by Earl Swift
He pauses.
“The muskrats got it.”
A MONTH AFTER THE MEETING at the firehouse, I drive down to Norfolk to visit with the corps and to hear the details of the proposal for myself. I don’t necessarily distrust the town council’s interpretation of what was put on the table, but seeing as how the proposed jetty has ballooned in island minds into something bigger than it is, it seems prudent to cut out the middleman.
I’m ushered into a conference room and seated at a table with Gregory Steele and a senior member of the party he led to the island—Susan L. Conner, chief of the Norfolk District’s Planning and Policy Branch. “It’s been confounding, how we as an agency can best address what’s happening at Tangier,” Steele opens. “It’s a very difficult proposition. You have to look at where is the taxpayer best served, in terms of the limited dollars we have.”
He walks me through the vexations facing the corps. First: Saving the town itself as a flood-management project is a no-go. It would never meet the agency’s cost-benefit analysis. Second: Even if the corps were able to somehow find the money to preserve the settlement, the most efficient means “would likely turn out to be, okay, we’ll relocate the town, move ’em to the Eastern Shore.” That is not a viable solution to the island’s dilemma, however. “Tangier has a cultural and economic aspect to it that makes that kind of move really unattractive to the people there,” he says. “And they are the engine and the hub of the blue crab fishery in the bay.”
So the corps found itself at an impasse, until Steele’s lunch with John Bull. Together, they had the first glimmer of how they might solve several problems at once: The corps could use the by-product of one of its key missions—improving navigation—to perform another of its primary directives—preserving and creating ecosystems. Almost as an afterthought, it could save the town, flood management being another of its missions. And the state would no longer fret about mountains of silt getting tossed into the Chesapeake.
But a glimmer is all that it is, Steele emphasizes. “This is not a slam dunk,” he tells me. “This is a Hail Mary. If we were to come up with a project to save Tangier, a whole lot of pieces would have to fall into place. We have to have authorities, and those will be difficult to get. We have to have appropriations.”
Conner explains that before the corps can begin its three-year general investment study—the inquiry the town council mentioned—the agency must receive authority to conduct it from an assistant secretary of the army. The corps itself cannot seek that authority; the request has to come from stakeholders in the project, those being Tangier and the state. They have to make a strong case. The army reviews all such submissions and it nitpicks. Getting through the process is a long shot.
Even assuming it clears that hurdle, the study would be no sure thing, because only ten are green-lighted per year nationwide. If the Tangier study were one of them, it would cost $3 million, and the federal government would pay only half that. And even if the research concluded that the project was a superb use of the public treasury and of unqualified benefit to the nation, there would still be the matter of financing, the biggest challenge of all.
Steele says he doesn’t know how much the whole grand scheme would cost, but it could conceivably run upward of $800 million—“the equivalent of giving everyone on Tangier $2 million.” That could prompt resistance in Congress, which might prefer to spend a tenth as much: “Instead of spending $2 million per person, you could spend $200,000 per person and get them a really nice house somewhere else.”
And if it gets through Congress intact, the project could still just sit, Steele tells me. “The corps has I don’t even know how many billions of dollars in projects that have been authorized but never constructed,” he says. His summary of the proposal: “This is a heavy lift for all of us.”
At this point I’m both glad that I made the trip and depressed at what I’ve learned, because it is clear that the town council put a rather optimistic spin on that meeting at the firehouse. Tangier does not have, as James Parks told his fellow islanders, a “five-year waiting period to see if this project will take off.” The corps doesn’t yet know whether the concept is even worthy of study.
And that study, if it were to happen, might well conclude the idea is a bad one. A danger of such projects, Steele says, is “inducing risk—creating protection that works until it doesn’t, and the results are catastrophic.” Build the island up, and you might prompt a false sense of security in its occupants, when in reality they remain on a tiny piece of hurricane bait in the center of a great and unpredictable body of water. “The community is going to think, ‘We’re good,’” he says, “when really, no, you’re not—the right combination of factors can bring about a disaster.”
