FIFTY YARDS BEYOND UPPARDS, COOK CANNON LEANS THE Noel C. to starboard and we arc into the shimmering, flat strait between the Canaan shore and Goose Island, a junction of latitude and longitude that was once solid ground. Water has replaced the finger of land that once jutted northward from Tangier—a thin vestige of which survived on a government map from 1917 but had vanished when it was updated twenty-six years later. Off to port, Goose—formerly all but attached to that finger—survives as a wafer of marsh barely clearing the water.
We’re headed to Crisfield, where Cook has to pick up some building supplies. Because he parks the Noel C. toward the west end of the boat channel, it’s his habit to forsake the shorter but molasses-slow putter through the harbor in favor of cutting west into the bay and howling around Uppards at speeds that call to mind life’s frailty. The diesel roars beneath the deck, so conversation means shouting. But it’s a cloudless early morning, the air is crisp and refreshing, and the bay to our south is dotted with deadrises gleaming bright white in the low-angled light. It’s a fine time to be out in a boat with an old salt who’s navigated these waters for most of his seventy-two years.
Cook nods to his left. “That’s Goose Harbor,” he yells, using a term that historically applied to the water just east of the island, but which Tangiermen sometimes use for the island itself. “When I was a boy, this gap between there and Uppards was about three hundred yards across.” I peer across an expanse of water more than four times as wide. Our movement shifts our perspective on the island, which I now see has been split in two and whittled to splinters. “Used to go over there all the time,” Cook tells me. “And you could wade across this gap. I used to wade across it in knee boots, not waders.”
“You could walk there?” I ask. It seems a tall tale.
“Yes, you could,” he says. “Look now. Lot of water here. And deep water, all the way up to the bank.” He turns the boat toward shore, and we hug Uppards’s crumbling peat edge. On his depth gauge, I see that the bottom is ten feet down.
Later, I’ll examine a navigation chart published by the U.S. Coast Survey in 1863 and find that as unlikely as Cook’s assertion seems, it was once possible to walk a much greater distance—from Tangier north to Smith Island, six miles away across the state line—without encountering water more than a foot deep. That chart, shaded to reflect the water’s depth, clearly shows the ghostly remains of the long peninsula that once contained both Tangier and Smith.
Cook steers the boat to the northeast, and we cross water that on the old maps was studded with an archipelago of small islets, holdouts of that sunken peninsula. Few remain. We pass Queen’s Ridge, just east of Goose, which was home to at least one extended family back in Joseph Crockett’s day. Now it has barely enough ground for a campsite. We cruise past a point marked on old maps as long and skinny Little Piney Island but find nothing there but water. The same goes for Reach Hammock, just above Little Piney: vanished. Farther north was a little square of land labeled Herring Island, which Tangiermen called Hearn. Ooker has told me he recalls stepping ashore there as a youngster. “Weren’t very big, but you could walk around,” he said. “My dad used to talk about the days when there was a store on it.” Tangiermen still use Hearn as a reference point, but it’s a phantom conjured from memory. There’s nothing there.
What all these islands lacked in common, Cook hollers, was sand: Sand protects a shoreline. “Sand makes the water go up and over the bank. When the sand’s gone and the water comes in, what it does instead is this.” He smacks his fist into his palm. “What it does is undermine the shore, and it breaks off in big chunks.”
Sand used to line Tangier’s west side, he tells me. In his youth, the islanders didn’t hike down to the spit to play on a beach; they made the far shorter journey to the point where West Ridge Road meets Hog Ridge today. Taking a lane that cut to the west, they walked past several houses and through marsh and high grass to a place they called Cow’s Hole. “We used to play cowboys down there,” Cook says. “There was that tall grass, that good-to-lie-down-in grass, and it was a good walk through there. I’d say as much as half a mile.” The hike ended at a lovely beach. Whatever protection its sand provided to Tangier didn’t last, for the beach itself proved no match for the bay. It washed away, the sand drifting south to the spit—until the bay dislodged it there, too, and carried it away from the island for good.
