Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island

Tangier Island is a tiny island in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay (between Virginia and Maryland on the East coast of the US) that is getting tinier by the moment. This is true for both the physical shoreline of the island and for the aging population.

The island is visibly sinking into the bay, losing feet of shoreline yearly due to rising sea levels from global warming. However, the islanders firmly believe that it's what they call "erosion", not climate change, as they are climate change deniers. While the island shrinks, so does the population. This is partially due to the crabbing industry, the main - really only - source of income for the island, falling apart. Maryland Blue Crabs are well known for their deliciousness and are a show more regional delicacy. But over-fishing and changing environment are making the crab population dwindle. Local regulations have brought back the blue crabs fairly successfully, but they are not as local to Tangier Island anymore, so the industry for the island is not sustaining families anymore. More and more of the younger generations are choosing to go to college and stay on the mainland.

The author of this book stays on the island for a year, getting to know the people and presenting a detailed history of the island. He discusses the science of what is happening to the island and the cultural significance of physical changes of the island. The author frames this as a larger discussion of what we're going to do as a nation as populated areas of our country are made uninhabitable by climate change. How big does a community need to be for the federal government to save it? Does cultural significance play a role in the decision? Tangier Island is a unique, isolated society with an important local industry, an accent so think they sound like they are speaking another language, and their own brand of government plus christianity.

I really loved this book. It's a fascinating look at an area and people that live within a few hours of my home, but whose beliefs, customs, and ways of life are totally foreign to mine. It is not at all "preachy" about climate change, it is actually a well-balanced look at the people, the island, and the politics.

Original publication date: 2018
Author’s nationality: American
Original language: English
Length: 382 pages
Rating: 4.5 stars
Format/where I acquired the book: borrowed from my mom who was reading it for her bookclub
Why I read this: sounded interesting - also because my mom told me several women in her bookclub sat out this month because they wouldn't read a book about climate change since they don't believe in it. :-0 show less

Summary: A journalist's account of nearly two years on Tangier island, the tight knit community organized around watermen harvesting blue crabs, and the likelihood that it may disappear within the next century.

I first learned about Tangier Island nearly twenty years ago when I heard one of the people mentioned in this book, Susan Drake Emmerich, speak about the Watermen's Covenant she helped facilitate, rooted in the strong Bible-based beliefs of the island's watermen, that helped ease tensions over state and federal laws and fostered care for the island environment as well as the crabs and the Chesapeake Bay that provided their livelihood.

Earl Swift chronicles a different threat to the very existence of the island. Throughout the show more Chesapeake, there are shoals that were once inhabited islands. Over the last two centuries, Tangier Island has lost two-thirds of its land. The northern part of the island, called Uppards, once was inhabited. Now its graves are washing into the sea and most of it is a patchwork of marsh and open water. The west end of the island's shipping channel has widened to over 75 feet. A seawall protects the landing strip on the south end of the island. Residents are hoping for a jetty off of the shipping channel, and a sea wall around the island. The cost is over $30 million, and most consider that it would be cheaper to relocate this community of under 500 to the mainland. The most obvious cause is coastal erosion, evident after every major storm when more coast is lost and parts of the island are inundated. However, geologically, Tangier is slowly sinking, and the Chesapeake is slowly rising. It's possible that all or most of it could be submerged within 50 years.

Swift, who first visited a much bigger island in 2000, returned in 2015 and spent the best part of two years researching his account of the island. It is not only an account of what is happening to the island, but an account of the community that traces its origins back to 1608 when John Smith mapped it and the Revolutionary War, when it was settled. Many of the current residents trace their lineage back to these early settlers and most are related.

Swift joins in every part of the island's life from sessions of the island's elders at "The Situation Room" to attending both of the island's churches. He eats at the restaurants, endures the insects, and attends the funerals. He describes town services from the sewage plant to the local grocery, the school, and the visitor center (a place representing a painful memory). Most of all, he spends time with the watermen on their boats, especially James "Ooker" Eskridge, mayor of Tangier and the town's spokesperson when the media come calling. Up before dawn, we get a sense of how hard the work of crabbing is, and how precarious this existence always has been, even before declining catches.

Perhaps the most riveting part of the account is that of Ed "Eddie Jacks" Charnock and his son Jason, who are stranded on a sinking boat during a blinding, gale force storm on the bay, and the urgent rescue efforts mounted by the other islanders who hear the one distress message they were able to send out. It is a story that represents the tightly knit character of this community as well as the deep biblical faith that undergirds their life.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Swift is his ability to portray the islanders on their own terms. There is no deprecation of their religious faith or their avid support of President Trump and denial of climate change (islanders attribute all the loss of land to erosion and dismiss evidence of island subsidence and water level rise.) He even affirms that Ooker Eskridge bests Al Gore in a discussion with his straightforward assertions that he has seen no water level changes at his crab shack.

