CHAPTER 9
A Coastal Playground Is Disappearing
“You don’t like it, do you, Rocco—the storm? Show it your gun, why don’t you? If it doesn’t stop, shoot it.”
—Humphrey Bogart, Key Largo
Tybee Island, Georgia — Paul Wolff leans over the railing and yells down at me.
“Chapman,” he bellows. “What are you driving?”
“A Subaru,” I say, sheepishly.
“You should be driving a Prius or a Leaf or some other alternative. Not an SUV,” he scoffs.
I mumble something about my kids and good gas mileage and it not really being an SUV. No good. Not even my Grateful Dead bumper sticker mollifies Paul, the Apostle of Climate Weirding, who preaches the gospel of a warming world.
I pass the jumble of old bikes, kayaks, and other beachy paraphernalia crammed into his open-air garage and climb to the third-floor aerie amid the treetops. A placard in the side yard certifies the property as wildlife habitat. I let myself in. The smell of four cats hits me before I see Paul’s smiling face. He offers me a beer. I decline. I want to take a bike ride.
Paul is one of the Georgia coast’s leading environmentalists, a former Tybee Island city councilman who dragged the hippie-redneck outpost into the vanguard of climate-change activism. I’ve interviewed him many times over the last fifteen years and learned boatloads. On an island full of characters, known affectionately one time or another as the “Truck Stop by the Sea” or “Mayberry on LSD,” Paul stands out. Everybody knows him, and not solely because of the shoulder-length, electric-white hair with matching beard that lends itself to prophetic comparisons. That long-legged dude cruising the island on a low-ride Dyno Roadster beach bike? That’s Paul.
He wheels the Roadster out to the street. I get the less sexy Dyno Glide with the broken seat that keeps me swiveling like a bobblehead as we begin Tybee Climate Tour 2020.
First stop: The island’s back side dredged from Venetian Inlet muck in the 1930s so sharpie real estate types could sell swampy lots to sun-seeking Savannahians. Hundreds of cottages were laid out in a checkerboard pattern of streets (east-to-west) and avenues (north-to-south). Today, the modest homes of administrators, artisans, and Atlanta retirees underscores Tybee’s Everyman charm. The allure, though, fades as higher tides, heavier rains, and more-frequent hurricanes lash the lower-lying half of Tybee—elevation seven feet on a good day. Lying along a very vulnerable Georgia coast, Tybee’s back side is one of the spots most vulnerable to the vagaries of a warming world and the realities of sea-level rise. So-called sunny-day flooding is a problem, too. And when the hurricanes and big storms hit, the folks living along Tybee’s southeastern edge bear the brunt of Mother Nature’s fury.
We dismount on Chatham Avenue. Kayakers skim the river. Little Tybee Island, barren and recently scorched by wildfire, fills the distance.
“This is the land that wasn’t there,” Paul says of big Tybee’s back side. “It’s all reclaimed mud and floods like crazy. It’s impermeable, with the worst drainage on the island, because it’s not sand. It’s going to be the land that isn’t there in the future, too.”
Next stop: Nineteenth Street and the island’s southernmost point, which stands naked to the Atlantic Ocean. The beach is near full just days after the governor (prematurely) loosened coronavirus rules on public gatherings. Container ships line the Tybee Roads, the offshore anchorage, waiting for a chance to steam up the Savannah River to the port. Big houses loom over the beach, taunting tropical disturbances to come ashore, something they’ve done with alarming frequency in recent years. Hurricane Irma was downgraded to a tropical storm by the time it hit Tybee in September 2017. But the storm surge reached nearly five feet—the second-highest ever recorded—and flattened sand dunes, flooded living rooms, and tossed sailboats onto streets.
“The surge was really bad here,” Paul recalls while standing at the end of the boardwalk. “It’s the most quickly eroding end of the island.”
Last stop: North Beach. We mount our Dyno steeds and cruise Butler Avenue, the main drag, past the pier, city hall, Fort Screven, and the lighthouse. Daufuskie Island, where Paul owns a cabin and runs a golf cart rental business, reflects the late-afternoon sun across Calibogue Sound. Fifty-foot dunes once towered over the beach, but when the War Department gave Fort Screven to the City, the dunes were leveled and spread along nearby streets. Little dunes now, bravely, stand sentinel.