Cook steers us up along Smith’s eastern flank. Smith is not one island but a cluster and, not counting the wildlife refuge that occupies the biggest of them, it’s at least four times the size of Tangier. From its underside, three tentacles of land dangle southward, their tips crossing into Virginia. One used to have an island off its end called Shanks. It was settled in the eighteenth century and occupied through much of the nineteenth; Joseph Crockett’s daughter Molly spent much of her life there. Nothing remains of it but its name, preserved in Shanks Creek, a tidal inlet to the east of where the island once lay.
We race past a crabbing area called the Peach Orchard, named for a point of land that once occupied the spot. Rooftops peaking over the marsh advertise Tylerton, one of Smith’s three villages. Unconnected by road to the other two, it can be reached only by boat. The “yarnies” there, which is what Tangiermen call Smith Islanders, have much in common with their neighbors—a life sequestered from the mainstream, nearly indecipherable accents, and a home that has steadily shrunk over generations.
We cross the state line, marked by a widely spaced chain of white buoys. Up ahead Crisfield looms, its water tower and several big waterfront condo buildings glowing against the sky. Cook steers the Noel C. into the mouth of the Little Annemessex River, so wide that it seems we’re entering a bay rather than a short creek. Off to port stretches a white sand beach, and on it stands a tall brick chimney. It’s all that remains of a fish-processing plant that burned in 1932 and now serves as an aid to mariners as surely as a lighthouse. A good piece away on our other side is the river’s low, marshy, and crumbling south bank. “When I was a boy, we had to stay to the left here, almost all the way to that chimney, to get into Crisfield,” Cook tells me. “This over here”—he nods across the two hundred yards of water to our right—“was all land. It was really big, and now all of it has washed away. Just since I was a boy.”
It’s a reminder that the effects of rising seas are not limited to the Chesapeake’s islands. It has fueled erosion that’s stolen vast acreage from the bay’s edges, from the Susquehanna to the Virginia Capes. Since the mid-nineteenth century, it has chewed away bluffs, erased beaches, and undermined forest. Up in Maryland, the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, created as a layover on the Atlantic Flyway for migratory waterfowl, saw five thousand of its nearly twenty-nine thousand acres of marsh turn to open water between 1938 and 2009. The loss is significant: The refuge contains one-third of the state’s tidal wetlands.
The northernmost mainland community on Virginia’s piece of the Eastern Shore, a low-lying watermen’s village called Saxis, is flooded by even minor storms, and high water has carried off many of the crab houses that lined its waterfront for generations. With their destruction, Saxis lost its commercial heart. It’s pervaded today by the unmistakable air of a ghost town in the making: The principal road snaking through town dead-ends at a business district consisting of a coffee shop, a tiki bar, and a cinder block crab-picking house.
Sixty miles to the south, at the Chesapeake’s mouth in Hampton Roads—a metropolitan area of 1.7 million inhabitants that includes the state’s two biggest cities, Virginia Beach and Norfolk—high tides routinely submerge neighborhood streets under water deep enough for motorboat traffic, and northeasters sometimes maroon entire sections of town. Photographs of cars stranded in water up past their windows have become a post-storm cliché in the Virginian-Pilot.
The region’s relative sea level is rising even faster than Tangier’s, because the much larger population there has tapped an underground aquifer for its water, and draining it has hastened the subsidence of the land above. Among the properties at risk is the mammoth Norfolk Naval Base, home to the Atlantic Fleet. Its aircraft carriers, guided missile destroyers, and submarines aren’t at risk—they’re built to float, after all—but the piers where they tie up, the pipes and utilities that supply them, and the streets their sailors travel to report for duty are in serious peril. The Hampton Roads Transportation Planning Organization, a panel of local, state, and federal officials and leading citizens tasked with adapting the region’s highways to the looming crisis, reckoned in a May 2016 report that the bay could rise two feet there by 2045.
All of which is to say that Tangier Island is not alone in its struggle with the sea. It’s just furthest along in the battle and the worst for it. The problems there will soon be felt elsewhere, just as Tangier is now vexed by challenges similar to those of Holland Island a century ago.
