Earl Swift paints a portrait of the determined and self-reliant watermen of Tangier Island.
Dey Street Books, $28.99
Set in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay and only reachable by boat or small aircraft, Tangier Island has evolved at its own slow pace, little affected by modern influences. The island has no cell phone service, and cable TV and Internet are fairly new acquisitions. The result is a unique and iconic piece of American landscape that is home to a gritty community of watermen. But not for long. Due to climate change and rising sea levels, the island may soon slip away. The tide will keep chewing away shoreline—at a rate of more than 25 feet per year, sometimes much more—until the land is completely swallowed by the bay.
In Chesapeake Requiem, Earl Swift tells the story of this sinking island and its shrinking population of strong-willed watermen. Spending 14 months on Tangier, Swift captures the majesty of this island and the nobility of its people. We witness the arduous labor and long hours that crabbing demands and the extreme hardships of life cut off from the mainland. Melancholy abounds in these pages as island residents gaze across open water and remember now-sunken forests they once played in as youngsters and the neighborhoods abandoned to pounding surf. Oyster Creek. Canaan. Homes and graveyards now several feet underwater.
The destructive force of hurricanes and tropical storms further multiplies the regular ceding of land to water. After one big storm, Swift travels by boat with an islander, Carol Moore, to the ruins of Canaan. Sifting through detritus, Swift captures the experience with his keen eye for telling details, writing, “I collect a nail, the neck of an ancient ice-blue bottle, and a wave-worn knot of tree limb, stepping around headstones that every few weeks Carol has dragged clear of the advancing water. …. Examining a tidal pool in the sod, I find what appears to be an interesting piece of driftwood. It’s pale gray, four inches long, and resembles a tree stump in miniature. It feels featherweight, leached of substance, and I see that it’s laced with tiny holes. With a jolt, I realize it’s bone. I gently return it to the ground.”
As with many tragedies, Chesapeake Requiem is also a love story. The book serves as Swift’s love letter to the islanders he’s come to look upon as family. Their lives are hard and their fortunes fickle, with livelihoods dependent on the vicissitudes of weather. But no matter how desperate their situation becomes, their will remains indomitable. Admiration for the residents of Tangier resounds in Swift’s rich descriptions of islander actions, habits, and manner of speech, things someone could only learn after long study in close company.
Ever the reporter, Swift does not let his love for the people keep him from his duty to the truth. Alongside their finer traits, Swift shows their foibles. He tells us of the infighting between rival churches in 1946 that resulted in vandalism, brick-throwing mobs, and threats to life and limb. He also tells of the current-day refusal of much of Tangier’s population to believe in climate change, blaming the loss of shoreline on erosion instead.
It took a long time for Swift to weave himself into the tight-knit community’s fabric. He went to every church service, every school program, and every public function he could. He rode his bike around the island and stopped to chat with anyone willing. And once he earned his bona-fides, he set out to sea with crabbers aboard their vessels.
Being accepted into the community allowed Swift to capture the essence of daily life. He sat in on bull sessions with retired watermen as they debated climate change and discussed the vagaries of crabbing. Their knowledge of crabbing is unparalleled, hard-won from past experience, passed down through generations. And Swift shares it all with us: the blue crab life-cycle, the intricacies of their mating rituals, even the different types of boats used to hunt for them.
The overriding theme behind the whole story is that Tangier is just the first place of many that will soon be affected by climate change. By showcasing the slow-moving tragedy unfolding on Tangier, Swift shows not only what we stand to lose with this remarkable island, but how its fate foretells what may happen else whereas well.
This article originally appeared in our February 2019 issue.
