right, USA, who wants to go first Come on, come on someone, anyone, Lets see some hands. No No one All right then, Mother Nature will just have to choose one of you, Eenie meenie, miney mo, which will be the first to go All right, Tangier Island, looks like youre it, Congratulations! You are the premier official global warming refugee site in America, Come on down and receive your prize, Free ferry tickets to the mainland, Dont let the waves hit you on your way out,
Tangier Island photo credit Andrew Moore for the NY Times
It is a community unlike any in America.
Here live people so isolated for so long that they have their own style of speech, a singsong brogue of old words and phrases, twisted vowels, odd rhythms.
Its virtually amphibious men follow a calendar set by the Chesapeake Bay blue crab, and they catch more of the prized delicacy than anyone else, It is a neartheocracy of oldschool Christians who brook no trade in alcohol, and kept a major movie from filming in their midst over scenes of sex and beer.
And not least, this is one big, extended family: All but a few islanders can trace their lineage to a single man,
Foryears theyve occupied a speck of mud and marsh that nowhere reaches more than five feet above the tide, seldom tops three, and most often fails to clear one.
Now it is washing ever faster into a bay on the rise,
David Schulte, from the Army Corps of Engineers, on the beach in whats left of the Tangier region called Uppards image from the NY Times photo by Andrew Moore
Earl Swift was a reporter for the Virginia Pilot when he got his first briny taste of Tangier island in.
He wrote several pieces about this littleknown place, that was not only isolated as isolated as one can be only twelve miles from the mainland, but facing considerable longterm challenges.
Tangier had been used by Native Americans for hunting and fishing, It was first mapped inby one John Smith you may have heard of him and not regularly occupied, by Westerners anyway, until, when the Royal Marines built Fort Albion there.
It is expected to be claimed by the bay by the mid/latest century, It will be rendered uninhabitable long before that, Sparked by a significant item from Scientific Reports in, Swifts interest was rekindled and he opted to take a closer, deeper look,
little Tangier is important in one respect, As the Scientific Reports article concluded, its likely to be the first to go, That experienceand the uncomfortable questions it forces the country to confrontwill inform what the rest of us on and near coasts can expect in the decades to come.
What makes a community worth saving Will its size alone prompt the nation to fight for its survivalor are other, less tangible factors as important Which such factors count the most And if size is the chief consideration, whats the cutoff, the minimum population, thats worth rescue What, in short, is important to us
And theres the matter of the Chesapeake Bay blue crab: Without Tangier, bigcity restaurants will be serving a lot less softshell, and many more will have to substitute imported crabmeat for the genuine article in their crabcakes.
Earl Swift image from the University of Missouri Saint Louis
For some the potential demise of Tangier is a crying shame, the loss of a culture that has grown its own ways and language, a real community of real people.
Not exactly a lost Stone Age Bornean tribe in their differences from the rest of us, but with enough uniqueness to mark some lines between here and there.
For others, the loss of Tangier would be just another manifestation of the ongoing global warming that is raising sea levels and making much of the planet hotter, and much of our weather harsher.
The question posed by this book is whether the island is worth saving, given that saving it will entail a considerable public investment,
A backyard of a home on Tangier Island gives way to marsh, a trend affecting more and more homes, as erosion, land subsidence and sea level rise afflict the island.
Photo taken on Saturday, July, image and text from The VirginianPilot by Steve Earley
To inform our answers Earl Swift spent considerable time on the island getting to know its residents, learn the local culture, patois, values, personalities, values, beliefs, and concerns.
His more deskbound research offers us both a history of the place and a look at the climatic and geological conditions that seem certain to doom Tangier to a watery grave.
The value of the island, and related islands is not just the human history and culture that is at risk, There are natural features that impact the survival not only of local avian life, but the underwater fauna and flora that support a wide range of species, including the blue crab and oyster.
There is value to sustaining existing environments and species, for environmental, aesthetic, and commercial reasons, If when this island disappears, how will its loss affect the Chesapeake Bay blue crabs that fill so many bellies, How will that loss affect the men and women who bring this renewable resource to our tables, If the potential crab harvest is severely reduced there will be secondary impact, as the shutting down of a significant economic force sends waves through the adjacent economies.
