by Earl Swift
“It is a conservative estimate,” he tells me. “I don’t think they have fifty years. When newspapers interview me, I always say twenty-five to fifty—and I think it’s probably closer to twenty-five, because the rate is continuing to go up.”
I ask him about the proposed jetty at the west end of the boat channel. “That’ll help them a little bit with that particular problem,” he says, “but it doesn’t do anything about the bigger problems.” Build the jetty without somehow armoring the rest of the island, and eventually Tangier will consist of that jetty and the existing seawall to its south. The island itself will be gone.
“Anything we’re going to do is going to have to get started in the next couple of years,” he says. “Let’s say the interest level was high enough. You could do a mini Poplar Island over there. That’s an option.”
IF THERE ARE TWO words guaranteed to provoke an exasperated shake of the head from Tangiermen, they are “Poplar Island.” Located about sixty miles north of Tangier off Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Poplar was one of the bay’s many inhabited islands in the mid-nineteenth century. Its principal settlement, Valliant, boasted a hundred citizens and cattle farms, a school, a general store, a post office, and a sawmill.
That sawmill may have hastened its destruction. In felling Poplar’s dense woods, its inhabitants robbed their home of the tree roots binding its soil. From about 1,100 acres that stretched in a four-mile-long crescent before the Civil War, Poplar broke into pieces, and each dwindled rapidly. Islanders quit the place by 1920, and seventy years later, the island had been reduced to a five-acre islet and three tiny outlying knobs of land. All seemed destined to become shoal.
But unlike so many other islands that have been allowed to disappear, Poplar was saved at the proverbial last minute: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, decrying the bay’s shrinking inventory of remote island bird habitat, partnered with the State of Maryland and the Corps of Engineers’ Baltimore District to rebuild the island to its original size.
The project used silt that the corps dredged from the shipping approaches to Baltimore harbor. Dredging the channels was nothing new—the corps has performed this duty for generations to keep the nation’s major harbors open to deep-water traffic. But it had typically disposed of the silt by dumping it at sea. Restoring an island in the Chesapeake made more sense, and Poplar was only thirty miles away—a short run for scows lugging the dredge spoils.
So, beginning in 1998, the corps built a riprap dike approximating the island’s 1847 shape and size and started dumping dredged material three years later. By early in 2016, Poplar measured 1,140 acres, bisected by a high spine. On the eastern, more protected side of that ridgeline, the corps built varied wetlands: high and low marsh, ponds, tidal flats, and islands for nesting birds. To the west, it mounded two large upland cells with silt that will eventually reach an elevation of twenty-five feet and will be forested with pines.
In 2014, Congress authorized expanding the new island by 575 acres, combining open-water habitat with additional high ground and marsh. When the entire project is completed around 2040, it will have used about 68 million cubic yards of dredge spoils, or enough to fill more than 2 million twenty-foot shipping containers. The projected price tag: about $1.4 billion.
Here’s the part that deeply aggrieves Tangiermen: This lavish, decades-long effort and heroic outlay will create a habitat for birds by the thousands and a wide range of other wildlife besides. But the human population will be zero. For that kind of money, Tangier could be turned into an impregnable fortress. As Jerry Frank Pruitt put it in the Situation Room: “They can build islands but they can’t save an island? I don’t go for that much.”
One of the challenges Tangier faces in drawing that kind of money is its location. Had Poplar not been convenient to Baltimore, and had the corps not needed to keep Baltimore’s shipping lanes clear, that island would have gone under. Tangier is a long way from any such dredging operation, which worries Schulte. “We’ve already lost so many islands in the Chesapeake Bay,” he says. “We only have a couple left. Are we really going to let them disappear, too?
“Right now, it looks like maybe we will.”
Standing water occupies the footprint of a demolished house in Black Dye. (EARL SWIFT)
Seventeen
LATE ON THE MORNING OF MONDAY, AUGUST 15, A CONTINGENT of mainland visitors arrived at Tangier’s firehouse for a meeting with members of the town council. Most of the island was unaware of the gathering, and even the council wasn’t sure what it was about—the visitors had sketched out the agenda in a few vague sentences. The Tangiermen were excited, just the same.
