Jerry Tilghman sat in his perch, watching the boats drift to and fro, east and west through the narrows past his small control tower. He had been a bridge tender at the Choptank Narrows Bridge for nearly twenty-five years. He’d raised the drawbridge between Matthew’s Island and the mainland thousands of times; it was the nation’s busiest remaining bridge of its type. A retired meteorologist for a Baltimore television news station, he had settled on the island with his wife, Helen, more than twenty-six years before, and quickly decided when he arrived on the island that the retired lifestyle wasn’t for him.

The part-time position tending the bridge suited him perfectly. Three twelve-hour shifts a week had seemed more like a full-time job to his wife, and certainly made for some long days, but they didn’t warrant full-time benefits from the Maryland Transportation Authority. In the beginning of his time as bridge tender, Helen had put up a bit of a fuss, nagging him her fair share about being away from the house. The truth of the matter was, they didn’t have the money to travel the way she’d hoped, and they both knew the money from his bridge job was something they needed. She nagged him when he was there, nagged him when he wasn’t, so he figured it evened out. But that had been back when she was alive. Eventually the cancer had stopped her nagging. He missed it.

“What other job in the world has a view of the sunrise and the sunset from the same spot?” he’d say to her, a smile on his face, but she’d knitted away, shaking her head. He didn’t even think she heard him most of the time, but he knew at least she was pleased he wasn’t in a job that was physically or mentally taxing. At the bridge tender’s house, there was satellite TV, not that he ever watched except for an occasional news report. He had his crossword puzzles and his newspapers, and besides, with all the boat traffic, he was usually too busy to do any of that. The watermen came and went all day long, hauling crabs and oysters and rockfish to and from the various harbors, making their living. He enjoyed watching them, waving as they went by; they all knew him, at least most of them who cared to bother.

If he wasn’t watching the boats, he was watching the weather. This year was shaping up to be the windiest, most erratic and stormy in some time. Jerry worked alone, but anyone who knew him could tell you that if Jerry got the chance, he’d talk your ear off about the rising water level or the increase in the rates of unpredictable, violent storms. But nobody wanted to hear it. Most of the watermen thought talk of “global warming” was malarkey. Jerry specifically never used words like that anymore for that reason. “Climate change” was a little bit better, he learned, but still sounded like a government conspiracy to many of the locals. So Jerry had adapted, tried to be more vague, and now only really talked about this “right crazy weather we’re havin’” just to fit in.

Helen hadn’t wanted to hear any of it anymore, either. She would knit and nod her head and manage a polite “of course, dear” as Jerry went on about how he’d been sitting there for a quarter of a century just watching the dramatic weather changes happen. He had a small can of black paint and a small paintbrush that he kept in the storage closet at the bridge tender’s house, known as a tenderhouse to Helen and Jerry and other bridge tender families (though most people didn’t know it was called that) and he’d dutifully marked the high tide marks of the storms on the underside of the drawbridge over the years. The high tide marks from Hurricane Irene in ’03 and Isabel in ’11 and even that most unusual “Great Derecho of 2012” that blew out the entire glass wall of the Matthew’s Island Inn just a few years back—those black marks were all on the wall, with a lot of lesser-known high tide marks in between from storms that came and went when the Talbot River met the Chesapeake Bay in just the right wind conditions and the water rose and rose and sometimes Jerry felt like nobody even noticed it happening but him. With Helen gone, damn cancer (she’d just been glad she didn’t have any children who had to suffer through getting this awful thing, she had said) he didn’t have anyone to tell it to, so he’d mostly just talk to himself, keeping notes in the bridge tender’s log about the tide line marks. He kept a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel—the charts and graphs showed the rising waters over a twenty-five-year time period. He reported all of his detailed findings to NOAA, though he wasn’t ever sure anyone there really gave a rat’s ass. He figured all the data he was keeping should go to someone.

As a former meteorologist, Jerry liked predicting the weather, and he didn’t trust the existing computer forecast models out there that were basically a crapshoot. He’d devised a system of combining all the individual components from a variety of data- satellite, low pressure, wind speed, barometric pressure, cold and warm fronts, and other calculations gathered from reports he had access to from the Internet, thanks to a few friends back at the TV station and a few creative online underground methods he had learned over the years as well. He did a daily weather analysis and was able to compute a weather prediction model for the island on a daily and weekly basis that was more accurate than anything that ever came out of the major cities. A few of the watermen knew that Jerry could more accurately predict the weather than any other source—they figured it was just because he sat up his bridge tender’s house and watched it all day—and had taken to asking him about it when they’d see him around town. It helped their boating business to know what to expect in terms of weather when they were about to go out on the water for the day.

The winds the night of that crazy derecho (the Spanish word for a damaging windstorm hadn’t even been introduced into islanders’ vocabulary until that storm) back in ’12 had been off the charts for something that wasn’t a hurricane. The tiny bridge tender’s house had whistled and shaken until Jerry was sure it would fall apart. The state of Maryland had officially told him to evacuate, but Jerry stayed at his post, concerned that if a boat came through, it would need to be able to cross the narrows. He wouldn’t want a captain to be stuck out there in those awful conditions. These were not pleasure boaters out in this weather—these were working boats. There weren’t too many workboats big enough to even need the bridge raised, and he usually knew exactly which ones were out and which had already come back in, but that night there had been one boat he couldn’t reach by radio. It was a boat that sometimes stayed out overnight. It was very possible the boat simply wasn’t coming back in. It wasn’t his job to babysit the boats, and no one expected it. And of course the boat could have docked up somewhere on the other side if it came back in and he wasn’t there. But he just couldn’t walk away from the bridge and leave the poor guy unable to get to his regular harbor on a stormy night like that.