“I hope they’ll protect us from the consequences of sea-level rise,” Paul says, wishfully.
Paul’s tour bummed me out, but I was still enjoying the freedom from my self-imposed Covid exile. After leaving the riverkeeper, I re-created Muir’s route from Augusta to Savannah as best I could. Muir, too, was eager to quit Augusta after spending one dollar for a comfy night at the Planter’s Hotel downtown. He got up early the next day, wolfed down “a cheap breakfast,” and set off along the river road. James Hunt wrote that Muir “dove into his botany” and that “his temperament improved.” He chronicled different grasses, apricot vines, liatris, goldenrods, saw palmettos, and pomegranates.
“Toward evening I came to the county of one of the most striking of southern plants, the so-called ‘Long Moss’ or Spanish Moss,” Muir wrote. “The trees hereabouts have all their branches draped with it, producing a remarkable effect.”
He lodged one evening with a Mr. Cameron, a wealthy planter who was scouring rust off the cotton gin saws he’d hidden in a farm pond to avoid destruction by General Sherman’s troops. Mr. Cameron waxed eloquent about the future of “e-lec-tricity” and how one day it would run trains, steamships, and the world. The hydroelectric dams on the Savannah River would prove Mr. Cameron prescient.
I’m keen to find the planter’s antebellum home along the old Central Georgia Railroad outside the town of Sylvania. Cameron Station, though, no longer exists. But Indian Branch Creek supposedly runs along his property, so I aim for it.
I pass Chemical Alley and, within an hour, the Vogtle nuclear power plant’s hulking cooling towers. Row upon row of RVs and campers fill nearby farm fields, providing temporary housing for thousands of construction workers building the nuke plant’s last two units. I reach US 301, the old north–south highway that sun lovers took to reach Florida before the interstates. The Dreamland, Skylark, Pine View, and Syl-Va-Lane motels, some covered in kudzu with caved-in roofs, beckon motorists outside town. A frayed “Join the SCV” sign attached to a fence post invites Southerners to rekindle their Lost Cause ardor. At the futuristic-looking welcome center at the river, opened in 1962, ice-cold Cokes and salty peanuts await travelers who prefer the slow lane. The “hostesses” who worked there in the sixties once regaled me with hilarious tales of Northern motorists inching up to the counter to determine whether the young women wore shoes.
I can’t find Mr. Cameron’s plantation. I get lost and end up on the other side of Sylvania. Suddenly, the two-lane blacktop turns into a narrow dirt road. The GPS stops working. The oak trees creep closer, shrouding the road in leaves and moss. Deep potholes reduce the speed limit to fifteen. Small farms with long-exhausted cotton fields and fat cows are bordered by dark-water cypress swamps. It’s a tableau eerily similar to Muir’s time. I picture him loping down this country road looking for a spot to sleep, fearing the serpents of the swamp, and hoping a farmhouse magically appears. Rare today are the locations along Muir’s route that resemble life in 1867. I even see a man with a walking stick crossing a field.
But then, just as quickly, I return to the twenty-first century of paved roads, jacked-up pickups, and center-pivot farms. Muir most likely followed the Old River Road, an Indian trail transformed, according to a roadside historical marker, into “the longest white man’s way in Georgia.” He probably passed through the settlement of New Ebenezer with its red-brick, green-shuttered Jerusalem Lutheran Church, circa 1769. But he didn’t mention it. Nor did he mention Mulberry Grove Plantation outside Savannah, where Eli Whitney supposedly invented the cotton gin that remade the South. This was also the likely route of William Bartram, the South’s other preeminent botanical explorer, who trekked between Savannah and Augusta on a couple of occasions in the 1770s.
I hurry, as Muir did, the last miles into Savannah. The port’s sprawl has turned US 21 into a mash of warehouses, truck-repair depots, skanky motels, rundown churches, and public housing. The Bag still emits the smell of rotten eggs.
Muir arrived on October 8 and headed straight to the Adams Express office in search of a package from his brother. It hadn’t arrived. “Feel dreadfully lonesome and poor,” Muir wrote. “Went to the meanest looking lodging-house I could find, on account of its cheapness.”