The business at hand dated to the late spring, when Gregory C. Steele of the Corps of Engineers’ Norfolk District had had lunch with John Bull, commissioner of the Virginia Marine Resources Commission. They were discussing the disposal of dredge spoils in the open bay near the mouth of the York River—a corps practice since the 1980s, but one that had made the state increasingly uncomfortable, due to its possible effects on the blue crab.
“We were saying, ‘Yeah, we really shouldn’t be dumping that dredge spoil on crab spawning grounds,’” Bull recalled. “And one of us said, ‘We ought to take it all and dump it on Tangier.’ And we were laughing about it, until we both said, ‘Well, hold on a minute.’”
Now, more than two months later, the men led a party eight strong. Steele, who heads the Norfolk District’s Water Resources Division, was accompanied by five corps specialists—a civil engineer, planners, policy people—and Bull, by a second VMRC higher-up. Not present: Dave Schulte, who told me he was unaware of the meeting.
Representing Tangier were town manager Renee Tyler and three members of the council: Norwood Evans, who works for the electrical co-op; James Parks, Jerry Frank Pruitt’s brother-in-law; and Anna Pruitt-Parks, Jerry Frank’s daughter. Not present: Ooker, who told me he didn’t know of the gathering, either, because he didn’t check his email. He never checks his email. “I don’t do email,” he said. Everyone on the council knows he’s one of the few elected public officials in America who doesn’t find it useful. But instead of phoning him, the folks arranging the meeting emailed him.
In any event, he wasn’t present to hear the visitors lay out a proposal for Tangier’s salvation that would make another Poplar Island of the place: The corps would build cells over and around the island, then fill them to create high ground or sculpted wetlands. The primary aim was not to protect people—as Dave Schulte’s Scientific Reports paper suggested, the island’s wildlife habitat holds more value than the town’s infrastructure. But if the concept were to win approval, Tangiermen would be saved along with the birds.
“I was excited,” Anna told me later. “I’m not saying there’s any such thing as climate change, but if they’re willing to spend the money and try different things to fight climate change, so they can see whether they’d work in other places, I’m okay with that.”
When I asked about how the meeting happened without the mayor’s participation, Anna was visibly irritated. “Ooker knew,” she said. “I guess I shouldn’t be saying it, but Ooker’s a good mayor for about six months of the year. When it’s crab-shedding season, though, he ain’t worth shit. Love him to pieces, but when those soft crabs are shedding, you can’t get him away from them.
“And I mean, there’s been so many reporters, so many articles, so much attention, since that [Scientific Reports] article came out last December, that I think he’s just been exhausted and totally forgot about it.”
Whatever the case, Ooker is present two afternoons later, when the council convenes an official town meeting to share what went on at the sit-down. By then, a few details have trickled out, enough that fifty-eight expectant islanders assemble at New Testament for the session. It opens with a prayer from Duane Crockett. “We thank you, Lord, for your concern for our island,” he says. “And, Lord, there’s a lot of hearts that need to be changed in the government to do this.”
&nb
sp; James Parks outlines the corps’ proposal. He points to a rather crude corps rendering of what the new Tangier might look like: a squarish blob reminiscent of the island’s size a century ago, but only vaguely recognizable as Tangier. Inlets and concavities in the shoreline have been smoothed flat. The tidal creeks wriggling through the interior are gone, along with a lot of the creek between Canton and the P’int. In place of a spit, the south end of the island ends in a wedge.
“It’s going to take a three-year study,” James says. “They explained that. Gonna take two years to get to the three-year study, possibly. So that’s a five-year waiting period to see if this project will take off.”
Anna explains that the corps can’t justify saving Tangier for the sake of its human inhabitants—it costs too much for too few people—but that officials seemed to think that “what they done at Poplar Island” might work. “They haven’t looked real close at what that will do to the living area,” she says, referring to the town. “Once they get to expanding the island, will they have to elevate the living area to keep it from flooding? Will they have to blow dredge material into this area? Will they have to elevate the homes to accommodate that? All of that will be looked at in that three-year study.”
