Chesapeake Requiem

by Earl Swift

  Lonnie Moore says he’s finding two or three dead crabs in every pot. “It’s happening everywhere,” he says.

  “A lot of times,” Ooker says, “those crabs’ll have a different look to them, when they’re dyin’.”

  “A goin’-away look,” Lonnie suggests.

  “Yeah. They don’t have that healthy color to them.”

  Eleven days later, the die-off has worsened. In pots and tanks alike, crabs are expiring by the bushel. “All dyin’,” Richard Pruitt says with a sigh. “It does this every year.”

  “It ain’t the right water,” Leon says. “It ain’t like it is overboard.” That’s as much an explanation as any Tangierman can offer. They can’t say why the die-off ends after two or three weeks every summer, either.

  The carnage is still under way when I join Ooker on the Sreedevi for an abbreviated day on the water. It’s his birthday—mine, too—and he and Irene plan to head to the mainland on the evening boat, then drive down to Virginia Beach for a night at an oceanfront hotel. Just after sunup, a stultifying heat has already descended on the harbor. As we motor out toward the sound, we pass Short Ed Parks in the Princess Sky. He’s dressed for the weather in shorts, knee socks, and white shrimp boots.

  The first pots come up sparkling. The water has been crowded lately with gelatinous comb jellies, which ooze through the mesh, reflecting and bending the light of the low sun like prisms. Trapped with them is an abundance of small hard crabs. Ooker pronounces them “shit-eaters,” which marks the first time I’ve heard him curse. “This time of year, you catch a lot of crabs, but they’re no good,” he explains. “They’re peeler size”—that is, far smaller than the five-inch minimum for hard crabs—“and they look like peelers. They look like they’re going to turn.”

  But instead of molting within a few days, Ooker says, they just hang in that in-between state for weeks. “They call them junk crabs, shit-eaters. If they do turn eventually, it seems like they take the whole month of August before they do.” He tosses them back over the side, one by one. “Not much you can do with them.” For now, anyway.

  Some of the pots contain a peeler or two—Ooker’s first row yields twenty-six of them—but they’re almost lost among the junk crabs. One pot comes up with eleven crabs. He has to throw back every one. “You can see why a peeler crab wouldn’t want to go in there,” he says, “with all that commotion.”

  He has the radio on, and we listen to a Virginia Lottery ad touting a $478 million jackpot. He recalls a past lottery offering a similar payout; Ed Charnock told him that if he won, he could buy a lot of crabbing supplies with that kind of money. Not me, Ooker chuckles. “If I won that, I think I’d take up my peeler pots.”

  Another row. “A lot of crabs. A lot of junk crabs. A few jimmies in ’em, but very few peelers.” He sighs. “I’m losing my drive.” After four lackluster hours on the water, Ooker takes a break to eat a ham and mayo on white. We bob in gentle swells off the spit, close enough to hear an atonal chorus from the pelicans and black-backed gulls congregated there. “Right there, at Whale Point,” he says, nodding toward Canton’s friable southern shore, “is where we would have put some of those barges.”

  The barges are a sore spot. In the spring of 2011, with salvation from the Corps of Engineers years away, a would-be Tangier rescuer appeared on the southern horizon: A Hampton Roads salvage company was willing to donate several empty barges for use as makeshift breakwaters around the island’s battered shoreline. U.S. representative Scott Rigell, the island’s Republican congressman, got behind the idea, calling it an imaginative way to stave off erosion until a more permanent solution came along. And because the company would clean, tow, and sink the barges at its own expense, it would cost taxpayers nothing.

  That June, Rigell visited Tangier to meet with Ooker and one of the salvage company’s officers. All were excited by the idea. Unorthodox as it seemed, it had a precedent: When a ferry terminal opened near the southern tip of the Eastern Shore after World War II, it was shielded from the bay’s winds and waves by nine concrete-hulled cargo ships sunk end to end offshore. The ferry stopped running when the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel opened in 1964, but the ships remain on guard, though profoundly decayed and sprouting with grasses, shrubs, even a few trees. They now protect Virginia’s Kiptopeke State Park and serve as crowded roosts for pelicans, gulls, and migrating waterfowl.