The next day he took the Thunderbolt Road south of town for his fateful stay in Bonaventure Cemetery.
I pass Bonaventure the following morning after a pleasant evening camping alongside a salt marsh at a state park below Savannah. I cross the Wilmington River and descend onto Skidaway Island, home of the University of Georgia’s Skidaway Institute of Oceanography, whose director, Clark Alexander, has also educated me about climate science over the years. Clark, wearing a blue face mask, welcomes me to his near-empty office building. We exchange socially distant fist-bumps. He’s hunkered over a computer, trying to figure out how to cut 10 percent of the Institute’s budget in light of the state’s projected pandemic-depleted tax receipts. Virtually all research has been shut down. Clark is a marine geologist who has studied the impact of sedimentation on river systems, tidal flats, and continental shelves in China, Brazil, Russia, South Korea, and California. In Georgia, he’s now focused on the tidal and climactic forces that move shorelines. When he’s not balancing budgets.
“After Hurricane Irma [in 2017] I have given more talks on storm surge, coastal hazards, and the implications of sea-level rise on the coast than I did over the last twenty years,” says Clark, whose office affords a lovely view of expansive lawns and moss-covered oaks leading to the Skidaway River. “It’s on people’s radar now. They’re paying attention.”
They’d better. Clark tells me how the oceans absorb a third of all carbon dioxide emissions and act as the planet’s largest carbon sink. That’s a good thing. Imagine how hot it’d be if the oceans didn’t act as one big heat-sucking sponge. But all that heat is making the oceans warmer, too—a lot warmer. That’s a bad thing. The world’s oceans have warmed one and a half degrees Fahrenheit since 1900, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. More recent studies, though, show that the United Nations may have woefully underestimated the warming by 40 percent. Scientists in the United States and Canada reported in 2020 that the Atlantic Ocean is the hottest it has been in nearly three thousand years. All that hot water leads to a host of climate ills: melting glaciers; sea-level rise; coral bleaching; animal migrations; nasty weather.
The Skidaway Institute sends underwater gliders packed with sensors in front of hurricanes to measure temperatures and salinity levels in order to help predict the storm’s intensity. Variations in temperatures at different depths are believed to impact a hurricane’s force. The torpedo-shaped crafts surface occasionally to transmit the data via satellite to hurricane modelers who determine whether a storm is weakening or strengthening before reaching land. Hurricane Laura was a Category-1 storm upon leaving Cuba for the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico in August 2020. It was a Cat-4 eighteen hours later when it hit Cameron, Louisiana—one of the strongest storms to ever hit Louisiana—and killed thirty people.
“We don’t know if there are more storms, but we do know that they’re more intense,” Clark says. “The warmer water is just more fuel for hurricanes.”
Tropical storms and hurricanes vacuum up moisture from the Atlantic and the Gulf, adding to the already substantial amount of rainwater embedded in the storms. Researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Wisconsin reported in 2020 that the odds of tropical storms turning into Category-3, -4, or -5 hurricanes are increasing due to global warming. In fact, six of the worst hurricanes over the last fifty years have occurred since 2016. Hurricanes are coming earlier and staying later. And 2021 was the seventh year in a row that a tropical depression formed prior to official hurricane season.
A warmer Atlantic wreaks havoc underwater, too. Marine heat waves kill coral reefs by killing the food source—algae—they need to survive. Maybe half of Florida’s reef, which runs from West Palm Beach to the Lower Keys, is dead. Nitrogen from fertilizer and septic-tank sewage also harms reefs. Nevertheless, scientists consider the warming water Enemy Number One, particularly for the hundreds of species that live among, and depend upon, the reefs as breeding grounds and food pantries. Turtles. Crabs. Lobsters. Jellyfish. Grouper. Snapper. Lobster. Shrimp. They’re all in trouble.
Georgia shrimpers first observed black gill disease in the 1990s, but the energy-sapping, livelihood-killing parasitic fungus that causes the disease has spread widely in recent years. Skidaway biologists discovered that smaller harvests occur after particularly warm-water winters. In one study, they deduced that raising water temps by two degrees Fahrenheit increased mortality rates for infected shrimp as much as 70 percent. The shrimp, like many warm-water fish, keep moving north.