Ooker notes that the project will require adjustments from the island’s crabbers. “Some of the places, like where maybe some scrapers work, will be covered up,” he says. “But it’s a grand plan.” He looks around. “Any questions?”
“Yeah, I got one.” It’s Eugenia Pruitt. “Are they aware that our marshland, every day, is quickly leaving this island?” she asks. “Whatever’s in this marshland is doing a whole lot more damage than the erosion.” Large, ravenous rodents devouring the wetlands are a continuing worry of Eugenia’s. She’s told me that “these marsh creatures” are “tame as can be, and they’re bigger than a muskrat. I’ve seen one on my front walk. I seen him come in my front gate, and walk right up the walk. He’d sit in the yard and look at you.” What these animals might be, she can’t say. Nutria have been a torment to the Eastern Shore, but no one has seen any on Tangier.
“In another year the whole sound’s going to be on West Ridge because of them—whatever’s in there,” she tells the gathering. “I don’t care if it’s a mouse eating it up; something’s eating it up, and it’s quickly going away. Anybody can see that.”
Town meetings on Tangier, like those anywhere, frequently veer off topic. “Well, that’s all part of the project, too,” James says, eager to change the subject.
Eugenia: “If we got to wait three more years, there’ll be none of it left in the middle.”
James: “That’s exactly what we told them.”
Eugenia: “There’ll be nothing left.”
“Everybody knows how vulnerable our harbor is,” Ooker interrupts, trying to steer the discussion back to the corps’ proposal. “If you got a crab house or anything out in the creek here, you get a wind.” If the proposal becomes reality, he says, “there won’t be any more rough water in the harbor area, because it’ll be closed off. The only open water’ll be coming in from the channel, east and west side.”
“You’ll be able to go to your crab house on a moped,” James kids.
Duane Crockett stands. “I think it’s very sad to human nature that they would do all of this for birds and wildlife,” he says, “but I’m not going to strain out a gnat and swallow a camel, either. I don’t care why they save our island, as long as they save it. And I look at this plan as a divine thing.”
“Like Duane said, it’s sad [that birds count more than people],” Ooker says. “But whatever it takes, I’m fine with that.”
An islander asks how long the project will take. James and Ooker say they don’t know for sure, but years—more than ten. Perhaps many more than ten.
Eva Marie Pruitt, who lives in Black Dye, speaks up. She shares Eugenia’s concern about rodents in the marsh. (Unsolicited, she’s told me, “I’ve heard that if one of ’em gets ahold of you, they hold on until you’re dead—and I believe it.”) “So this has nothing to do with those things that are eating our marshlands?” she asks. “I don’t know what they’re called . . .”
“What was that?” James asks.
“Muskrats,” Anna says.
“Oh, no,” James says.
“As far as the muskrat problem,” says Inez Pruitt, sister to James and mother to Anna, “I say whoever wants to get permits and start trapping them, go right ahead.”
A convoluted exchange on muskrats ensues. It ends when waterman Gary Parks voices a thought that no doubt lurks in many minds: “You know, we’ve been told this a lot.”
“Exactly,” James agrees.
“I’m probably one of the skeptical ones about it,” Gary says. “I’ve got my doubts.”
“I’ve got mine, too, Gary,” James says. “I do. But it’s like they said, we got to start somewhere.”
Anna announces she forgot to mention something earlier. “After our meeting Monday with the corps, yesterday Senator Tim Kaine sent his regional manager and two of his legislative aides out to talk about the plan,” she says. “The week before he was called up to run for vice president he’d called us and was supposed to come out here to Tangier to sit down to a meeting with us. . . .
“I guess, hopefully, if he doesn’t get vice president, then we’ll see him out here and he’ll be helping us,” she says. “I’m going to be selfish and want him helping us for our project instead.”