  At Tangier, the three men envisioned barges used in similar fashion. They’d be sunk singly or in groups off fast-eroding points: at both ends of the boat channel, alongside Uppards, and across fast-eroding Whale Point. Rigell wanted to get started right away—in six months, he said, “but ideally, half of that.” He did not “want to see this held up,” he announced. “I really don’t want to see any pushback from any government agency.”

  But pushback he got. The corps balked, and the state, too. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation piled on. “One of those corps guys asked me, ‘How would that look, a bunch of rusty barges off your shoreline?’” Ooker recalls. “I said, ‘They’d look real good when a storm’s approaching.’”

  The chief objection, the mayor explains, was that the barges would have been planted on top of underwater grasses. He was frustrated by that, because if the erosion continues, the grasses are doomed anyway. “It’s the same principle as fighting wildfires—you give up some to save more,” he tells me. He shakes his head. “Common sense is not so common anymore.”

  ONE MORNING I DRIVE TO NORFOLK, where the Army Corps of Engineers occupies a large, wedge-shaped office building on the Elizabeth River waterfront, to meet Dave Schulte, the lead author of the 2015 Scientific Reports article that hastened my return to the island. He turns out to be a thickset fellow with a shaved head, whose well-considered speech and three-piece suit give him something of a professorial air.

  In his office, and later over lunch, Schulte outlines the years he’s spent studying the island and mulling its future. He arrived at the Norfolk district in 2001, after years handling forestry, game management, and wetlands restoration projects in Virginia and Georgia for the Defense Department. One of his early corps projects took him to Tangier, where he participated in a comprehensive study of the island’s erosion dilemma, aimed at preserving its usefulness as habitat to a wide array of bird, turtle, and insect species, and to marine life in the seagrass beds offshore.

  Uppards figured prominently in the work, and he can recall his first reactions on stepping ashore there. “It really struck me how low everything was,” he says. “The cemetery was still there. There was a mobile home, too, a fair distance from the water. I remember a few fig trees. There were pine trees there, too—it wasn’t a big stand, fifteen or twenty trees, but there were real uplands there.”

  That was in 2002. The study recommended a string of breakwaters along Uppards’s western shore, as well as a jetty at the mouth of the channel—a more elaborate and far more protective version of the jetty contemplated today. Corps projects require a positive cost-benefit assessment; if the agency’s estimate of what the public stands to gain from a project doesn’t meet or exceed that project’s costs, said project is discarded. In this case, the corps reckoned the island’s importance as habitat was a worthy investment.

  But corps projects also require shared spending from federal, state, and local governments. “We were very frustrated,” Schulte tells me, “because Tangier couldn’t come up with its share of the project. That’s not unusual. They asked for the state to pay their share, but the state couldn’t come up with the money, either.”

  The study offered a prediction of what might happen to Uppards were the project not undertaken: the scenario that has been unfolding since, which Schulte describes as “pretty grim.” That has been “sorely frustrating, because we sit here at the corps with this old study that could have addressed a lot of the problems the island’s experiencing,” he says. “It’s 2016, fourteen years later, and we’re just finishing the internal steps necessary to address one small piece of that pro
posal. It seems like it takes a long time to go from saying, ‘We’ve got to fix this problem,’ to actually fixing it.”

  SCHULTE STAYED ALERT to news about Tangier in the years that followed, stayed interested in the fate of the island and its people, and stayed up on the literature about the changing bay. Even before he arrived in Norfolk, there was a lot of such information, for the Chesapeake had emerged as a favored setting for scientists studying the effects of climate change. In a 1991 paper, for example, two University of Maryland scholars studied four vanishing Maryland islands and marshes on the nearby mainland, searching for evidence of shifts in the rate of sea-level rise. They found that the islands began losing land at an accelerated pace in the mid-nineteenth century. Even more profound acceleration followed in the twentieth, when tide-gauge records showed that the rate of sea-level rise in the bay was “more than double the long-term trend of the last several thousand years.”