Still, he and Conner stress, there is reason for hope. The state seems enthusiastic: “The fact that VMRC sees a lot in this is a big win,” Steele says. The army might be intrigued by a project that marries the corps’ three primary missions. The island represents a “resource that has become much scarcer and therefore more significant.” And there’s an intangible allure to Tangier: “The cultural component of an isolated population seems to resonate with people,” Conner points out.
“At the least,” Steele says, “we think the idea would pass the red-face test.”
THE CONVERSATION TURNS, in time, to what a reconstructed Tangier Island might look like, not only in its footprint but on the ground, from its streets, and out the windows of its homes. The blocky, indistinct rendering displayed at the town meeting made clear that if this concept becomes reality, most Tangiermen would live farther from the water. Reaching either the Chesapeake or Tangier Sound would require a longer morning commute. The beach might no longer exist. The Heistin’ Bridge could well be superfluous.
Much of this might be welcome; most islanders, I’m sure, would trade a pretty view for the security of a sturdy shoreline. Still, these are people who, time and again over the past century, have demonstrated a staunch resistance to change. That yen for preserving the status quo has colored most every controversy and collective worry. Tangiermen aren’t known for their eagerness to seek new and better ways to do things.
“If we were to identify a plan and go forward with it, the island would look very different from the way it looks now,” Steele acknowledges. “We’ve learned things at Poplar, so whatever we did at Tangier, if we did something, might not look anything like Poplar, either.” For instance, Conner says, instead of riprapping the island’s entire circumference, the corps might opt for “natural approaches to reduce flood risk,” such as rebuilt marshland around the town and tree plantings.
Steele raises another possibility. “It could be that we build cells like at Poplar, too,” he says, “and we move the town to one of the completed cells—move the whole town, lock, stock, and barrel, and leave the current townsite [to revert to marsh].” This is not a prospect that came up at the town meeting, and it provides me with the grist for much later thought. Among Tangiermen’s proudest attributes is their connection with their little piece of the planet, with particular houses and lanes changed little over time. While the world beyond its shores has been refigured in concrete and steel, Tangier today is much as it was generations back. To a population raised on chart and compass, geography matters.
What happens if all that is scrambled? If the town were, as Steele suggests, picked up and moved, it would not likely take the same form elsewhere; it wouldn’t make sense to separate its homes into three far-flung ridges, when a snug grid of streets would be cheaper and far more efficient. It might be a nicer town in which to live, in most respects—neater, more neighborly, with shade trees and a park, perhaps. Shorter distances between homes, the grocery, and church might encourage walking. Tourists might find it more the postcard-ready village they seek and expect, in place of the wind-scoured, cluttered fishing town that it is. But would it be Tangier?
Conner cautions that even if all goes as hoped, this ambitious rescue will move slowly
. “From where we sit now, it’s at least a few years before we can get a study started,” she tells me. “I don’t want to throw a number out, but we’re most likely talking about five to eight years before the study would be finished.”
Steele: “At the midpoint of that study, we’ll have a pretty good idea of whether this’ll work—whether we’ll have traction.”
“We try to manage expectations,” Conner says. “When you tie all of these timetables together, it’s unlikely you’re moving dirt in less than ten years.”
We shake hands not long after. I ride the elevator down to the building’s ground floor, turn in my badge, and step outside into the summer heat. The Elizabeth River, a three-pronged estuary that curls through the heart of Hampton Roads, is swollen with a flood tide and laps high along the bulkhead that rings the corps’ property. If sea-level rise and subsidence combine here to the drastic degree forecast by scientists, the corps will be among the first of the region’s landowners to experience them.
By that time, Tangier’s fate will be sealed, unless the corps pulls off this Poplar Island concept. I walk to my car with the conviction that it will take a miracle—in getting it through the army’s bureaucracy, in getting it financed by Congress, and in getting it finished before a storm muscles up the bay and renders the whole thing moot, at least for the island’s human inhabitants.
A minimum of ten years before earth is moved?
