islander, served on a Coast Guard buoy tender during World War II, and had three children, among them Jerry Frank. Before and after the war, he’d worked the water. The family lived in a house built for his grandfather William Asbury Crockett, the lighthouse keeper who’d drowned on his run to get the mail.

  In 1958, Asbury had left the crab and oyster business to work for the U.S. Navy, which had used the Chesapeake as a gunnery range for nearly fifty years. In 1911, it had anchored a retired battleship a few miles southwest of Tangier and shelled, torpedoed, and strafed it for decades. It later parked other derelict warships nearby and pounded them, too. Now the navy positioned a pair of stripped Liberty ships just over two miles from Tangier’s western shore and dispatched waves of jets to assault them with smoke bombs.

  Asbury was one of four Tangier civilians hired to man two navy spotting stations off the West Ridge, and to offer feedback to the pilots on their accuracy and the angles of their attack. He was the boss, overseeing Short Ed Parks and Short Ed’s brother-in-law, Charles Pruitt, and Pat Parks, all veterans of the service. Before long two other islanders joined the crew, and for twelve years these six did their duty as the air over peaceful Tangier was shredded by navy attack jets, as many as eighty a day, ripping low over the water and the islanders’ crab pots.

  At some early point in his tenure, Asbury took note of the stations’ commanding view of his island’s western edge and the effects of the waves there. It was a rare perspective. Tangiermen knew their home was shrinking; Canaan was going fast, and they’d seen Oyster Creek consumed and the P’int whittled, too. But Asbury now saw it occurring before his eyes. “The ground would seem to wave up and down,” he said, “and finally drop into the water like chunks of a melting iceberg.”

  The sight alarmed him. And so, after nearly two hundred years of settlement on Tangier, Asbury Pruitt became the first of his people to seek an answer to the question: Exactly how much are we losing?

  On January 8, 1964, Asbury hammered an iron pipe into the marsh, not far from the main navy spotting station, and measured the distance from the pipe to the water’s edge. To my mind, that date and that act rank as turning points in Tangier history. With those measurements, Asbury engaged the island in a quest to understand an old and increasingly critical challenge. Until that day, Jerry Frank told me, erosion was a subject of “some concern” among Tangiermen. “But they didn’t keep up with it much. They didn’t pay much attention.”

  Asbury repeated the exercise every January 8 for decades, and his measurements provided the first year-by-year chronicle of nature’s wear on the place. “He was able to keep pretty good track of what was happening,” Jerry Frank recalled. “He was very concerned about it, he was.”

  Rightly so, because the island’s losses were far greater than anyone had imagined. During each of the first seven years of Asbury’s record keeping, he found that the Chesapeake tore away, on average, twelve feet of shoreline. After that, the damage increased year by year. In January 1973, he found that eighteen feet had disappeared. In 1974, his measurements showed that thirty-seven feet of island had vanished in the previous twelve months.

  By January 1975, his records covered an entire decade, during which Tangier’s shoreline had retreated by 159 feet up at the island’s north end, near the navy’s main spotting station. Down south, where a second spotting shack stood below Hog Ridge, a terrifying 181 feet had disappeared, 44 in the last year alone. Pond and marsh that had once separated that shack from the Chesapeake were gone. “You can stand right on the platform of that station,” Asbury said, “and throw something right into the bay.” He said this to reporters alerted to his annual ritual. His measurements thus earned mention in the Virginian-Pilot and other regional newspapers, which prompted the government to step in. Virginia convened a task force of federal and state officials to study the situation.

  Its most immediate worry was the island’s new airport. In December 1965, the Corps of Engineers had answered a long-standing desire of Tangier watermen by excavating a channel from the town’s harbor westward, through marsh, to the Chesapeake. Until this “North Channel” was dug, a crabber looking to set pots on the island’s west side had to head east into Tangier Sound, circle wide around the spit, then traverse more than a mile of bay. A boat channel slicing through the island’s waist, separating Uppards from Tangier proper, seemed an easy fix to this inconvenience and a no-fuss project for the corps. It proved so easy, in fact, that dredgers dug the passage in less than a month.

  The project was bundled with another that promised to make island life easier: The corps pumped the dredge spoils into a long rectangle of soggy marsh behind the houses on the West Ridge. Over the next three years, the state graded and paved the reclaimed land into an airport with a 3,050-foot runway and a large airplane parking area. Governor Mills E. Godwin Jr. dedicated the facility in March 1970, even as Asbury Pruitt’s measurements made clear that it wasn’t long for the world.