As do lionfish, an invasive predator discovered off Fort Lauderdale in 1985. These red-white-and-black killers, with venomous, pointy fins, corral their prey into coral corners before attacking. They can eat fish more than half their size. They’re rather indiscriminate gourmands, too, devouring more than seventy different types of fish and invertebrates, including snappers, groupers, parrotfish, and shrimp. Once a lionfish moves in, the neighborhood empties out. Florida officials implore fishermen to kill them on sight. Restaurants, though, prize their moist and buttery flesh.
“They’re quite tasty,” says Clark, who has partaken of lionfish at local restaurants.
A warming ocean expands lionfish habitat. They’re now wreaking havoc off the coast of Georgia. Mangrove forests are also on the doorstep, threatening to outmuscle Spartina alterniflora, the iconic cordgrass that frames the state’s saltwater marshes. Mangroves provide many of the same ecological benefits as salt marshes, like erosion control and carbon sequestration, but they also displace indigenous plants, animals, and wading birds. The sinewy, stilt-like plants typically only grow at tropical or subtropical latitudes because they hate the cold. Clark says mangroves “change the food web. They change the ecosystem. The big woody plants drop their leaves, which are more refractory than spartina and harder to break down, which makes it harder for organisms to get good nutrition from the plants.”
He adds, “Species will continue to migrate in response to climate change. You see it in fish. You see it in plants. You see it all around us. That’s not going to stop. With increasing temperatures we’ll see new diseases from warmer climates that we’ve never seen before.”
After thirty years in the business, I left newspapering in 2016. But I wanted one last hurrah: Hurricane Matthew.
I’ve covered so many hurricanes that I’ve lost count. My first was Hugo in Charleston in 1989, a Category-4 monster that killed more than eighty-five people and dropped a tree on my rental house in Winston-Salem, more than two hundred miles away. (I didn’t learn about it until I returned a week later.) I’d spent the night of the hurricane in Wilmington, North Carolina—the projected landfall—in my car in the parking lot of a motel where TV reporters with coiffed, yet tousled, hair did their stand-ups before returning to the bar. The next morning I hightailed it down US 17 to Charleston. The devastation was jaw-dropping. Homes obliterated. Fishing boats tossed across highways. Every tree at Francis Marion National Forest sheared in half. In Charleston the National Guard patrolled with M-16s, and lines for water stretched for blocks.
Matthew, in 2016, raked Haiti before riding up the East Coast and swiping Tybee Island. I’d driven down from Atlanta two days before it hit, talked my way past a cop enforcing (sort of) the mandatory evacuation of the island, and quickly accepted Paul’s offer of his girlfriend’s sturdy house on the island’s north end. For company I had Mary’s mama cat and four babies, who mewled all night as the storm worsened, the water rose, and the winds topped one hundred miles per hour. Roof tiles peeled from neighboring homes. The garage flooded and seawater climbed halfway up the first-floor steps. The beach, on a good day, was two hundred yards away. When the power went out, and I could no longer file updates for the newspaper, I hung out with the cats. We enjoyed each other’s company. I spent the brunt of the storm in a well-fortified bathroom.
It was the worst hurricane to hit Georgia in more than a century, though the winds weren’t terribly destructive. Eighteen inches of rain fell. The tidal gauge at nearby Fort Pulaski hit twelve and a half feet—a record. Flooding typically starts at ten feet. The ocean’s surge deposited a ten-foot sand dune on Nineteenth Street. My rental car was flooded with ocean dreck covering the engine and floorboards. Friends asked me to check on their houses.
Melissa Turner lives on Lewis Avenue, which runs between two branches of Horse Pen Creek. The Palm Terrace subdivision was built in the fifties and retains its Florida bungalow charm. As the storm approached, Melissa, a former Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter and editor, husband Thomas, and two cats evacuated to Savannah. A state of emergency kept them from returning to Tybee. So I clambered over downed trees, around electric wires, and through lake-sized puddles to reach her home. I peered inside windows and doors and found nothing amiss, the furniture seemingly in place in the darkened home. I texted Melissa the good news and left.
“We finally got to come back on the island three or four days later and I walked up to the front door, opened it—and it was just devastating,” Melissa tells me after my bike tour with Paul. “Everything had been sitting and moldering in mud for four days. There was salt water on the table tops. But Dan Chapman had said everything was fine.”
