OPINION:
CHESAPEAKE REQUIEM: A YEAR WITH THE WATERMEN OF VANISHING TANGIER ISLAND
By Earl Swift
Dey Street/William Morrow, $28.99, 434 pages
An important place, like a great person, deserves a gifted biographer. Think Dr. Johnson and his Boswell, or Alexander Hamilton and Ron Chernow. Tangier Island, a scrape of sand and seagrass in the lower Chesapeake Bay, found its genius scribe in Earl Swift.
Having come there first as a Norfolk Virginian-Pilot reporter, he returned often, then settled in for a year to comprehend Tangier. “Its importance lies,” he writes, “in its history as an insular community and its status as a test case in our dealings with climate change.” That’s the headline, the shiniest object. The meat of the matter is Tangier’s intriguing past while the book’s soul is its people — devout, tireless, talkative.
Tangier was a prosperous farming community when British forces bivouacked in 1812 and a local pastor hexed them, or at least accurately forewarned heavy losses if they attacked Baltimore. Tangiermen have been devout Methodists ever since, some so God-fearing that on the sabbath they wouldn’t wash dishes or use machinery as complex as scissors.
The island was shrinking even then, as it now — to a fraction of its historical size and not enough above sea level to measure in a storm. Its population shrank, to 500 now, though it remains the hub of the Chesapeake crab fishery — with its forested uplands slimmed into ridges, which daily slide into marsh and wetlands, which disappear under unrelenting waves.
The island became so famous for its plight and characters that President Trump phoned. (Tangier gave him 87 percent of its votes.) As Mayor ’Ooker’ Eskeridge related, “He said ’Your island has been there for hundreds of years and I believe your island will be there for hundreds more.’” To which author Swift adds, “Many islanders are reassured by this.” And “The world at large finds it preposterous.”
Scientists say Tangier is being flooded by interlocking elements: Sea level rise, global warming and “glacial isostatic adjustment” (the relative sinking of a region as adjacent lands rebound from the weight of glaciers). Tangiermen insist the cause of creeping inundation is what they see every day, simple “erosion” which an equally simple dyke or seawall could halt.
Mr. Swift gives ample shrift to the protect-or-abandon arguments and the larger dilemma: This is one map-speck that will soon be drowned by accelerating natural forces. Should it be one of the many we try to save along with Manhattan, Calcutta and Guam? At what cost? How should we choose among them all?
But get not thyself lost in the weeds. “Chesapeake Requiem” is a much bigger book than a report on current controversy. Engaging in its breadth, its details range from hilarious to terrifying to tear-starting as it embraces one island’s geography, ecology, history and its people, the bay-farers.
They “are bound by blood and history to a degree most modern Americans cannot fathom,” Mr. Swift explains. “They are creatures of a place so rooted to their tiny lump of mud in the Chesapeake that they seem products of another age.” Describing their island today, he uncovers how it became “a vestige of America untouched by road rage, fast food, and snark, where anonymity is impossible, accountability unavoidable.”
These exasperating people expect “God’s plan” to save their homestead while science says the water temperature around them rose 2.5 degrees in three-score years. This WASP village takes adopted orphans from India to its heart and refuses to let Hollywood producers shoot a movie with characters drinking alcohol.
In lesser hands these folk might seem quaint. In Mr. Swift’s they are as warm as toast, and crisp, brittle. Writing with pure affection, ungrudging respect and eye-popped incredulity, his narrative seduces like Circe. He has given the literature of the maritime, from Homer to Melville, a new classic in his chapter on the crab boat Henrietta C voyaging in Pequod’s wake.
Debunking the notion that Tangier-talk must be a throwback to Elizabethan English, Mr. Swift calls “Tangier’s odd tongue a tuneful confluence of accent and dialect.” To unaccustomed ears it is “as indecipherable as Tagalog or Navaho [and] rendered all the more foreign by the islanders’ habit of saying exactly the opposite of what they mean.”
The crabbers’ chit-chat over bottomless coffee mugs is an art form entangling convolution/exaggeration/contradiction. Thus it is said that those really big crabs “Don’t take many to make a dozen.” Tangier-speak muddles names: With localities called Meat Soup and Black Dye, with people who answer to Hambone and Woodpecker. Even the gulls have names, like those soiling Mayor Ooker’s dock: John Roberts, Condi Rice, Ann Coulter.
Like the sizes of olives, terms for softshell crabs defy apparent truth: Mediums are small, then in ascending order come hotels (don’t ask why), primes, jumbos and whales. Obfuscations aside, these islanders speak in wry profundities. After steering his mail boat through a killer storm, the skipper tells his passengers “I don’t know who’s dumber — you for coming aboard or me for leaving the dock.” For myself, I don’t know when I’ll read a better book today.
• Philip Kopper, publisher of Posterity Press Inc. in Chevy Chase, Maryland, writes about American history, arts and culture.
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