by Earl Swift
“Like crapping your pants,” says Ooker, pouring himself a coffee. “Ain’t that right, Leon?”
Leon nods, unfazed. “That’s one thing you can’t do when you get some years on you. You can’t say, ‘It’s okay—I’ll wait awhile,’” he tells Jerry Frank, Cook, Bruce, and me. “Everything down there, you don’t have the strength you once had.”
“The check valves don’t work as good,” Bruce suggests.
Leon nods. “That’s right.”
We hear the outside door open, movement in the hall, and into the Situation Room step four people from CNN: two videographers laden with enormous cameras and tripods, a producer, and one of the network’s on-air meteorologists, Jennifer Gray. Ooker has been talking to the network for weeks about this visit and invited the crew to join us here. What’s about to happen will propel Tangier into the news to such a degree that everyone will soon forget about the weird crab.
Jennifer Gray, several months pregnant, surveys the room. “It’s cool,” she says, taking in the cracked tile, the tacked-up pictures, the fruit flies. “I like it.”
“So do we,” Cook tells her.
“The more I see of the outside world,” Jerry Frank says, “the more I like it here.”
“I know, right?” Gray says. “Your own little place.” She looks to Ooker. “So, is this like the city council?”
“This probably has more authority than the city council,” the mayor replies.
The producer has everyone switch seats, so that Bruce, Leon, Jerry Frank, and Ooker are lined up beneath the big publicity still of the Harry S. Truman. Cook, who says he doesn’t want to participate, takes a seat next to the coffee maker and behind one of the cameras. I sit off-camera about two feet from Ooker.
The cameramen fit their subjects with lavalier mikes—first Ooker and Bruce, who wear T-shirts and need only drop the cords inside them, then Jerry Frank, who wears a button-up shirt tucked into his pants. A cameraman unfastens the buttons one by one, threading the mike cord under his shirt. Jerry Frank is visibly uncomfortable. Leon, watching from the next chair, looks horrified. Finished with Jerry Frank, the cameraman approaches Leon, who shakes his head. “I don’t need that,” he says. “I’ll yell into his.” He leans toward Bruce to demonstrate.
Gray takes a seat before the four and, with the cameras rolling, asks whether they’ve noticed the island shrinking. “Yes, I have, and they’re letting us go,” Jerry Frank says. “It could have been prevented years ago.” He pauses before adding, “It’s never too late.”
Gray asks whether they’ve noticed signs of the bay rising. Jerry Frank again speaks for the group. “I’ve been living here for seventy-two years, and it hasn’t changed much at all,” he says. “This here argument about sea level rising, I don’t go along with it at all, because your sea level depends on the way the wind is blowing.” He launches into an explanation of how the wind affects tides and water levels.
Ooker jumps in. “What we focus on is erosion,” he says. “Sea-level rise is at such a slow pace that erosion will get us long before sea-level rise does. . . .”
“The island’s problem, the erosion problem, it’s on your mind when you wake up in the morning,” he continues, “and it’s on your mind when you go to bed at night. It’s something we think about all the time. It’s always in the back of your mind.”
“Always,” Jerry Frank says.
“It causes people to hold back from investing here,” Ooker says. “You find yourself thinking, ‘Should I invest here, when it might not even be here?’”
Gray: What makes the place special?
Jerry Frank: “The history alone is worth saving.”
Bruce: “That it is.”
Ooker: “Lots of history here. Lot of military service. And now we need help from Washington.”
Gray shifts the focus to Donald Trump. “If you could say anything to him or his administration today, what would you say?” Gray asks.
“I would say . . .” Ooker begins. He pauses for an instant, and Leon, who has been silent until now, blurts out: “Build us a wall!” No microphone necessary.
“Yeah, build us a wall,” Ooker says, as Cook chuckles off-camera. “They talk about a wall—we’ll take a wall. We’d like to have a wall all the way around Tangier.”
The subject turns to the island’s affinity for the president. Ooker says he likes the man’s willingness to slice through red tape: “He’s gonna cut down on the time it takes to study something. We’ve been studied to death. We just need something done.”