And we know how those turned out.
COOK THROTTLES BACK the engine and we chug past Crisfield’s city dock, where the Courtney Thomas ties up. We veer through a narrow passage into the vast Somers Cove Marina, the biggest haven for boaters in this part of the Chesapeake, with more than five hundred slips, a big dockmaster’s office, and a busy Coast Guard station lining its edges. Cook leaves the cabin for the stern steering station and, with typical Tangier nonchalance, spins the boat and backs it into a slip in a single fluid maneuver. It’s all the more impressive because Cook’s virtually blind in his left eye, thanks to a childhood accident, and as Leon has advised in the Situation Room: “If you ain’t got both eyes, you got to be real particular if you’re bringing a boat into the dock, because you can’t tell how far away you are. You’ll run into it.”
We tie the boat in place and walk up the dock and across a parking lot to a black Ford F-150 that Cook uses when he’s on duty. He’s in his ninth year with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the bay and its drainage. It traces its beginnings to 1964, when a handful of Baltimore businessmen worried over lunch that people were overusing and underloving the bay, which was degrading its water quality, disrupting its wildlife, and spoiling its quiet beauty. The humble group they founded has grown into a noisy and effective advocate for restoring the Chesapeake’s health, with a cadre of scientists, lawyers, and educators, backed by a committed army of volunteers.
Its mission has at times put the foundation at odds with Tangier’s crabbers. Islanders will allow that the CBF has done a lot of good, particularly in raising public awareness about the bay’s fragility. But in its past dealings with commercial watermen, the foundation could come across as high-handed and smarter-than-thou. It seemed quick to dismiss the wisdom that crabbers had gleaned in decades of working the water. Its fresh-scrubbed activists talked about the bay as if they knew all about it. Tangiermen lived in it. The activists, they argued, were often flat-out wrong.
The islanders, on the other hand, didn’t always come off as wise or reasonable. They sometimes seemed to think they had a God-given right to plunder the Chesapeake as they saw fit, and that their heritage granted them immunity from laws and regulations. They denounced the science that CBF held dear if it didn’t square with their more anecdotal learning. They invariably referred to the group by its motto—“Save the Bay”—and they often said it with a sneer. When relations were at their worst, in the mid-to late nineties, the island was pretty much at war with the outfit. Tourists pulled into a harbor lined with signs denouncing the CBF as an enemy to people who depended on the bay for their living.
These days the two are getting on better. The foundation has made a heartfelt effort to seek the advice and input of watermen—to treat them as valued players in the bay’s culture and health—and to do a better job of explaining its research and aims. Tangiermen have tried to squelch their distrust of scientists and regulators and to treat Save the Bay as neighbors, especially the young staffers who spend summers on the P’int, at the Port Isobel education center. As they achieved a cautious détente, the foundation took to boating groups of students and teachers to Tangier to visit with crabbers and watch them work, giving both sides more time in each other’s company. That helped, too. Ooker’s crab shanty is a regular tour stop.
At first inspection, Cook Cannon might seem an odd fit with the organization. He is a man of strong opinion and very loud volume—even in private conversation, he tends to speak in a near shout—and while he’s prone to smiles and devoutly religious, he also has a quick-flaring temper and little fear of an argument. Like most Tangier men of his generation, he quit school at fifteen to work the water with his stepfather, and he doesn’t necessarily agree with the foundation’s science. “The company I work for believes in global warming,” he’s told me. “They know how I feel about it, too. I don’t believe in it. I think it’s a load of crap.”
But consider: When Cook was seventeen his stepdad was hurt aboard their boat, and the boy became his family’s breadwinner. He chased work wherever he could find it—crabbing, naturally, but also building and remodeling houses, laying phone cable, honing his skills as a plumber, electrician, and mechanic. He spent six years in the engine room of an Army Corps of Engineers dredge. Then, in 1988, he landed a job as supervisor of the town’s sewage treatment plant and trash incinerator, a $3.5 million facility that had quit working after just five years of operation. Few had faith that he’d be able to fix it. Gases from the plant’s sludge tank had chewed through wiring and control panels and had so corroded steel catwalks and ladders that they couldn’t support his weight. Failed pumps had spewed sewage ankle-deep on the concrete floor.