Nature has time on its side.
Part Four
A People Anointed
Pastor John Flood, left, and former principal Denny Crockett shoot the breeze in their golf carts, Memorial Day 2016. (EARL SWIFT)
Eighteen
WHAT WITH TANGIER’S LONG HISTORY OF BIBLE-THUMPING, its physical isolation from the mainland’s sharp-elbowed bustle, and its detachment from its countrymen’s obsessions with social media and reality TV, it’s often cast as a throwback to more innocent, more godly times—straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting, with morals intact, air fresh, and entertainments wholesome, a place where family comes first, where the men are God-fearing, self-reliant, and strong, and the women, faithful, loving, and good cooks all. Tourists come in search of this fabled place: a vestige of America untouched by road rage, fast food, and snark; where anonymity is impossible, accountability unavoidable. And when they come for an afternoon, or spend just a night or two, that is what they find.
Most of what you read about Tangier bolsters this image. The only reputable history of the place, published by a Methodist minister in 1999, is titled God’s Island. The 1973 National Geographic package on Tangier, written by the late Harold “Spike” Wheatley, the school’s principal at the time, showcased worship at Swain as much as any other facet of island life: Besides the picture of Annette Charnock at her wedding, there were photographs of the preacher and of Miss Annie Parks during services, and a lovely, ethereal image of Bruce Gordy’s wife, Peggy, in the sanctuary with her two small daughters.
Across the years, hundreds of other newspaper and magazine stories have made hay of religion’s influence in all things, beginning with that piece by J. W. Church in the May 1914 issue of Harper’s Magazine, which reported that “the minister is a benevolent despot whose word is law” and that he oversaw a church whose “members and adherents embrace virtually every adult in the settlement.”
“As fishing is the sole industry of the island, so is religion, of the sternest and most uncompromising sort, the only intellectual stimulus or recreation,” Church wrote. “No alcoholic drinks, playing-cards, dancing, or frivolous amusements are tolerated or apparently desired by the fisher-folk of Tangier. Life is too serious a matter for such things.”
The town had always been “singularly free from crime or misdemeanor.” So why, Church wondered, did it need a town constable? Sugar Tom’s son, Captain Ed Crockett, explained that the cop’s job was “to look after what strangers come ashore.” Church pressed him to reveal more:
“A few years ago,” he said, “things come to an awful pass here. There got to be a regular spell o’ swearin’, an’ it wa’n’t only on the boats, but right on the street within hearin’ of the childer. So thirty of us met right here in this room an’ formed a Law an’ Order League, an’ we pledged our sacred lives an’ property to put a stop to this wickedness. I told them that a man could be fined five dollars for swearin’ in any state in the Union, an’ it ought to be the same here. So that’s what we decided to do, an’ we told Bud Connerton [sic], the deputy-sheriff, to give every man who swore a fair warning, and the next time to fine him five dollars.”
“Did he make any arrests?” encouraged Ellis [Church’s photographer].
“Forty-three the fust week,” said the Captain, “an’ none since. The boys soon decided that swearin’ was too expensive to be careless about.”
“How about strangers?” I asked.
Captain Ed eyed me suspiciously. “We warn them twice,” he said. “We’ve only had to fine one. Bud, he’s great on doin’ his duty.”
That would be the same C. C. “Bud” Connorton who shot Annette Charnock’s grandfather a few years later and came to a sad end himself.
That Harper’s story set the stage for a great many that followed over the next eighty years. The island’s unsullied reputation seemed affirmed for good when, early in 1998, Warner Bros. sent location scouts ashore, on the hunt for a fishing village in which to set a planned Kevin Costner and Paul Newman movie called Message in a Bottle. They eyed the town by land, boat, and helicopter and decided it was ideal for some outdoor scenes.
The studio called the film a “poignant romantic drama.” A fisherman, played by Costner, writes a love letter to his dead wife, slips it in a bottle, and chucks it out to sea. It washes up on a Cape Cod beach and into the hands of a vacationing Chicago newspaper researcher, played by Robin Wright. She feels compelled to track down the loving soul who wrote such a beautiful letter, and does—and so on, in the manner one expects of a film based on a Nicholas Sparks novel.