He does not stop there. “I love Trump,” Ooker declares without the hint of a smile, “as much as any family member I got.”
Even after fourteen months of exposure to Ooker’s strident political views, I’m goggle-eyed. Two thoughts immediately cross my mind. First: There’s no way CNN isn’t using that. And second: Trump is bound to take notice.
Gray wraps up the interview by asking again what her panel would like to say to the president. “Donald Trump, if you see this, I mean, anything you can do—we’d welcome any help you can give us,” Ooker says. “If Donald Trump would come out here, I’ll take him out crabbing and take him out for a good crab cake dinner.”
THE SEGMENT AIRS four days later, on Friday, June 9. Gray’s report juxtaposes the island’s steady inundation, its support for Donald Trump, and Trump’s characterization of climate change as a hoax—and includes a brief interview with me toward the end. In the first minutes after the story runs, several Tangiermen post Facebook comments lauding the piece and congratulating Ooker for his comments.
But almost immediately CNN’s Twitter account blows up with comments from viewers astounded that the island voted overwhelmingly for a man who derides the science behind sea-level rise. “I have NO sympathy for the people of Tangier Island,” one writes. “If they voted 87% for that IDIOT, they are getting what they ASKED FOR! GOOD LUCK.”
“Dear Tangier Island, Va: Be swallowed by the sea,” another reads. “You’re all #Trump supporters and deserve what Nature gives you: submersion.”
So they go, screen after screen: “What do you call a sinking island of Trump supporters? A good start.” And: “Hard to be empathetic for residents, who are objectively stupid and proud of it.” And: “Hope they know how to swim.” And this: “Tangier Island in MD?? Seriously. It’s a test tube for inbreeding.”
The islanders I speak with, and those whose Facebook accounts I follow, are dumbstruck by the ferocity of this invective from strangers, and confused—heartsick—disgusted—alarmed, even—that their support for Donald Trump has moved fellow Americans to wish them dead. Barb Baechtel, who moved to Tangier with her husband, Rob, in 2013, was furious when I spoke with her in the midst of this storm. “They have been asking for twenty years or more for help with a natural disaster,” she said of her neighbors. “It’s a slow-moving natural disaster, but it’s a natural disaster. If it was a fast-moving natural disaster, like a wildfire, everyone in the country would be saying, ‘Oh, those poor people! They need our help!’
“We’ve actually got people sitting around debating whether these people are worth saving. How is that okay?” she said. “I don’t care if you want to call it erosion or sea-level rise or Aunt Sadie’s butt boil. It doesn’t matter what’s causing it. The point is that this disaster is happening, and these people need help.”
WE SOON LEARN that fallout from the CNN report is just getting started. Three days after the story airs, Ooker is out potting when he sees Woodpecker racing across the water toward him. His son pulls his boat alongside the Sreedevi and says, Dad, you have to come in. The president’s trying to call you.
The president of what? Ooker asks.
It takes his son a minute to convince him that the White House has been calling the oil dock. Ooker motors into port, waits for a call, decides to buster up his peelers—his crabs won’t wait—and when he again comes ashore, the phone rings. A woman tells him the president wants to know whether he can speak with the m
ayor. Yes, Ooker replies. He sure can.
Donald Trump comes on the line, introduces himself, and, as Ooker later recounts it, tells him: You’ve got one heck of an island there.
This is Trump Island, Ooker replies. We really love you down here. He tells Trump that he believes the president stands for the workingman, and that he wants to put people back to work. That he’s for the military, and Israel, and protecting religious liberties. That he’s the right man at the right time for the country.
Trump tells Ooker he appreciates that. He comments that Tangier looks like a beautiful place, and that if Ooker’s ever in Washington, he should stop in for a visit. He calls Ooker his kind of guy. He says that he and his family love the citizens of Tangier.
And he provides fodder for headlines around the world. As Ooker describes it to a reporter, “He said not to worry about sea-level rise. He said, ‘Your island has been there for hundreds of years, and I believe your island will be there for hundreds more.’”
Many islanders are reassured by this.
The world at large finds it preposterous.