Mainland experts wrote off the mess as unsalvageable and talked about spending millions of dollars to replace it. Cook got to work. He cleaned out the sludge, rewired the controls, rebuilt the pumps, and returned the plant to full operation, mostly by studying each component and sussing out what made it work. “I’m not naturally smart,” he said, “but I was determined.”
The Tangier Town Council was so awed and grateful that it voted to grant him the job for life. All of which made him, twenty years later, a peerless candidate for the job of caring for the CBF’s four educational facilities on the bay: a couple of big, old houses in Tylerton; a former hunting lodge on Fox Island; the big complex of dorms, docks, and a conference hall at Port Isobel; and a mainland outpost at Bishops Head, Maryland, near the Blackwater refuge.
WE ROLL OUT of Somers Cove and onto Crisfield’s Main Street as Cook rails about Tangier’s boat channel, which opens the harbor to westerly winds and agitates the water around the crab shanties. “You talk about a rough harbor,” he says. “We’re the only port on the whole bay that ain’t got a good harbor. And we’re the seafood capital of the world. You know that ain’t right.” Talk has bounced around for years, he says, about building a stone breakwater on the island’s western shore to protect the channel. But every time it’s appeared about to happen, either the money has fallen through or the Corps of Engineers, which oversees such projects, has opted to think on it a bit more. “They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to study it, and they never get around to actually doing anything,” Cook roars. “I say it’s time to stop listening to politicians and take action ourselves—if it’s right or if it’s wrong.” One grows accustomed to hearing such talk from Cook, though that’s all it is. If Tangiermen could take action themselves, they’d have done so years ago.
Crisfield is quiet this morning. We encounter few other vehicles along the mile and a half to the hardware store and lumberyard where Cook is to pick up a pile of posts he’ll use to build osprey nests on Smith Island. Cook’s boss, a fit CBFer named Paul Willey, is waiting in the parking lot in a Patagonia ball cap and cargo pants. He and Cook venture into the store and emerge with a load of salt-treated four-by-fours. The three of us drive back to Somers Cove, passing under Crisfield’s water tower, the orange crabs on its tank faded to a pale pink, and through a downtown of scattered restaurants, a shuttered bank, a stately but long-abandoned customs-house, and an abundance of vacant lots. Main Street dead-ends out at the end of the city dock, which is wide enough to accommodate a lane of traffic, angled parking, and a covered waiting area beside the mailboat tie-ups, and which is flanked by large condominium blocks built on stilts at the water’s edge. All’s quiet down there, too. Loudspeakers over at the Coast Guard station sound reveille as we haul the wood across fifty yards of lawn and dock to the boat. Sweating, we untie from the slip and motor out of the marina, passing a line of old brick crab-packing plants—relics of days when this waterfront was far too occupied with the business of picking and packing seafood to leave room for condos.
In the cabin, conversation centers on the meager number of peelers in the water off Tangier and the season’s slow start for hard crabbers. “For the last three years,” Cook says, “things been different. The crabs have been acting different. I think they got smart. I think they figured it out.” Meaning, presumably, that the crustaceans have developed higher reasoning skills and are consciously outmaneuvering the island’s watermen.
Willey, a boat captain in his own right who has worked on and around the water for CBF since 1989, sounds like a doubter: “You think they got smart just in the last three years?”
“Let me tell you, every spring we’ve always had two runs,” Cook says. “For the past three years, those ain’t happened.”
Willey cocks an eyebrow. “So you think that in the last three years, the crabs got it all figured out?”
Cook nods vigorously. “If you can train an alligator, you can train a crab.”
Willey throws up his hands. “Cook, nobody’s training the crabs!”