Her mother takes this thought a step further. “Vote that he don’t get in,” Inez says. “Vote the right way.”
“Well,” the mayor says, “we can only hope that if he does become vice president, he’ll still remember us, maybe.”
THE FOLLOWING DAY, the mood in the Situation Room is ever so slightly jaundiced. “It’s as if they just thought of it: ‘Hey! We can blow fill!’ We’ve been asking for that for years,” Bruce Gordy complains. “Fifty-eight people were there out of 450, so you know how much interest there is. One reason is that they’ve heard this all before. They’ve heard it thousands of times.”
“In 2016 we were supposed to be putting stones down,” Leon says. “Do we have stone? Three years to study it. Three years!”
“We’ll all be dead and buried and forgotten about,” Bruce says, blowing e-smoke.
“I don’t even believe ’em,” Leon mutters. “They’ve lied so many times in the past. They’ve lied more than Hillary. Why didn’t we get the jetty in 2016 like we were supposed to?”
“They used the money for something else,” Ernest Ed Parks suggests.
“And they’ll use it for something else again,” Leon snarls. “We got more history here than any place in Virginia. Virginia don’t care about history. Maryland—now, Maryland cares about history. But not Virginia.”
Richard Pruitt enters. The room falls silent as he fixes a cup of coffee, then settles into a chair next to the trash can. The fruit flies over that way are worse than ever, and a swirling cloud forms near his left shoulder. He doesn’t seem to notice.
“You ever seen the tide make so low?” Leon asks the room. I’m curious myself, because while out on the water yesterday I noticed that the harbor was drained dry: The creek between Canton and the P’int was an exposed mudflat, and the bottom under most of the shanties was exposed, too. The breeze bore the complex scent of brine, methane, and rotting crab exoskeletons, which lay heaped beneath the shedding tanks.
“The whole bay’s gonna come in the creek at flood tide,” Allen Ray says.
“The tide’s a funny thing,” Leon muses. “It’s an awful funny thing.”
The sound of the ambulance’s siren reaches the room. Conversation halts. “Somebody’s sick,” Leon says quietly.
Bruce, peering out the window toward the road, announces, “Going up Meat Soup way, and quick.”
“Somebody’s sick, or somebody fell,” Leon says. They catalog all the likely prospects up at that end of the Main Ridge: Jean Autry and Strickland Crockett, both
elderly and failing. Ginny Marshall, who is eighty-nine. Iris Pruitt, eighty-eight. The list goes on.
Ooker strides into the room. “Milton fell on his dock,” he says. That would be eighty-five-year-old Milton Parks, owner of the Parks Marina at the top of Meat Soup and father-in-law to Jerry Frank, first cousin to Leon, close cousin to Allen Ray and Richard. It seems a boat was coming in to dock and tossed a line to Milton. He gave it a pull, and it turned out the rope wasn’t tied to the boat. He lost his balance and went down hard, breaking a hip.
Jerry Frank takes his leave as the conversation returns to yesterday’s meeting. Ooker complains that there was too much talk about muskrats. “You don’t think they’re the problem?” Bruce asks, suppressing a smile.
Ooker tilts his hat back, looking weary. “I wanted to say a few things, but I thought, ‘No.’ I just let it go. I thought, ‘Lord, we got one of the greatest proposals presented to us, and we’re getting hung up on muskrats.’ She said, ‘This jetty won’t do any good if we don’t take care of these muskrats.’ I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s good. I wish our biggest problem was muskrats.’”
The subject shifts yet again, this time to the good luck dipnetters have been having. Only a few Tangier crabbers use hand nets, and only for a short spell in late summer. “The netting’s good up where Hearn Island used to be,” Ooker says, noting that his son Woodpecker was there yesterday “and caught fifty-five in an hour.”
“I know it’s been good,” Leon says, nodding.
“He said if the tide hadn’t been so low, he could have caught a hundred or more.”
“Where exactly was Hearn Island?” I ask.
“It was up above Fishbone Island, on the way to Smith,” Ooker says.