  In 1995, another paper found that more than forty-four thousand acres of Chesapeake Bay coastline had washed away over the preceding one hundred years. The historical record unambiguously “shows land loss occurring since at least the mid-nineteenth century,” the authors wrote. “It appears that land loss is not a new phenomenon, but the rate of loss has likely accelerated in the past century.”

  The following year, an article in the Journal of Coastal Research reported much the same thing—that both sea-level rise and shore erosion were slow “from the middle seventeenth century until about 1850,” at which point charting them required “the insertion of a sharp inflection point.”

  Clearly, the middle of the nineteenth century marked a turning point for the bay and its islands. Studies published after Schulte became involved with Tangier built on that notion. For example, a 2006 article in the journal Global Environmental Change used Holland Island as its focus, reporting that land loss there averaged less than a quarter acre per year from 1668 to 1849 but underwent a fivefold jump between 1849 and 1989.

  And the literature suggested that sea-level rise and land loss to this point, dramatic though they’ve been, pale next to projections for the coming decades. A prognosis offered in 2010 by scientists writing in the journal Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science promised that the Chesapeake’s water level will rise ever faster, achieving “increases of approximately 700 to 1600mm by 2100, a projection we consider to be very likely.” That’s a jump of twenty-seven to sixty-three inches.

  What would that look like on Tangier? Another Journal of Coastal Research article found that in all of 1998, tides rose to a meter or more over then-mean sea levels for only three hours on the island. But if sea levels rose as expected, by 2100 the Main and West ridges could be underwater for as many as 4,400 hours per year, or about half the time. Long before that the place would be uninhabitable, because Uppards would dissolve away altogether, rendering the harbor useless.

  How Tangiermen might react to such a scenario was forecast in a 2013 paper in the journal Nature Climate Change. The intensity of people’s attachment to a climate-threatened community signals how they’ll respond to government strategies for dealing with the threat, the paper said. “Consequently, adaptation strategies that directly affect attachment to place may not be supported, and different strategies that allow people to remain in their current place are more likely to be successful.”

  Indeed, I’ve heard islanders say as much. Ooker summed up the feeling of many when we talked about mainlanders who think saving Tangier would cost too much, and that the islanders should pick up and move. “We’ve been here for a couple hundred years or better,” he said, “and it’s our home.” Or as Carol Moore put it to me: “I’m staying until I got one foot on the side and one foot in the water.”

  SCHULTE UNDERTOOK his own 2015 study with two coworkers: Karin Dridge, a geographer, and Mark Hudgins, chief of the Corps of Engineers Norfolk District’s Hydraulics and Hydrology Section. The corps financed the paper, but because it did so through a scientific grant, Schulte “could say things that the corps can’t,” he tells me. “I could talk about the value of the resource. We [the corps] can’t put a dollar value on it, but this time I did.”

  It wasn’t the value of Tangier’s human presence that the paper focused on. “Losing the town is, of course, a huge loss, but I wanted people to know that there’s more to it than that,” Schulte says. “Island habitat is extremely valuable, because it’s not in abundant supply. I wanted to show what would be lost, just in terms of habitat—and in dollars—if the island were allowed to wash away.”

  The paper pegged wetlands and underwater grasses with ecological values, which are not what you could buy them for, but what they’re worth per year, based on their status as wildlife habitat. Using a conservative projection of future land loss, the authors estimated that by 2063, Tangier, Uppards, and their outlying islets would lose more than 431 acres of wetlands, with an estimated annual value of $1.75 million in 2015 dollars. By 2113, the islands would lose 629 acres of marsh—in other words, pretty much all of it—and habitat worth $2.54 million per year. “Bird nesting will decline,” the paper warned, “accelerating the decline of these species.”