Out on Tangier Sound, the subject turns, inevitably, to erosion. Cook rants for a few minutes about the longed-for Tangier breakwater, and Willey acknowledges that the Corps of Engineers is a tough organization to read. “One thing that’s been a tough nut to crack, even though we have a good relationship, is getting them to tell us exactly what stage the breakwater is in,” he tells me. “We try our best, but we always seem to be waiting for information.”
The shriveled marshes of Smith Island slide past the boat’s windows as Cook notes the sorry state of Uppards and the shoreline’s retreat all around Tangier. Willey nods sympathetically. “The natural process of the bay is erosion and filling in,” he says. “But it’s tough when it affects critical pieces of the bay, places that shaped the bay—and, of course, people’s homes.”
Well, Cook says, one solution might be to take dredge spoils from elsewhere in the bay and blow them onto Tangier. Build the island up. Replace what the bay steals. Buy it more time. It worked at the P’int, he says—before the foundation moved onto the islet, it was owned by a fellow who dumped a mountain of fill there, then planted hundreds of trees, stabilizing what might otherwise have washed away. “That was marsh,” he says, “and ain’t that the prettiest place now?”
“But that’s a slippery slope, Cook,” Willey counters. “That’ll give people an excuse to use fill to make uplands from marsh that they ought to just leave alone. When it’s going away, you want to lash out at everybody, but sometimes you have to just accept that this is the natural course.” The CBF’s belief in that principle likely will doom its Fox Island education center, Willey tells us. The center occupies a rambling, wood-frame hunting lodge built in 1929, when the land on which it stood was still called Great Fox Island—to distinguish it from Little Fox, off to the south. Since then, Little Fox has disappeared completely, and its big sister has eroded to a whisper of marsh. The lodge is unprotected, wide open to the weather, its demise only a matter of time. “And it’s a shame,” Willey says, “because Fox Island is such a powerful place. Imagine being a kid from Baltimore and being out on Fox Island, in a place so remote, with no lights around. It’s fantastic.”
Later, as Cook and I cruise back to Tangier, having left Willey in Tylerton, we can see the Fox Island lodge a few miles off to port, a big white rectangle that seems to float on the water. The clubhouse, as mariners know it, is such a familiar sight that it’s difficult to imagine this part of the bay without it. But the day is coming—and soon.
Erosion devoured not only Fox’s uplands and marsh, but the sandbars that for centuries cushioned it from the worst a storm might dish out. Within the memory of older Tangiermen, the shallows south of Fox were shallow indeed. At low tide, only a film of water covered the flats of sand and mud all the way down to Watts Island. Jerry Frank Pruitt, born in 1944, has told me that he can remember “seeing the tree stumps under the water” down that way. “They were big old round stumps, big trees.
“It was so shallow, all you could get through there was a skiff, at low tide,” he said. “That’s how it was when I was a teenager.”
No longer. Winds and currents have scoured the bay’s floor, robbing Fox of the speed bumps that softened the effects of wind and tide. A single hard blow will finish the place. The clubhouse and Fox itself are, as Tangiermen say, “going away from here in a hurry.”
THIS WOULD HAVE been unimaginable when the Fox Islands were inhabited, and Watts, too, and thanks to the oyster business, Tangier’s head count was growing by leaps. By the outbreak of the Civil War the wintertime oyster harvest was Tangier’s “main dependence,” Adam Wallace wrote in his 1861 biography of Joshua Thomas, The Parson of the Islands. Even then it was “conjectured that the supply, in the Chesapeake waters, must soon fail, in view of the immense quantities taken up annually, and the increasing facilities with which (the oysters) are obtained.”
War’s end only intensified the oyster harvest, with boosts from several simultaneous developments. In 1866, the Eastern Shore Railroad pushed a line into the small, sleepy waterfront village of Somers Cove, and instantly the oyster trade had a way to get its catch to the big cities of the East. Shucking and packing houses sprouted along the water’s edge by the dozens, and in 1872 the fast-growing burg renamed itself Crisfield, after the railroad’s president. Enterprising townsfolk filled the marshes at water’s edge with mountains of oyster shells discarded by the industry; over time they created a peninsula jutting into the Little Annemessex that became the town’s business district. Crisfield was literally built on the oyster.
