Treasured Island

by Kate Kilpatrick, projects.aljazeera.com

May 11

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Story and audio by

Photographs by Ian C. Bates
Published May 11, 2014
TANGIER ISLAND, Va. As in many places, conversations on this remote island in the Chesapeake Bay tend to steer toward the
weather. But here it's not just small talk.
A long winter has chilled the water so it's still too cold to catch crabs even on the last day of March exactly two weeks after crabbing
season started. Most of the island's watermen who oyster in winter and catch blue crabs in summer haven't earned a penny in
over a month.
When they do talk about the weather on Tangier, it doesn't sound like most places either. "Crabs," for instance, is drawn out to allow
an extra syllable or two: "cr-aeae-uh-bs."

The voice of Chuck Pruitt bounced off the wall of the old Double Six sandwich shop, a bellow amplified by his Tangier Island accent.
(Click the red arrow to listen to an audio recording of the quote in the text.)
"I think it's supposed to get nice after today, from what I hear. Ain't windy over at the railway!," he said.
Translation: The railway is where Tangier's watermen are getting their boats, or "rigs," ready for the new season.
The island's vintage dialect traced to its early settlers from Cornwall in southwest England isn't the only thing that sets it apart.
Here, families bury their loved ones in their front yards and townsmen meet for coffee at the power plant every afternoon. Boys spend
summers navigating the meandering creeks on their skiffs, and baby shower announcements are taped to public buildings, since the
whole island is invited anyway.
Tangier Island just 3 miles long and 1 mile wide is a step back in time, but with a very hazy future. The people's language, their
way of life, the very ground they walk on: It's all facing extinction.

Trent Pruitt plays on a raft he found in the creek that runs through Tangier Island, which has fewer than 500 residents. Scroll
for more

Ricky Laird leaves his home, passing the family tombstone. On Tangier, it\'s common for families to bury their loved ones in
their yards, where graves are safer from the encroaching sea.

A group of regulars spend a rainy morning in Tangier\'s hardware store.

Show Captions
Though only 12 miles off the coast of Virginia, Tangier is struggling to literally stay afloat. State regulations on oystering and
crabbing have hit the island especially hard. Meanwhile, Tangier is sinking and eroding, losing as much as 15 feet a year on the

western shore alone.

"You can do a lot of things to deal with sea level rise bring in land, raise your house," said Scott Hardaway, marine scientist
supervisor at Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS). "But you have to deal with the fact that it is rising, and you still get beat up
by storms. I'm not sure at what point [the people on Tangier] start leaving."
Young people are already abandoning Tangier, heading off to college on the mainland or to work as merchant marines on tugboats up
and down the East Coast. Residents who stay worry that they're witnessing the last generation of Tangier watermen, with only a few
dozen left, most of them over 50. And that if something isn't done to halt the erosion, the next Isabel-caliber hurricane will wipe out
the island completely, taking 400 years of heritage with it.
Audio portrait: Ricky Laird
At its height in 1930, Tangier was home to nearly 1,200 people. By 2000, that number had dropped to 600. Residents say about 470
people live there today. More than a quarter of homes and trailers sit vacant, according to census data.
As the population shrinks, the graveyards grow. Tangier is full of family cemeteries, front yards littered with the tombstones of
generations of Crocketts, Pruitts, Eskridges, Parks and Dises.
Capt. John Smith discovered Tangier in 1608, naming it and other islands Russell's Isles, after the doctor aboard his ship. How it
became known as Tangier in later decades remains a mystery. Pocomoke Indians are believed to have lived or at least summered
on Tangier before that, and to this day Tangiermen (a label that includes women) find primitive tools, jugs, arrowheads and other
artifacts.
Just about every home has a satellite dish, and on a long weekend in March, 16-year-old Nathan Bonniewell strolled around playing
"Wrecking Ball" on his iPad, connected to a handheld speaker. While technology allows the residents to be well versed in life on the
mainland, even Miley Cyrus can't expunge their distinctive language.
According to David Shores, a Tangier native and author of "Tangier Island: Place, People and Talk," the island's distinctive dialect was
influenced by the likely lower-class British men and women who settled there. It's changed little since the Civil War remaining what
Shores calls a "curious mixture of double negatives, clipping, slang, nicknames . . . [and] 'talking backwards.'"
Local Bruce Gordy, a former schoolteacher, has been cataloguing Tangier's unique expressions.
If you're quare, you're disagreeable. If you stink, you've got the mibs. If you're thirsty, you might say you're dry as Peckard's cow,
Peckard being an old farmer.
Then there's the backwards talk.
A sampler of Tangier talk
Speakers: Bruce Gordy, Michelle McCready, Gary Parks, and James "Ooker" Eskridge
"Backwards talk is a way to emphasize something by saying the opposite the literal opposite of it," Gordy explained.
If you say a woman is "ugly," that means you think she's pretty. If it's a "pretty day," it's probably storming.
"If something's real good, on the mainland we say, 'Oh, that's great!' We wouldn't. We would say, 'Well, that's poor!' Like we're going
to Disney. 'Going to Disney? Well, that's poor!'" Gordy said.