  Just losing Uppards would usher the destruction of subaquatic vegetation off the island’s leeward east side, covering more than 370 acres of the bay’s floor. Schulte and company reckoned that was worth $3 million per year. Over decades, the cumulative value of lost habitat would run into hundreds of millions of dollars. “We concluded,” he tells me, “that saving the island is well justified.”

  The authors did not put a dollar value on losses to the island’s human inhabitants, but they made clear that they’d be steep. They expected Tangier “to lose land at an exponential rate,” they wrote. “South of the seawall, Tangier will experience significant land loss. The projection indicates it is very likely that the sand spit, which provides some protection against incoming wave energy from the south, will be lost. Tidal creeks winding through the islands will widen significantly, encroaching into the upland ridges. Most of Uppards is predicted to be inundated by 2063, reducing the protection provided to the Town of Tangier.”

  Actually, losing what remains of Uppards would eliminate any protection to the town during the winter, when winds blow in from points north. “Without Uppards, you can’t really have a Tangier,” Schulte acknowledges. “You lose your protected harbor. You lose the entire seafood industry.”

  Tangier would be uninhabitable in less than a hundred years, and likely by 2063, Schulte and his partners predicted. Its ridges, with the possible exception of a few isolated knobs of high ground, “will be converted to a mix of intertidal and high estuarine marsh.” This was not fully accepted on Tangier, especially the study’s memorable last line: “The Tangier Islands and the Town are running out of time, and if no action is taken, the citizens of Tangier may become among the first climate change refugees in the continental USA.”

  The mayor and much of his constituency maintain their skepticism about a human role in global warming, and the town itself has since sold T-shirts with the silk-screened legend: I REFUSE TO BE A CLIMATE CHANGE REFUGEE. Schulte nods patiently when I ask him about that. “The subtleties of sea-level rise are something they’re just not able to comprehend,” he says. “They’ll see a spot that had grass and is now marsh. They’ll know that trees grew in a spot, and now the trees have died and they can’t grow new ones. But they don’t ascribe that to sea-level rise. That’s flooding.”

  Schulte’s paper prescribed a chain of rock breakwaters around the west, north, and east edges of Uppards, positioned a short distance offshore. The space between the breakwaters and the fast-eroding shoreline would be filled with a combination of beach and sand dunes, with the deepest such buffer on the island’s exposed western flank. It also advocated another breakwater armoring the beach below the airport—essentially a further extension of the existing seawall. Finally, it suggested using dredged sand to rebuild five uplands once home to human settlement on Uppards and Tangier prop
er, and planting them with loblolly pines.

  Schulte and his coauthors were thinking big, and such thinking carried a price tag to match—about $20 million to $30 million, they estimated, which they tried to offset by restating what was at stake: “If no action is taken, significant wildlife habitat will be lost, as well as the culturally-unique Town of Tangier, the last offshore fishing community in Virginia waters of Chesapeake Bay.”

  I tell Schulte that I find the article compelling but can’t help but feel it’s overly optimistic—that based on the changes I’ve seen since 2000, and the retreat of shoreline at Canaan that I’ve witnessed in just the past few months, I figure you’ll be able to drive a workboat over most of Tangier by 2063. No chance the town can last anywhere near that long.

  Schulte nods. Corps studies are required to use computer-modeled sea-level projections, or “curves,” he tells me. The source for the figures used in Tangier’s curves is the tidal gauge records for Sewells Point, on the Norfolk Naval Base. “The problem is with the Sewells Point data set itself,” he says, which is “one of our longest sets on record, and we use the entire data set to establish averages.” Because the data starts at a point when sea levels were rising at a much slower rate than they are today, averaging its entirety understates the severity of the current problem; it “gives a falsely rosy picture of what’s happening.”

  “You have a choice,” he says. “You can chop off those early years and use the more accurate, more recent data, or you can recognize the low-scenario curves”—the most conservative projections of future sea-level rise—“as unlikely.” He and his coauthors chose the latter path, using a curve that split the middle between best-and worst-case scenarios—though, as the paper admitted, the worst case was looking more realistic all the time.