So he waited. Tending the bridge. That was his job, wasn’t it? He’d actually told the state he had already evacuated his post. Didn’t need to get their feathers all ruffled. Sometimes, he’d even spend the night at the bridge tender’s house, unbeknownst to anyone. If his shift ended late at night and started early the next morning, there wasn’t even a reason to go home, now, with Helen gone. The sofa was plenty comfortable. He’d shower and shave that next night. There were plenty of snacks and drinks in the small fridge, or across the street at the bait and tackle store, where he’d walk twice a day to exercise his legs and get a taste of the local scene. Having come in with their hauls for the day, the boat captains sat around, gossiping and drinking.

Jerry glanced both ways, seeing no boats coming and glanced at the clock; he found a rare opportunity for one of his twice-daily fifteen-minute breaks.

“Here comes Jerry!” one of the watermen called as Jerry walked across the street during the quick pause in boat traffic to get a snack. “Hey, who’s running the bridge?” the crab boat captain joked. “I think I see a giant sailboat coming this way!”

“Well, they’ll just have to wait while I get my Little Debbie snack and a Gatorade!” Jerry replied, lumbering up to the counter with his Baltimore Sun newspaper. “Sure isn’t the end of the world, now, is it?”

The locals made fun of Jerry’s preoccupation with what they considered the myth of “global warming.” They knew about his measurements of the rising water levels, because they could see the black marks from their boats when they went under the drawbridge. All in good fun, they teased him.

“You come out from yer castle to measure that rising water ag’in, Jer’?” another boater asked, snickering, plunking a forty-ounce beer, a candy bar, and a bag of chips onto the counter.

“You wanna wait twenty minutes for that drawbridge to go up next time you come into the harbor with a boat full of oysters?” Jerry would answer in return, a half-mocking grin on his face.

Jerry didn’t mind most of the watermen; in fact, he had a great deal of respect for almost all of them. The majority of them were hard workers who took care of their families. But there were a small percentage of the locals who proudly flew Confederate flags on their boats, drank far too much, used drugs regularly, and treated the women in their lives very, very poorly. They drove their boats drunk around the narrows, endangering other boats and especially endangering casual recreational boaters and innocent kayakers in the water. These types of “captains” he could do without.

Jerry returned to the bridge tender’s house, happy as always to lock the door behind him and get back to work. As he locked the door, he thought of the time the police had come to the door and taken over the control of the building, when a drug bust was taking place. Jerry had been ordered to raise the bridge so that the suspect couldn’t leave the island. Of course he’d done as he’d been told. The suspect had eventually been arrested. Apparently he wasn’t much of a local—one of those guys would’ve simply hopped into the nearest boat to escape the island.

He knew there was a way of life that was dying off on the island, and it was sad. He missed one of his favorite fishing boat captains, the legendary, larger-than-life Harry Budson, who loved to tell tales of “raising the bridge” on someone who owed him money, to keep them on the island until they paid their debt, or notifying the bridge tender to raise the bridge on someone he wanted to keep off the island, like a state regulatory agency. Tales of women dying who had been born on the island and never once left it and other generational stories were ones he found quaint. He loved watching local kids come up to flatten a penny by placing it in exactly the right spot where the drawbridge, when raised, would return it to them, thin as paper. He appreciated and respected the history of the island.

Although the rough-around-the-edges locals could get a little raunchy, it was the wealthy weekenders who could really get on Jerry’s nerves. Calling the bridge tender’s phone line or radioing in to request the bridge be raised—these were often $250,000 boats that also managed to get stuck in the mud at low tide coming into the channel because they somehow couldn’t manage to have a $250 piece of equipment or app on their smartphone to tell them the water depth or the time of low tide. He saw it almost every day in the summer. These pleasure boaters came in on these fancy sailboats and just had to sit in the mud for three hours waiting for the tide to come in. Forget calling me to raise the drawbridge, jackass, you can’t get through the narrows if your four-thousand-pound boat just tried to get through two feet of water.

And these were the guys who didn’t believe in rising water level, because they thought low tides meant the high tides weren’t higher. They didn’t seem to remember the fact that the island used to have beaches and now there weren’t any, for the love of God, not to mention the fact that entire islands that used to be around them were now gone, completely underwater. Jerry talked to a guy one time who told him “the water ain’t rising, the island is sinking.” The sad fact of the matter was that both of those things were positively goddamned true.

Jerry pushed the large green button to raise the bridge for another seafood boater. He glanced at his computer screen, showing an early model for the upcoming hurricane season. This year was expected to be the worst storm season on record, and he worried about how the island would fare. He punched in a few keystrokes and looked at another model, again finding no differences. All his early calculations looked the same. He knew all it would take was one hurricane coming up the Chesapeake Bay the wrong way. The waters were calm now, but his numbers told him they weren’t going to stay that way, and Jerry’s numbers hadn’t lied to him in the past. He watched the boat as it sailed from the majestic bay on the east to the stately Talbot River on the west, and he thought, as he had so many times in the past, God help Matthew’s Island if those two massive bodies of water, separated by an island only a mile wide, ever got together. This island was what he had left to care about, so care he did.