At the same time, he describes an island that is slowly dying, no matter what the islanders believe. Youth are moving to the mainland, and the elders are dying and the population continues to decline. Properties are abandoned, and despite the religious rectitude, there is evidence of drug use among a portion of the population. There are tipping points approaching for sustaining everything from the local school to the grocery.

Swift calls his book a requiem. While Tangier has not yet died and its residents have not given up, the book helps us to appreciate on a small scale what it would mean to this beautiful place and its tight knit, beautiful, and productive community, to be lost. He helps us care for these people and their place.

I find myself also thinking that this might be the first of many requiems, or perhaps a more hopeful image is that Tangier is the canary in the coal mine, a warning of how much more we might lose if we fail to act. The factors that endanger Tangier are the same ones that put our naval station at Norfolk at risk, and even our nation's capitol, as well as the coastal cities of the world. Perhaps the irony that the islanders themselves dismiss climate change and its effects is also salutary. It is one thing to have to relocate under 500 climate refugees. Potentially this could be multiplied by millions in the years ahead. Will we close our ears to this requiem until catastrophe is upon us, or take prudent steps now? If the trends at Tangier are any indication, we may know the answer within a generation. show less

This was written for me.

Having lived on Virginia's Eastern Shore, as well as some of the other areas mentioned in the book, there was near constant nostalgia on every page. I've worked in seafood restaurants that served the very crabs and oysters discussed in the book. As a boy scout I camped on once inhabited barrier islands on the other side of the Eastern Shore. We got there in a boat very similar to the ones described in the book.

I'm also United Methodist. While I don't agree with the extremely conservative theology adhered to on Tangier, the religious history of the island was fascinating.

Swift does a great job of capturing the personalities and stories of the island characters. He weaves personal tragedy and joy with ecology, show more geology, religion and politics. His love of both the people and the island itself come through.

Highly Recommended. show less

There’s a romance that lingers around certain places in America. Usually they are places that to outside observers have been “left behind” by modernity. Those of us frantically trying to keep up with the blistering pace of technology fool ourselves into thinking that the “good old days” represent some platonic ideal of how life should be lived. Reality, of course, looks different when viewed from inside the bubble,

Such is the case with Tangier Island, a seemingly idyllic throwback to a simpler time when men supported their families by working the land (or in this case, water), when everyone in a small town knew everyone else, when the attractions of nature, board games, and books outweighed the allure of instant messaging, show more video games, and social media. Every summer, tourists flock to this Chesapeake Bay island (only reachable by ferry, and navigable on land via bicycle or golf cart) to briefly gawk at people whom time has seemingly passed by.

The subtitle of Earl Swift’s Chesapeake Requiem: A Year With the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island (Harper Collins, 2018) offers the reader a clue that not all is what it seems, and as the pages turn the dilemma faced by the people of Tangier becomes more and more clear: Rising waters in the Chesapeake (caused by a number of factors including coastal erosion and climate change) have swallowed two-thirds of Tangier’s land mass in the past two centuries. The best-case scenario, if no man-made intervention is made, is that the island will be uninhabitable within 50 years. The math is not promising: The current population is fewer than 500 people. The cost of shoring up the island is measured in the tens of millions of dollars.

Swift, a longtime journalist in Virginia, who had visited Tangier earlier this millennium while reporting a story, felt compelled to return in 2015 and chronicle life on the island in depth. By living for a full year on the island, he was able to earn the trust of the islanders, who opened their lives to him in really moving ways. Swift shares with the reader not only the scientific and political ramifications of the island’s disappearing land mass, but the essential humanity of the people whose families have lived and worked on the island for generations. We learn about the island’s past glories as a preeminent source of the coveted blue crab, its difficult present as the watery bounty in the Bay and the land under their feet both become ever more scarce, and its grim future as its young people graduate from high school and most of them move off-island, never to return.

Whenever a reporter embeds themselves into a place there can be a temptation to over-identify with your subject matter, resulting in journalism that fails to cast an objective eye on the situation. Happily, that’s not the case with Swift. While it’s clear that he feels affection and respect for the people he meets and lives among on Tangier, he doesn’t shy away from detailing their shortcomings. In particular, the near-universal refusal to believe that climate change is real, let alone playing a role in their island’s peril, is frustrating to read about, as is their hostility to the environmentalists who want to help save the island but who are mistrusted as also wanting to regulate the fisheries that support the islanders. I felt the same about the people’s baffling passivity in the face of their problems; at one point, several of the old watermen are sitting around talking about a meeting on the mainland where decisions will be made that could seriously impact their ability to earn a living from crabbing. “Somebody should go down there and represent the island,” they all agree. But no one is willing to actually do it, and so the meeting takes place without any representation from the people whose lives will be affected.