Isaiah McCready, 14, swings from an old boat lift at the former railway where watermen would fix their boats between fishing
seasons.

Football isn\'t an organized sport on the island, where the Tangier Combined School has just 66 students, with only one in the
sixth grade. These boys are playing on the airport tarmac.

The choir sings during Sunday service at Swain Memorial United Methodist Church, one of two churches on the island. The
church had just finished a weeklong revival.

There\'s no movie theater, mall or park on Tangier Island so young people make their own fun. Jack Mariano shoots his .22
caliber rifle at an abandoned ship off the coast.

Christian Creedle sits in the window of the Double Six, an old watermen\'s hangout. With fewer of them on the island, the
owner says he now stocks a lot of chips and candy for the kids.

Show Captions
"There's a lot to do here!" one might say of Tangier talking backwards.
Tangier has no shopping mall, no movie theater, no football field, no sports team. Just 66 students attend the island's only school,
which teaches kindergarten through 12th grade. No alcohol is sold on the island.
Religion is the social glue, and members are fairly evenly split (hostilities occasionally flare) between Swain Memorial United
Methodist Church and the newer New Testament nondenominational congregation. In the late '90s the town council rejected
Hollywood's bid to come there to film the PG-13 romance "Message in a Bottle," starring Kevin Costner, because the script contained
sex, cursing and alcohol.
For some, the smallness and quaintness of the island can be suffocating.
"Everything runs in a big circle here," said 32-year-old Brent Laird, as he painted the bottom of a boat down at the railway. "Ain't no
pool hall, ain't no arcades, sure as hell ain't no bars. For a single man, there really ain't nothing to stay here for."
Allen Parks, Tangier waterman
Nicknames abound on Tangier. There's Chowder, Seabiscuit, Monk, Hoot (who also goes by Frank, although his real name is George).
Everyone knows the mayor, James Eskridge, as Ooker, after a sound he made chasing his rooster as a boy.
"Ooker" Eskridge, 55, is a tall, thin, ruggedly handsome waterman with copper hair under his red baseball cap. When he's not working
on the island or crabbing on the water, Eskridge zips over to his crab shack on the Sree Devi a motorboat named after one of his
four adopted daughters to feed the seagulls and his four cats. On the inside of his left forearm is a tattoo of an ichthus with "Jesus"
written inside. On the right is a Star of David, to show his support for Israel and biblical literalism.
But Eskridge isn't here to talk religion, but rather the problems facing Tangier and its watermen.
First there's the license moratorium, started in 1999, to reverse the effects of overfishing in the bay. With no new licenses, it's tough

for young people to enter the fishing business. There's also the increased cost of working on the water higher prices for fuel, bait,
crab pots and the zinc bars needed to prevent the pots from rusting. But the biggest blow, he said, is the crab sanctuary.
"You do need regulations, don't misunderstand me. And you need laws concerning the harvesting of crabs and fish and the oysters,"
he said. "But it seems like they took it too far. You can regulate people out of business."
In 2000, the VMRC instituted a crab sanctuary that runs every year from May 16 through Sept. 15 and covers the heart of Virginia's
portion of the Chesapeake Bay. The region from Maryland just north of Tangier all the way down to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay
is covered by the same dates, even though water temperature (which determines where crabs are) varies considerably.
When the crab season starts March 17, the crabs are only in the southern part of the bay. By the time they migrate north around
Tangier, in mid- to late April or even early May, Eskridge said, there's not much time left before the sanctuary closes May 16.

Tangier Island sits just south of the Maryland-Virginia border, and north of Virginia\'s Blue Crab Sanctuary. The Sanctuary
closes the area to crabbing beginning May 16 every year. Watermen say they don\'t have enough time to harvest: crabs near
Tangier are ready in late April and early May, and regulations kick in just a few weeks later.
Photo by: Click to enlarge image

"A lot of the guys around here, they're just getting started good, and then the date rolls around and they have to get out," said
Eskridge. "They have to stop making a good day's work and actually move their pots to where crabbing's not so good."
Tony Watkinson, habitat director at the Virginia Marine Resources Council (VMRC), said Virginia's crab sanctuary protects an area
believed to be a corridor for female crabs. He said Tangier is strongly affected, due to its northernmost location, but the watermen
aren't without options.
"There's two types of thoughts about fishing and crabbing," said Watkinson. "One, there are those who want to be able to fish or crab
fairly close to where they live, and that is a very traditional philosophy that not only Tangier has but it's shared by our upriver
fishermen. The other thought is that there's a mobile aspect to the harvesters."
In other words, Tangier watermen could take their boats south at the start of the season, staying in a motel on the mainland for a
stretch to catch crabs in the lower part of bay before they reach Tangier.

While Watkinson believes it's time for a new census to make sure the sanctuary boundaries and dates are still appropriate, he said the
license freeze won't be lifted overfishing remains a problem.
Eskridge, however, says increasing population along the coasts is to blame for problems in the bay, and the watermen are just a cheap
and easy scapegoat.
"Nobody wants to see a healthier Chesapeake Bay than the watermen do," he said, "because that's how we make our living."