Foreign reporters descend on Tangier—I encounter Norwegians, Russians, French, and Brits on the roads. Stephen Colbert makes the island the centerpiece of his Late Show monologue. “Now in the unlikely event that Donald Trump’s words didn’t calm residents of the soon-to-be-lost city of Tangier,” Colbert says, “their mayor believes there is a solution to coastal erosion. They need a jetty, or perhaps even a seawall around the entire island, and . . . Trump will cut through red tape and get them that wall.
“Yes!” he says over laughs and jeers. “Trump is going to get them that wall and then make the ocean pay for it!”
This does not go down easy on the island. But it’s forgotten soon enough, because Tangier is again propelled into the news: The mayor is invited to appear at a televised “town hall” moderated by CNN anchorman Anderson Cooper and featuring former vice president Al Gore, whose efforts to sound the alarm on global warming earned him a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
Cooper introduces Ooker about a third of the way into the hour-long program. The camera closes in. The mayor is wearing his Sunday clothes: a fresh-looking Tangier souvenir ball cap and a button-down plaid shirt. “Vice President Gore, Mr. Cooper, I’m a commercial crabber, and I’ve been working the Chesapeake Bay for fifty-plus years,” he says into a handheld microphone. “And I have a crab house business out on the water, and the water level is the same as it was when the place was built in 1970.
“I’m not a scientist, but I’m a keen observer, and if sea-level rise is occurring, why am I not seeing signs of it?” Those familiar with Ooker’s usual easygoing manner can detect that he’s nervous. But he has great presence. He comes across as unpretentious and intelligent, and the slight tremor in his voice lends him an endearing humility. “Our island is disappearing, but it’s because of erosion and not sea-level rise,” he says. “Unless we get a seawall, we will lose our island. But back to the question: Why am I not seeing signs of the sea-level rise?”
Sounding supremely confident, the former vice president asks, “What do you think the erosion is due to, Mayor?”
“Wave action,” Ooker replies. “Storms.”
Gore: “Has that increased any?”
Ooker: “Um, not really—”
Gore: “So you’re losing the island even though the waves haven’t increased.”
“Yes,” Ooker tells him. “This erosion’s been going on since Captain John Smith discovered the island and named it. It’s got to our doorstep now, and we focus on it more.”
Gore nods. “Won’t necessarily do you any good for me to tell you that the scientists do say that the sea level is rising in the Chesapeake Bay. . . . And that the forecast for the future is another two feet of—what, if there was another two feet of sea-level rise, what would that mean for Tangier Island?”
“Tangier Island, our elevation is only about four foot above sea level,” Ooker says. Which is true of only the high spots.
“Yeah,” Gore says.
“And if I see sea-level rise occurring, I’ll shout it from the housetop.”
Gore, nodding: “Okay.”
“I mean, we don’t have, you know, the land to give up,” Ooker concludes. “But I’m just not seeing it.”
“Yeah. Okay,” Gore says. He holds a finger to his chin, seemingly deep in thought. “Well, one of the challenges of this issue is taking what the scientists say and translating it into terms that are believable to people, where they can see the consequences in their own lives. And I get that, and I try every day to figure out ways to do that.”
At this point, Gore might have explained that day-to-day eyeballing, even over decades, provides an unreliable perspective on incremental change. That by contrast, hard scientific evidence leaves no doubt that the water is climbing. That just because Ooker has not noticed the water coming up doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
Instead, he takes a tack that shows he understands something about Tangier culture but addresses Ooker’s question only obliquely. “Reminds me a little bit of a story from Tennessee,” he says, turning to Cooper, “about a guy who was trapped in a flood. He was sitting on the front porch and they came by in an SUV to rescue him, and he said, ‘Nope. The Lord will provide.’ And the water kept on rising. He went up to the second floor, and they came by the window in a boat, and they said, ‘Come on, we’re here to rescue you.’ And he said, ‘Nope. The Lord will provide.’ Then he went on up to the rooftop as the water kept rising, and they came over in a helicopter and dropped a rope ladder. He said, ‘Nope. The Lord will provide.’