Oops.
They ripped out the walls, tile floor, and kitchen cabinets and placed them on the curb alongside furniture and appliances. They put in new furniture, appliances, and “a really fantastic floor” because, really, what were the chances of another hurricane hitting Tybee? It had been 119 years since the last one. They moved back in May 2017. Four months later Tropical Storm Irma inundated Tybee, pushing the second-highest tide on record across the island.
“It hit at exactly the right wrong moment—high tide,” Melissa recalls. “The creeks were full. We were sitting in the living room and saw water coming across the street. Then we saw water coming from the back, filling up the pool and meeting the water from the street. We still didn’t think we had anything to worry about. But then the water just kept coming and coming and coming. It started coming under the doors, then under the walls. We put the cats on top of the bed. We were sitting on the bar stools in the kitchen and the water came up under our seats.”
Two uncharacteristically wicked storms in two years. Something ain’t right on Tybee Island. The Fort Pulaski tidal gauge, a couple of miles from Melissa’s house on the Savannah River, tells why. It sits in a squat, windowless brick building at the end of a dock used by the Savannah River pilots who guide the big ships upriver to the port. This is where NOAA scientists monitor the Atlantic’s steadily encroaching waters. The sea off Georgia rises more than three millimeters per year. It has risen ten inches since 1935—three inches since 1990 alone.
The surge “is projected to accelerate in the future due to continuing temperature increases and additional melting of land ice,” says the Fourth National Climate Assessment. How much so? Possibly another forty inches by 2110. Researchers at Georgia Tech predict that 30 percent of Chatham, Liberty, and McIntosh Counties will be underwater by then. The barrier islands will be swamped. Coastal towns will experience billions of dollars of damage to roads, water and sewer facilities, and private property. Two-thirds of Georgia’s saltwater marshes might disappear. And poor Tybee Island could lose one-third of its commercial property and half of its residential neighborhoods. Bye-bye, Lewis Avenue.
“I feel sorry for the next generation, including my own kids,” says Melissa. “I know that at some future point Tybee will not be Tybee anymore.”
Higher temperatures, as any armchair hydrologist knows, makes water expand, further filling the world’s oceans. An already-full bathtub exacerbates the storm-surge damage done by hurricanes by pushing water farther inland and blocking rivers from flowing easily to the ocean. The watery double whammy, according to the National Climate Assessment, will cost the Southeast as much as one hundred billion dollars annually by 2090.
Hurricanes are nasty beasts, but the inexorable thrum of rising tides may prove more dangerous in the long run. High tides, of course, are products of wind, weather, and lunar cycles. Add an ocean that’s ten inches higher than before, though, and the tides more easily reach dunes, homes, and roads. Our favorite Fort Pulaski gauge recorded two high-tide, or “sunny day,” floods in 2000. In 2019, a record thirteen high-tide floods swamped nearby Tybee. By 2050, there could be anywhere from forty to ninety-five sunny-day floods.
And let’s not forget the king tides that coincide with full or new moons and are infinitely more frightening than the now-common nuisance tides. When the Earth, moon, and sun are perfectly aligned, usually in the spring, the Atlantic rises higher and higher and inundates places usually deemed safe. Who can forget the startling photo of the ghostly octopus splayed in a Miami Beach parking lot in 2016 during a king tide? US 80, the only road on and off Tybee, now shuts down a few times a year due to king tides. Paul was tooling back from Savannah one fine spring evening when he crossed the Bull River bridge and ran smack-dab into a couple feet of water that wasn’t supposed to be there. (He was driving a Chevy Metro, 46 mpg on the highway.)
“The water was coming right over the marsh. It was scary,” Paul recalls, as was the repair bill for the Chevy’s undercarriage.
For years islanders have pushed the state to raise US 80. The cost: minimum one hundred million dollars. Tybee’s low-lying precariousness, and the recent spate of bad storms, furrows many an islander’s brow. There’s this dread, this gnawing suspicion each hurricane season, that living on an Atlantic barrier island is frivolous, foolhardy, dangerous.