What about, for instance, the truckers who deliver crabs and oysters from the Tangier watermen to the rest of the nation, the shops and restaurants that depend on them for customers and product
The Amanda Lee, a typical Tangier workboat image from OutsideOnLine.
com photo credit Matt Eich
In reading Chesapeake Requiem, you will pick up some terminology, will learn to differentiate a jimmy from a sook from a peeler, and appreciate the significance of a sponge on a crab.
What might a progger be, or a comehere What is a doubler, and what are the differences between jumbos, primes, hotels, and mediums, and what is a sugar toad
It is also a place where, when a couple learned that their adopted Asian children had been taken from their birth parents illegally, they gave the kids the chance to meet their biological parents, and choose where to live.
Image from The VirginiaPilot
It is a place where an overzealous cop shot a kid for violating a blue law when he was buying his mother milk on a Sunday.
It is also a place where someone later shot dead the cop who had been convicted of a crime for that action, but who had been subsequently pardoned.
No one will say who, It is a place where being a cop is a considerable challenge when everyone who calls in a complaint is a friend or relative and every one they are calling about is a friend or relative.
It is a place where, when a pastor, who was deemed insufficiently conservative, left the Methodist church and started his own parish, he was vandalized by locals.
Outside intervention was needed to make the attacks stop, And when the national Methodist Church expressed support for Palestinians wanting their own state, member of the local Methodist church rebelled, creating a schism,
From New Yorker article photo by Gorden Campbell
It is a place where, when one of their most respected captains went down in a stormy sea, fifty boats launched into awful conditions, Dunkirklike, to try to rescue him.
It is also a place where flinty boat owners sometimes skimped on known needed repairs or safety equipment to their own peril, and the endangerment of those seeking to come to their aid.
It is a place where a clothing factory that employed mostly women was burned to the ground when the local men were put off by the independence this new employment provided to the island women.
It is a place where the vast majority of landbased jobs are held by women, and the vast majority of waterbased jobs are held by men,
It is a place where plans to build a seawall to protect the island keep getting buried under years of studies, funding denials at federal, state and local levels, and presidential impediments.
Wind and waves have ravaged Tangier, including the islands public beach, shown here image from The VirginiaPilot photo by Steve Eearley
It is a place that welcomes newcomers guardedly, and has benefited mightily from some of the advances those invasive species brought with them.
But it is a place that becomes toxic and shunning when those outsiders do not fully accept all the local norms,
As individuals, the islanders are fiercely independent and selfsufficientmodernday cowboys, or so they like to think, As a group, however, they show precious little initiative,It is a place where a man called Ooker knows the local ospreys by name, and feeds them, where feral cats abound, where if you have seen a squirrel on the island, it is really the squirrel, not a squirrel.
It is a place where a respect for the land is not always obvious,
objectively speaking, islanders were poor stewards of their island and its waters, The marshes were studded with their discarded kitchen appliances, bicycles, And outboard motors. Litter made eyesores of the ridges, Watermen routinely threw trash, including motor oil, overboard the harbors shallows had acquired a sharpsmelling and colorful sheen, And Tangiermen had nothing but enmity for environmentalists, who warned that the bays blue crab population was overfished, teetering on collapse, and would rebound only with tighter regulation of the commercial harvest.
Cameron Evans,, looks for artifacts from Canaan, one of the communities that once existed on Uppards, This stretch of shoreline, about aminute boat ride from tangier Islands harbor, has been receding at a rate offeet or more a year recently image from The VirginaPilot photo by Steve Earley Friday, June,
It is a place that has survived an invasion of parasites that almost wiped out the oyster crop entirely, a place where limits on crab takes were routinely ignored, forcing the state to intervene to keep the resource from being wiped out.
It is a book that generates few gripes, I recommend that if you are poring through this on or near a digital device, you keep a window open with a map of the islands, It makes it much easier to track where things are while reading, Of course, the full, hardcover edition may offer more visual aids than did the ARE I read for this review, so take that concern with a grain of sea salt.
Atpps it felt long, but not terribly so, I did feel, though, that at times there might have been too much local culture, That made it feel a bit longer, But not much else. Swift is a gifted writer, with a smooth style,
a keen eye for detail, and a very useful ability to get up close with people he started out hardly knowing.
An old deadrise workboat sits in a marsh at Tangier island, The islands three ridges, where people live, are not much more thanfeet above sea level image and caption from The VirginiaPilot photo by Steve Earley taken July,
In the summer ofGR reduced the allowable review size by, from,to,characters.
In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below,
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