AN ISLAND FADES: Tangier Island is both sinking and eroding. The southern end of the island, shown here, used to curve
around into a full hook.

Old sunken boats sit in the marshes of the Uppards, an abandoned part of the island no longer habitable. According to
environmental engineers, the Uppards will be underwater by 2100.

A cross sits in the marsh on Tangier Island.

Show Captions
As for the island's erosion, nowhere is the situation more dire than the Uppards, the northernmost part of Tangier. The uninhabited
strip of patchy beach and mostly marshland was once the town center before residents relocated to higher ground.
"My dad took me there when I was a little kid. It was full of goats and chickens and fig trees and oak trees and maple trees," said Carol
Moore, a seventh-generation Tangierman. "The place I used to walk as a kid, I ride my boat now."
She feels like crying when she's there, she said.
"And sometimes I do," she added.
The Uppards has been slowly washing away for centuries, but environmental engineers say the erosion there has accelerated in recent
decades. They predict the area will be underwater by 2100.
Moore slides open the drawer of her glass-topped coffee table to reveal items she's found along the beach of the Uppards: a smooth
black Indian arrowhead, a white pipe she says "dates back to before Sir Walter Raleigh came to America," an antique inkwell, some
fossils, tinted glass pharmaceutical bottles embossed with names like "Balsam of Life."
She's also found bodies.
Heavy storms in 2012 had left bones and coffins strewn along the beach of the Uppards. "I wasn't going to let them wash into the bay,"
Moore said of the exposed graves. Archaeologists helped her recover some of the remains, which dated back as far as 1895.
In 1990 the Army Corps of Engineers built a stone jetty or seawall by the airstrip to keep the erosion there at bay. Seeing its success,
Tangier has been lobbying to have the seawall extended to other sides of the island. In November 2012, Virginia announced the
construction of a new seawall around Tangier's harbor in 2016.
More good news came this March, when Tangier Island's historic district (essentially the entire island except the airstrip) was added
to the Virginia Landmarks Registry. While nearly 3,000 sites are on that list, Marc Wagner, director of capital region preservation at
the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, says "it's very unusual for us to list a whole island on the register."
The designation won't save Tangier, but makes it eligible for Hurricane Sandy funds and paves the way for the island to be added to
the national historic registry potentially attracting more tourists and advocates for its preservation.
After all, fortifying Tangier Island has critics, who believe the $4.2 million in taxpayer money that will pay for the new seawall is just
one of many hefty expenses needed to stave off the island's inevitable disappearance.
But Ooker Eskridge, the mayor, sees it differently. "A lot of folks serve in the military from here. And they've gone all over the world,"
he said. "And now Tangier itself is in trouble. We're only a few miles from D.C., and we would like some help here."

A WATERMAN\'S LIFE: Gary Parks, 53, paints a boat at the railway, where he works fixing watermen\'s boats between crab
and oyster seasons.

Parks watches television on his couch while children roughhouse beside him. "Our young people will not be watermens no
more," he says. "When we grew up that\'s all we wanted to be was a waterman."

Parks rides a boat around Tangier Island. "Ain\'t nothing for me on the mainland. I\'ve been a waterman all my life and
working up the railway," he says. "I leave Tangier Island I\'d have a hard time getting by I believe."

Show Captions
Unless Tangier is evacuated or abandoned, Gary Parks has no plans to leave. He sits in his living room recliner, not much more than
an arm's length from the television facing him.
"I've been a waterman all my life and working up the railway," he said, heavy breaths punctuating his gravel-coated voice. "Ain't a
whole lot out there for me. A high school education's all I got. I leave Tangier Island I'd have a hard time getting by, I believe."
Parks, 53, volunteers at the fire department and helps organize the annual homecoming, where Tangiermen past and present those
who've moved off the island and those who've stayed reunite for an annual cookout. In other words, it's not just the work but the
close-knit community that makes Tangier home.
Audio portrait: Gary Parks
"I know everybody on the island. Everybody knows everybody. It's a good thing or it could be a bad thing, but most times it's a good
thing," he said. "People are always willing to give you a hand, especially if you're having a rough situation like maybe your boat's tore
up or sunk or you're having health issues."
Parks' son and daughter-in-law are considering relocating from Hoboken, New Jersey, to Texas. If he had to, Gary and his wife, Dixie,
would probably join them, although there's not much work for a waterman in Dallas. So if the island has to go, Parks hopes it holds
out at least as long as they do.
"I hope I die right here on the island. I hope it stays that long anyway," he said. "But I don't know."

Families bury loved ones in their yards due to limited high ground on the island. The tombstones often date back to the 1800s.
Photo by: Click to enlarge image

Produced by Alex Newman & Steve Melendez

Edited by Katherine Lanpher & Vaughn Wallace
Photographs by Ian C. Bates, part of a year-long documentary project capturing Tangier and its residents.