“We had the come-to-Jesus discussion—‘Do, uh, we really want to go through this again?’” says Melissa, remembering the fraught conversations with Thomas and neighbors after the house was flooded a second time. “We never contemplated leaving Tybee. But we had to figure out how to live comfortably on Tybee without every hurricane season being stress-inducing. So we decided to raise the house up.”
After Irma they again dragged everything to the curb, hired a contractor to replace the sheetrock, and another to lift the fourteen-hundred-square-foot house ten feet off the ground. It took nine months and $300,000.
I ask why Melissa she stayed.
“Look at this,” she commands, her arm sweeping wide to take in the view beyond the pool, lawn, and mandevilla to Horse Pen Creek. “You’re looking at nature! I grew up on a coast and wanted to retire on a coast. We’re not on the ocean. We’re not even on the Back River here. But every morning I look out on that big, open marsh and see egrets and herons and listen to the waves—it’s the most peaceful existence.”
Melissa retired recently from running the Tybee Post Theater, popular with fans of rock tribute bands and old movies including Jaws, which runs every Fourth of July weekend. She no longer organizes the island’s Polar Bear Plunge, the famed New Year’s Day spectacle where hundreds of locals and visitors (including me) dip into the chilly Atlantic to sober up and raise money for the theater’s restoration. Melissa savors her “very funky little beach town” and backyard sanctuary free, for now, of the zoonotic and climatic events sweeping the globe.
“I am certainly not a climate-change denier. I know sea level rises every single year,” she says as a grackle, perched on the hot tub, listens to our conversation. “It sounds terrible, but it’s not going to put me out of my house for the next twenty years. This is my little slice of paradise and I plan to enjoy it.”
Paul didn’t want his Tybee Climate Tour 2020 to be a complete bummer. So he made a point during our bike trip of showcasing the good work of local officials, university researchers, nonprofit experts, and dedicated volunteers in the fight against an aggrieved Mother Nature. Each Dyno-propelled stop highlighted a climate-mitigation project that promises to quell the rambunctiousness of high tides and killer storms. With two-thirds of Tybee possibly underwater by century’s end, the odds against success are long. But the commitment to try and save Tybee is undeniably strong.
As far back as 2011, City officials began discussions with Clark Alexander and others on the damages wrought by sea-level rise. This was the Deep South, and deeply red Georgia, remember, where most folks either dismissed climate change as a hoax or disputed its manmade origins. Governors routinely dodged my questions on climate. Then-US Senator David Perdue, who lives on an another highly threatened barrier island sixty miles below Tybee, told me “the scientific community is not in total agreement about whether mankind has been a contributing factor.”
In 2015, though, a remarkable report by Georgia’s natural resource agency declared climate change “a threat (that) presents unprecedented challenges.” A year later, the Tybee city council, with Paul leading the charge, unanimously approved a Sea Level Rise Adaptation Plan with all sorts of short- and long-term fixes. Tybee was the first Georgia community to officially acknowledge climate change.
“We hope we’ll have time to adapt,” Paul told me at the time. “If we don’t want to be treading water or having our grandchildren growing gills, we definitely need to spend this money now instead of putting it off. The longer we procrastinate, the more expensive it will be.”
Paul is a Tennessee boy, an Army brat, and Vanderbilt grad. Armed with degrees in English and sociology, Paul “hobo’ed for a couple years” out West, settling in Boulder, where he managed a Kentucky Fried Chicken. He returned to Wartrace, Tennessee, the home of the Tennessee Walking Horse National Museum, and took a day job as a buyer for a construction company. He raised organic cattle on the side, an unheard-of, yet far-sighted, undertaking in the mid-seventies South. He lived on $5,000 a year so he could retire young.
A friend told him about Tybee.
“He said, ‘Paul, you got to check out this Tybee Island. There’s people like you down there.’”
Paul and a girlfriend visited one weekend in 1994. She left. He stayed. Paid cash for his house. Married, and divorced, again.
“Tybee’s a beach community that still feels like a small town,” Paul says. “It’s got height limits and no room for a golf course. People are very down-to-earth. I’ve never met anybody from Tybee who’s not a character.”