Canning plants followed not far behind the railroad, and soon diners a thousand miles from the sea could enjoy the fruits of a Tangierman’s labor. The more available the oysters became, the greater the public’s demand for them grew, and Crisfield boomed. Its register of sailing vessels grew to be the biggest in the country. Even today, older Tangiermen can remember it as a town that supplied virtually all their needs. Its business district boasted department stores and five-and-dimes, along with dress shops, shoe stores, places that outfitted kids for school, and a slew of restaurants, some catering to families, others to watermen. It had an opera house and, later, movie theaters. Grand churches. Big neoclassical and Romanesque banks equal to those anywhere. And rightly so, because the oyster catch landing at Crisfield ran into the millions of bushels a year, which brought money and lots of it.
That would soon enough cause trouble, as money will, between the watermen of Virginia and Maryland—and, in particular, the populations of Tangier and Smith islands. But in the meantime, the Civil War’s end brought a more immediate crisis. Cholera arrived in October 1866. It was Tangier’s first epidemic, and although there’d later be outbreaks of measles, tuberculosis, and smallpox, none exacted so high a toll or excited such panic. “The first case occurred on Tangier Island on the 10th instant,” the New York Times reported on the twenty-seventh, “and from that date to the 21st, there were thirteen deaths.” The paper advised that most cases “could be traced to some imprudence in diet,” adding: “One or two ate watermellons [sic] and many others oysters.”
Oysters could, in fact, harbor the disease, but the real culprit was more likely the growing settlement’s casual approach to sanitation. Cholera is caused by a microbe that lurks in raw sewage and, when swallowed, attaches itself to the walls of the small intestine. The consequences are grim: gushes of watery diarrhea that lead to potentially fatal dehydration and that can, in turn, infect those tending to the patient. Easily treated today, cholera killed millions worldwide in the nineteenth century, including former president James K. Polk.
In 1866 Tangier’s households relied on privies, which were not set astride deep holes, as was the style on the mainland—the water table was too high for that—but over narrow “sewer ditches” that were theoretically flushed by the give and take of the tides. Never mind that these ditches emptied into larger canals that served as the island’s transportation grid. In those days, the roads were even narrower than they are today and suited only to foot traffic. To move cargo—wood for stoves, blocks of ice, furniture—islanders on the Main Ridge used small skiffs they’d “shove” with poles into the Big Gut, then turn up ditches they’d dug into their backyards, which effectively served as their driveways but also devolved quickly into open-air cesspools. Children routinely played in the waterways. Watermen invariably spent time in the same water, working on boats or rinsing off gear. It was all too easy to get an accidental mouthful of ditch water or to scoop drinking water from a cistern with unwashed hands. Or, yes, to eat an oyster exposed to sewage and infected with the microbe.
“The people began to die very fast,” Sugar Tom recalled. “We did not know what it was until the physicians told us, and as many as six adults would die in twenty-four hours. I could hear the voice of weeping all night.” The outbreak apparently led to the island’s evacuation—Sugar Tom wrote that “nearly all the people left”—though how long they stayed away, how many decided to remain on the mainland, and how many succumbed have all been lost to memory.
The wonder is that the disease didn’t return, for island homes continued to rely on privies and sewer ditches even as the population mushroomed. Most didn’t have indoor plumbing until after World War II, and even then it didn’t connect to a bona fide sewer system; indoor toilets flushed into septic tanks or, just as often, pipes that crossed the yards and emptied into open water. Bruce Gordy’s wife, Peggy, told me that none of her homes had indoor plumbing until she and Bruce rented a place in Meat Soup in the late sixties. Their modern toilet dumped directly into the main harbor.
The situation wasn’t remedied until Tangier installed water and sewer lines in the early 1980s, meaning that everyone in the Situation Room has had experience with outhouses. “Where those toilets used to be, the marsh would be this high,” Jerry Frank Pruitt told me one afternoon, holding his hand over his head, “and everywhere else it would be this high.” He dropped his hand to waist level.