“Well, he died in the water,” Gore says, “and went to Heaven and said, ‘God, I thought you were going to provide.’ And he said, ‘What do you mean? I sent you an SUV, a boat, and a helicopter.’”
So ends the exchange. The consensus on Tangier is that Ooker has “won” the face-off, and I, watching at home on the mainland, draw the same conclusion. The world’s preeminent spokesman for the perils of climate change has failed to answer a question compelling in its simplicity, asked by a plainspoken crabber with a high school education. In so doing, he has enabled anecdotal folk wisdom to persevere as a competitor to bona fide science. Mighty unfortunate, this.
Islanders are also angered by Gore’s joke, which they believe mocked their religious faith. I don’t read it that way—he was making a point, even if it was lost on his intended audience. The Lord has provided the islanders with minds for recognizing the danger that faces them. That might be the sum of what the Lord plans to provide them with, this time around. Denying that the danger exists—or expecting a miracle to chase it away—might not be what the Lord has in mind.
FOR THE REST OF THE SUMMER and into the fall, the global media maintains its fascination with Tangier. A British network sends a team ashore, and Lonnie raises some eyebrows by telling its reporter, “I don’t care if ISIS supports us and puts a seawall around here. Put any name you want on it, just so we get the seawall.” In the same report, Ooker questions the infallibility of science by noting: “Scientists also say we evolved from apes, too.” Over those same months the island is alert to the appearance of helicopters out on the runway. Rumors swirl that choppers from Andrews Air Force Base are casing the place for a presidential visit. It doesn’t come, which does nothing to temper the general enthusiasm for Donald Trump.
George “Hambone” Thomas dies. The population drops by one. Both Ricky and Nick Laird, father and son watermen, move to Crisfield. Another two down. Caleb Cooper, a young waterman, dies unexpectedly, and Gail Smith, a volunteer at the museum, passes. The head count continues to slip.
My landlady, Cindy Parks, marries a mainlander and moves off the island. Another loss. Cindy sells her house to her son, Jared. She’s fortunate: Some Tangier houses linger on the market for years. Fourteen months after moving in, I give up my quarters on the West Ridge.
In time, life settles back into a routine dictated by the seasons
and the blue crab. Jason Charnock goes to work as Lonnie’s mate on the Alona Rahab. The new school year starts with sixty students at Tangier Combined. Leon quits scraping for the winter. Ooker catches a mess of eels. The jetty project grinds its slow bureaucratic course through the Corps of Engineers, as it has for more than twenty years.
As for the big, expensive concept for saving the island as a wildlife sanctuary, it’s early yet. One might assume that Donald Trump’s reported feelings for the place can’t hurt its chances, but these days, assuming anything about Washington seems rash. And the idea would face rigorous testing in Congress—and, ultimately, before the American people.
I’M SOMETIMES ASKED by mainland friends whether, after more than a year among the islanders, I have an opinion on the prospect of taxpayers spending millions of dollars to save Tangier. My standard reply is that I hope the island is saved, that I want it saved. Tangier has worked itself into my pores. I have come to love the breezy openness of the marsh, its whispers and sways, the subtle play of sunlight and shadow on its grasses. I’ve treasured solitary hours progging on the spit and contemplating my own impermanence at Uppards. I’ve reveled in life without need of a car, even when it’s meant pedaling hard to stay ahead of the flies. I have learned to savor the smell of creosote, diesel smoke, and old crab on the docks and shanties. I’m excited every time I board a boat.
All those delights are nothing, I probably need not add, next to my feelings about the island’s people. Many are confounding in their beliefs and hidebound in their ways. They can be harshly judgmental, contemptuous of authority, dismissive of book learning. God knows, they are gossipy. But they’re also remarkably resilient, hardworking, and courageous. They are willing to die for one another. Their faith is unshakable, and their optimism, wondrous.
They are bound by blood and history to a degree most modern Americans cannot fathom. They are creatures of place, so rooted to their tiny lump of mud in the Chesapeake that they seem products of another age. And they are warm, loving, generous. Once they figured out I wasn’t a day-tripper, they treated me as one of their own.