He turned part of his house into Tybee Moons bed-and-breakfast and entered local politics. “Protect our island paradise!” was his rallying cry, a campaign slogan good enough for twelve years on the city council. He pushed curbside recycling, green building, water conservation, carbon-free transportation (i.e., bicycles), and made “Tybee” synonymous with “sustainable.” He tried to ban plastic bags and offshore drilling. He was the 2015 “Solar Advocate of the Year” in Georgia for helping to persuade dozens of local homeowners to put panels on roofs. He pushed offshore wind energy, to the consternation of some view-conscious constituents. He uses steel straws. His home is cluttered with newspapers, magazines, and bottles with no place to go, since the current council abolished his recycling program. (A sore point.)
On our Dynos we pass Melissa’s jacked-up house, the Back River, and “the land that wasn’t there.” En route, we pass a tidal gate installed by the City to keep rising seawater from clogging storm drains and flooding the island’s reclaimed-mud neighborhoods. During very high tides—even on sunny days—stormwater can’t escape to the river so it flows backwards onto streets, yards, and crawl spaces.
At Chatham Avenue, with Little Tybee in the distance, Paul extols the wonders of an all-natural “living shoreline” made of earthen berms and oyster reefs.
We follow the designated bike route to the Nineteenth Street boardwalk and the island’s “hot spot” where Hurricane Irma and sundry storm surges destroyed the low dunes. The City built acres of artificial dunes six feet tall and planted sea oats—resembling hair plugs on a bald man’s pate—to hold it all together.
“Theoretically, it’s going to work,” Paul says, “but we haven’t had a hurricane yet.”
Finally, at North Beach, we dismount to marvel at the thirteen-million-dollar “re-nourishment” project that widened and thickened Tybee’s main beach in 2020. Offshore dredges scooped up more than one million cubic yards of sand and deposited it between Fort Screven and the pier, two miles away. The town and the state paid for a series of herringbone-patterned dunes with fencing to keep the sand from migrating. Paul pounded wooden posts into the dunes. Sand is already piling up around the eight-foot poles, an encouraging sign.
“Hopefully, within five years, those fences will be invisible,” Paul says, admiring his handiwork. “That’s the goal. Build a fence and watch it disappear. It should help protect us against the consequences of sea-level rise.”
The Tybee-saving projects and others—raising US 80, low-lying homes, and water pumps—are all part of the island’s sea-level adaptation plan. The trick, basically, is to surround the island with barriers and put stuff on stilts. “Defend, adapt, and retreat” is the mantra of the climate-change-fighting crowd, though nobody dares suggest retreat in this tourist mecca. It’s really a finger-in-the-dike strategy to wring as much living, and money, out of Tybee as they can before the inevitable tides and storms make residence on the barrier island impossible.
“Tybee is endangered from several perspectives,” Clark, the marine geologist, tells me. “A lot of the fixed infrastructure and hard structures will eventually fail. Even if you put up a sea wall to protect the front side of the island, the back side of the island is still exposed to the standard rate of sea-level rise. And a wall on the back side of the island is exorbitantly expensive and not feasible. Tybee is going to have to significantly change unless they get some really rich benefactor who wants to put a wall around the entire island.”
Just about every town up and down the Atlantic grapples with the changing climate. The US Army Corps of Engineers proposes encircling downtown Charleston with a two-billion-dollar, eight-mile-long sea wall with floodgates and pumping stations. Not to be outdone, Army Corps’ engineers in Florida say that nearly five billion dollars is needed to wall off six miles of Miami coastline, elevate thousands of properties, and plant mangroves.
Paul believes that Tybee, one day, will need a wall, too. We park the Dynos at Huc-a-Poo’s Bites and Booze, a typically Tybee laid-back establishment, and order a to-go pizza with extra anchovies for Paul’s cats. The place is packed and maskless. We grab a couple of beers and hustle to a distant picnic table. We aren’t in a celebratory mood. Paul motions to the revelers and returns to the other existential threat facing our planet.
“Their kids won’t know the natural beauty we have,” he says, more sad than bitter. “Climate change is inevitable. We’re on the front lines of sea-level rise. We need to set an example for everybody else. We are doing irreversible damage to the planet and we’re almost at the point where we can no longer minimize the damage.”
The bartender brings the pizza to us. We pedal to Paul’s house and eat dinner. The cats dig the anchovies.