“Yeah. Good fertilizer,” Ooker said. “It got high around the sewer ditches, too.”
“These ditches,” I interrupted. “Did you guys go swimming there?”
Ooker nodded. “You’d run into a floater every once in a while.” “Have to do a reverse dog paddle,” Allen Ray Crockett recalled. They both laughed. “Yeah,” Ooker said. “Exactly.”
ON AN AFTERNOON four or five generations beyond the cholera, I climb into Carol Moore’s skiff to thud up the west side of Uppards to the ghost of Canaan. I’ve prepared for the trip by donning long pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and drenching myself in DEET. “I can smell your insect repellent from here,” Carol yells from the boat’s stern, where she’s guiding the tiller. “It won’t do any good. It won’t even slow them down.”
At Canaan, several tombstones lie on their backs near the surf line, along with tiny, scattered relics of the village: bricks worn porous and smooth, rusted cogs and sprigs of iron that once made machines, slivers of ancient lumber, glass.
“I’m going to walk this way.” Carol points to the east. “You want to hang around here and see what you find? Or you could walk down the west side.” As she speaks, flies home in on the fresh meat come ashore and orbit around us. “Look close, and you might find some arrowheads,” she says. “I’ll meet you back here.”
She strolls away. A fly smacks into my cheek, but it doesn’t land. Others buzz within an inch of my ears, but the DEET, for the moment, appears to be working. I wander over to the stones and stop at the tall, worn slab of marble dedicated to Polly J. Parks, who died on December 4, 1913. Canaan was a busy village then, home to more than one hundred people. Its docks jutted from a waterfront now submerged under the strait that Cook and I traversed in his boat. In Polly Parks’s day, the long finger of land linking Uppards to Goose Island, withered but intact, still guarded the Canaan shoreline from westerlies.
I brush sand away from her stone, which is cracked across its middle. Above the crack are the dates bookending her life. The inscription below the crack reads:
Here in the silent graveyard,
’Neath the sod and dew;
Never one moment forgotten
In sorrow we think of you.
What the stone does not reveal: That friends and family called her Dollie. That she was born a Pruitt and was directly descended from George Pruitt II, Joshua Thomas’s stepbrother, and Leah Evans, Joseph Crockett’s granddaughter. That she grew up in a crowded house, one of twelve children. That she married Harry Parks, a direct descendant of Job Parks and Leah’s sister, Rhoda, the first settlers at Canaan. That her kin survive: Polly’s great-great-nephew is Jerry Frank Pruitt, and her grandson Stewart married Jerry Frank’s sister Connie. That after Polly’s death, Harry remarried and outlived her by thirty-nine years.
Now her headstone lies broken and overwashed by the tide. The place where she raised her seven children, who would go on to seed much of Tangier’s living population, has been swallowed by the rising bay, leaving behind nothing but shards. A palpable melancholy hangs over Canaan, not only because it offers such scant evidence of the generations who lived here, but because it offers a glimpse of what may come.
Carol returns, having found little in her wanderings. It’s a lovely, windless afternoon, and the sun remains high in the sky, so we elect to cross the strait to Goose Island. We pick our way through the shallows around its edges, running aground time and again, Carol reversing course to keep the outboard’s propeller from chewing too deep into the bottom, and finally make landfall on the islet’s southeast tip. As small as Goose appeared from Cook’s boat, it seems even less substantial as we tread its edges. It rises to a foot, maybe two, above the bay. Wild petunias sprout from the low dunes. The island’s interior is a bog of stagnant tidal pools, surfaces veneered in scum, minnows busy below.
We prog the water’s edge for a few minutes as shorebirds circle and swoop overhead, calling and crying. Then, having searched what little ground Goose has to offer, we push off for Queen’s Ridge, a few yards to the east. This once-inhabited place is now little more than a narrow tuft of marsh grass. No point in searching for remnants of its past. There’s nowhere left to look.