  Five years later, with the bay clawing at the a
sphalt runway and surf breaking less than one hundred yards from the houses in Hog Ridge, the Virginia Airport Authority moved to armor the airport’s crumbling south end with a curving riprap seawall. Crews placed the thirteen thousand tons of rock in record time, and still the waves snapped off huge pieces of the airstrip and stole the lights at its south end.

  Meanwhile, the state task force issued its report and recommendations. Studying maps, the panel found that between 1942 and 1960, the spit had shifted radically eastward. The west side’s land loss was even worse than Asbury Pruitt’s records suggested: an average of eighteen feet a year from 1850 to 1942, twenty feet a year from 1942 to 1967, and twenty-five feet a year since. And while the riprap guarding the airport might halt erosion there, it would not stop catastrophic loss of marsh and upland elsewhere. The task force focused on two possible solutions: extending the riprap seawall along the entire western shore of Tangier proper, all the way up to the new boat channel’s mouth—far and away the best answer, but expensive—or attaching mats made of old tires to the same stretch of shoreline, which the group admitted was an ugly and untested alternative, but cheap.

  Whatever remedy the state chose would only slow, not stop, the island’s continued destruction. Because the largest waves tended to approach Tangier from the northwest, the future looked bleak for Uppards and the new boat channel’s western entrance. “One would anticipate continued retreat of the island north of the channel,” the report warned. “This would result in an offset configuration at the entrance of the channel resulting in eventual shoaling and exposure to wave action on the south bank of the channel. Thus, future corrective action for Tangier Channel, maintained by the Corps of Engineers, is foreseen.”

  Remember that. It will be important later. And remember that this was in 1976.

  IT SO HAPPENED that Virginia did not produce the money to build a seawall that year, and didn’t even find the $100,000 necessary to experiment with a mat of tires. The following winter, when the bay froze solid, ice tore away eighty-five feet of the western shore. Asbury Pruitt had to move his pipe inland, then had to do it again, and still the water advanced. In January 1978, he found that it had drawn another thirty-one feet closer.

  Down below Hog Ridge, the navy was forced to abandon the southern spotting shack. Jack Chandler, who would later marry Leon’s daughter Carolyn, went to work for Asbury around that time. “The very first day I was there, he took me down to the old spotting station on the beach,” he told me. “The sand had washed from underneath it. It was sitting in the bay.” Asbury pointed past the ruin, to the deep water offshore. “He said, ‘That out there used to be forest.’”

  Little more than two years after riprap had saved the airport’s south end, a second state study predicted that the rest of the runway would be underwater within a decade. “An emergency situation exists on Tangier Island which must be remedied immediately,” it concluded. “The erosion of the island is so severe that it will wash into the Chesapeake Bay in the very near future.” Tangier had a host of other ills, the document said, but if the erosion went unchecked, “the other problems will not need to be addressed.”

  That grim forecast resonated in April 1979, when Asbury was shocked to see that the western shore had retreated by seventeen feet in only three months. He also discovered telephone lines in the surf, six feet from the shore. The phone company told him it had installed the lines forty-five feet inland just fourteen months before.

  That same month, a delegation of high-ranking officials came calling, led by U.S. senator John Warner of Virginia. He walked the airport runway. He eyed the water drawing close. He spoke to Asbury Pruitt and other Tangiermen. “If we don’t stop the erosion soon, a piece of American history will disappear,” the senator told reporters who’d followed him there.

  His visit seemed to light a fire under the state and federal governments. That summer, Virginia signed an agreement authorizing the Army Corps of Engineers to start designing a seawall. The millions it would cost to build it wasn’t on hand, but islanders were encouraged that something seemed to be happening. In due course, the House of Representatives folded the seawall project into the Water Resources Development Act of 1980. President Jimmy Carter’s administration complained, however, that corps engineers had not adequately tested the effectiveness of a wall, rendering the project premature. Further study was needed.

  The House passed the bill anyway, but it bogged down in the Senate. When more than a year had passed since Warner’s visit to the island, the exasperated senator appealed to his colleagues. “Is there any process through which we can expedite—on an emergency basis—the authorization of a project to save historic Tangier Island . . . from further erosion damage that threatens its very existence?” he asked in a letter to the committee handling the matter. “Time and tide wait for no man.” While senators dithered, Warner wrote, “Tangier Island has been sinking—and continues to sink—not so slowly into the Chesapeake Bay.”