Beyond the science and the politics, however, I found myself enthralled by Swift’s pellucid descriptions of everyday life. I felt as though I was on board the crabbing boat of Ooker Eskridge, mayor of Tangier and hard-working waterman, as he pulled up his catch and sorted it into pots of jimmies (males), sooks and sallies (females), and peelers (those about to shed their shell and become the coveted soft-shell crab). Late in the book, a sudden storm blows up and puts the lives of father-and-son crabbers in peril when they are caught in the squall far from shore. I could feel the sleet lashing my face and the desperation of the men as they fought to save themselves and their boat. And when word reaches land that they are in trouble, fishermen who had just fought through the same storm and thankfully reached the safety harbor don’t hesitate for an instant before turning around and heading back into the dangerous waters to try to save their friends.

I didn’t come away from A Chesapeake Requiem with any brilliant ideas about what should be done. Should millions of dollars be spent to save what’s left of the island and its few hundred residents? Would the money be better spent to re-locate the people of Tangier to the mainland? What do we as a society lose when we lose places like Tangier — what value do you place on that sort of community benefit when you are calculating what saving the island is worth? Swift doesn’t pretend to have the answers, either, but his moving and enlightening work helped me understand just what’s at stake on this small patch of land so far away from me. show less

Swift details the history and current existence of a slice of American life that is largely invisible and will soon become even more so. What's interesting is how deftly Swift walks the line between showing how climate change is a large part of the issues that Tangier Island faces but doesn't chastise or condescend to the people of Tangier who generally don't see it in quite the same way.

There are beautiful descriptions of life on the water. There are in-depth details about the lifestyle of crabs. There are repeated details about the many familial connections between the people of the island. All of this doesn't add up quite as well as I'd hoped. It becomes repetitious through the middle of the book to the point that I couldn't sustain show more my interest. There wasn't enough of a sense of where the story was going or how these people might actually start to make changes in their lives. I might pick it back up from the library and flip to the last chapter or two to see how things wrapped up. show less

This was a challenging book, as I suspect the author intended it to be. The people of Tangier are facing a twin crisis of sea-level rise induced by climate change and land subsidence triggered by the end of last ice age; their island is vanishing at record speed. They themselves insist on seeing this as "erosion," are fixated on some pretty unlikely and expensive solutions, and make sympathy challenging through their overwhelming support for Trump and antipathy for science and environmentalists. They love each other and are fiercely loyal and passionate about their landscape (which just goes to show that being attached to a landscape is not a panacea for environmental apathy), and also exceedingly sexist and resistant to change.

It show more brings up a lot of compelling questions without easy answers and is a worthwhile exercise in exercising empathy in a challenging situation. Highly recommend. show less

(55) This is a non-fiction account of Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay - a crabbing community that has lived a fairly isolated life on this island since the 19th century. The island has been slowly sinking and suffering the fates of erosion and sea-level rise for the last 100 yrs or so. It seems clear the island will be no more unless the government erects some serious sea walls and land fills to protect and rebuild. The author spent a year or so on the island getting to know its people, their way of life, and their thoughts and philosophy about their vanishing island. I believe Swift did come to admire the Tangier men and women -- but... ummm. . . I sure didn't.

I had a hard time keeping all the people straight given all the show more similar names and last names - a cast of characters would have been helpful. I also ultimately found the intricacies of crabbing quite dull to read about - peelers, and doublers, and sooks, etc. It left me glassy eyed with boredom. Swift's writing is empirically good - although he did jump around a bit in time which was distracting. I most liked the history of the island, the early settlers, the stories of people who came to the island and made great changes. Perhaps if I had read this at a less divisive time in the country, I could have empathized with the Tangiermen more.

Basically, Tangier is like any dying rural town - filled with aging white uneducated evangelicals with chips on their shoulders and words and actions that are rife with ignorance and hypocrisy. The only difference is they are on an island. Does Swift really think his readers could possibly feel empathy for climate change deniers who rally against socialism, but want the government to save their sinking island? C'mon man. . .

I struggled my way through this book - it a lovely exploration of a place. I feel I could walk across the island and recognize everybody and everything and watch the gulls freewheeling in the sunset. But in the main - a bit dull and his subjects were frustrating people. show less