Warner Bros. proposed to pay the town $5,000 for its brief use of public property during the shoot and to hire locals to build sets. Tangier’s mailboat, restaurants, grocery, and inns stood to turn a little business. Excitement ran high. But the six-member town council had a peek at the script and saw that in one scene, Costner’s character undressed Wright’s, and a violation of Christian mores followed. The characters also drank beer and wine, and Paul Newman, playing the part of Costner’s father, threw around some PG-13 language. One council member complained of characters using the Lord’s name in vain, too.
So in a unanimous vote, the panel denied the studio permission to film on the island unless it cleaned up the story line. “Our Town Council is made up of Christian people,” then-mayor Dewey Crockett explained to the Washington Post. “We just couldn’t accept it.” Warner Bros. opted to take its shoot elsewhere.
The vote attracted a flurry of press attention, much of which marveled at the backbone Tangier had displayed in standing up to Hollywood. “Look up chutzpah in the dictionary, and you’ll undoubtedly find a thumbnail sketch of this Eastern Shore island town in the middle of the Chesapeake,” the Baltimore Jewish Times editorialized later in the month. “Whether or not you agree with this plucky town’s perspective, you have to applaud its refusal to succumb to the Almighty Green.”
A good many Tangiermen were not cheered by the decision, however. The night after the council’s vote, they crowded into the school auditorium for a boisterous town meeting. “Every soul on the island turned out for that one, to see the fight that would ensue,” said Anna Pruitt-Parks, whose father, Jerry Frank, was on the council. The twenty-seven who spoke were split pretty evenly for and against. Passions were roused. A petition asking the council to reconsider its decision drew two hundred signatures. It changed nothing.
The following week, Beth and the late Rudy Thomas Jr., who ran the mailboat and had circulated the petition, were visited by a family friend, Keith Ward, who had a charter boat ser
vice on the mainland. Come down to my boat, he told them. I need to show you something.
In the vessel’s cabin was Paul Newman. “He said it looked like a place he really would have enjoyed,” Beth recalled.
I CAME TO TANGIER in 2000 having read the Harper’s story and scores written since. I’d followed the movie saga. And in my six weeks on the island I noticed nothing that caused me to question its image as a devout community striving to live by the Scripture. To the contrary, I became convinced that practically every Tangierman was in church on Sunday morning and that worship was no weekly chore—it was the island’s radar, its compass, its guiding star.
Both churches were thoroughly integrated into every aspect of life. The absence of alcohol sales was the most visible manifestation of religious influence, but others abounded. I heard no one swear. The mailboat didn’t run on Sunday. The school library circulated no dangerous Harry Potter novels. No municipal decision ran counter to the faith, and no wonder—Dewey Crockett was not only mayor, but he also served as Swain’s music director and de facto associate pastor, the school’s assistant principal, and town undertaker. Denny Crockett was both school principal and a Swain lay leader. I spent a day with Cook Cannon, who was running the sewage treatment plant at the time, and he likened the outside world to the waves tearing at the shore—erosive and sneaky, worthy of constant vigilance.
In their homes, islanders told me of the many times Tangier had been spared from sure destruction by the Almighty’s benevolent hand, and just as often they spoke of a recent high-water mark of Tangier faith. Revivals are typically hosted by each congregation in spring and fall and are led by visiting preachers for five or six nights straight. In March 1995, however, the two congregations combined forces into a single run of nighttime meetings, lay preachers from each alternating at the pulpit. At first, the results were unremarkable—as Jack Thorne told me, “There were just a few, one or two, getting saved after several nights.” But on the sixth night, a Sunday, the revival’s last scheduled service, a member of Swain’s congregation came to the altar to pray. Marshall Pruitt, a New Testament elder who was up at the pulpit, climbed over the rail to kneel beside him. With that, Jack said, “the love come in.”