  The bill failed. Warner promised he wouldn’t give up and, nearly three years later, sponsored a new measure authorizing the corps to study the situation and estimate the cost of a seawall. That bill took more than a year to make it through the congressional sausage works. In the meantime, the water threatened another key public investment.

  In the early 1980s, the federal and state governments elected to end the island’s reliance on septic tanks and sewer ditches with a modern waste treatment system, and combined the project with a new waterworks. Contractors tore up the roads to lay pipe, built cinder block pumping stations on all the ridges, and erected the water tower. The work dragged on for years and made a muddy eyesore of the place. Then mayor Dewey Crockett complained that islanders had to “wear hip boots to get into the church on Sunday.”

  The centerpiece of the effort was a lavish sewage treatment plant and garbage incinerator west of the airport runway. Although situated on one of the island’s highest tracts, it was separated from the fast-advancing bay by only two hundred-odd feet of marsh. The $3.5 million investment was still under construction when, in January 1983, Asbury Pruitt found that the gap between building and water was closing fast. “I mean to tell you,” he told a reporter, “she’s a-going.”

  Congress wrote and passed another bill financing a seawall, only to see it vetoed by President Reagan. The bay kept coming. Every outside expert agreed that Tangier’s circumstances were dire. Every visitor seemed to consider the place worth saving. But twenty-one years after Asbury Pruitt made his first measurements, the federal government continued to sit on the problem. Islanders were not alone in their frustration. “Delay and deferment have characterized the federal effort,” the Virginian-Pilot editorialized. “Tangier Island may end up as Tangier Reef if Congress doesn’t get off its collective duff and approve the seawall the island desperately needs.”

  TANGIER HAD BEEN in difficult straits before and had always managed to somehow navigate them. “We are here until he [God] says otherwise,” Duane Crockett told me one afternoon at the island firehouse, where he works part-time as a bookkeeper. “I know the Lord works in some ways where things have to get to the point where we don’t know what to do—and right then, we find out that the Lord has everything under control.”

  The island had reached such a point. In October 1985, Junior Moore, Lonnie’s father, worried to a reporter that “with the rate it’s going, we won’t be here for another generation,” a comment that seemed downright optimistic when Asbury’s next measurement revealed that another thirty-seven feet of island had crumbled away. Then fortune shifted. It might have been the high cost of doing nothing that finally brought the reprieve—a realization in Washington that taking no action would surely claim the sewage treatment plant and squander a $3.5 million public investment, plus cost taxpayers additional millions to replace it. That by comparison a wall was a smart and economical use of the public’s money.

  Whatever the case, over the next two years Congress got serious about doing something, and by A
pril 1988 all the pieces of a deal were in place: The federal government would contribute $2.68 million toward a 5,700-foot riprap wall along the western shore, stretching from the boat channel south to the barrier built to safeguard the airport. In turn, the state pledged $1.47 million, and Accomack County, $200,000. At a town meeting, Tangiermen voted for a fivefold increase in their real estate taxes to drum up their $200,000 share of the cost. The vote, by show of hands, was unanimous.

  And so barges laden with granite boulders appeared off Tangier’s western shore in 1989, and a crane positioned them, piece by piece, until the coastline was sheathed in rock that towered higher than the ground it protected. The armoring stopped the erosion fast. Not an inch of ground has slipped into the bay there since.

  But it did not halt the Chesapeake, which took aim at other parts of the island with new ferocity. Among its favorite targets was the North Channel’s western entrance, just as the state panel had predicted so many years before. The effects are obvious with a trip to the slab. The cut through the marsh, originally seventy-five feet wide, is at least four times as broad now. Every storm reams it wider, and you can gauge the damage by a power pole planted over on Uppards: In the first five months of my stay on Tangier, I watched the ground around the pole’s guy wires retreat eight to ten feet, until the anchor for one wire was underwater.

  Just as vexing, the widening channel opened the harbor to westerlies, so that any weather beyond a light breeze turned the haven rough. “We used to have a good harbor before they opened up that channel,” Leon lamented one afternoon at the Situation Room. And on another day: “Over there where the crab shanties are at, we used to have fifty crab floats overboard, and not once did any of them break loose. Not once did the tide run high enough to move those floats. What happened? That channel is what happened.”