Calmer Waters
The novel Chesapeake by James Michener is 865 pages long, but in reading it upon moving to Maryland’s Eastern Shore a quarter century ago, I always remembered the line “so he turned his boat for the calmer waters of the Eastern Shore.” Since then every time I crossed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and my breath and heart would relax a tiny bit I’d think of it, but especially when crossing the Tilghman Island drawbridge in the last 13 years.
Moving away this weekend due to my health (thus finances) has been devastating, but what I’ll miss the most is the house where I live. It’s a flat-roofed mid-century modern house built in the 1950s, very Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired architecture. Although when I was younger and obsessed with maximalist Victorian arcitcture like the huge Second Empire haunted house where I raised my kids, I’ve grown to appreciate the architecutral opposite: the clean lines and minimalist design of mid-century architecture has a grip on me. I’ll remember fires in the gigantic brick fireplace, learning to catch and steam my own crab dinners on my dock, music, laughter and the beauty of the sun setting in to the Chesapeake. I took this photo yesterday when an osprey stopped by out front for lunch.
Stewarding this house was an honor. I wrote about moving in, adjacent to a waterfront park here on the island, where I’ve spent precious years writing, gardening, picking up pieces of sea glass and finding a way to become whole: watching waves turn into ice in the winter, hearing the roar of the workboats as they catch seafood. I encountered a glass wall shatter in a derecho at the Tilghman Island Inn soon after arriving, and watched as tornado force winds tore the roof off my house as water poured in and I saw the winds of climate change at the front door.
There’s no shortage of climate-change denialism on the island; I’m nearly alone in my observations as a kayaker over the last 13 years. The Army Corps of Engineers’ Poplar Island restoration project, heralded as an enviromental achievement, is fantastic, but changed the currents of the bay, funneling water directly at the fragile Narrrows area of the island, eroding a tiny place called Tar Island that once protected the marina and recreation waterfront.
I watched as coastlines I used to love beachcombing disappeared, and every time I drove across the island drawbridge I’d turn my head to see the shocking demise of Tar Island, knowing that once the full force of the Chesapeake arrives to pummel the bridge area, there won’t be anything to stop the Choptank and the Chesapeake from coming together—once it happens in a bad storm, there’s no keeping them apart again at a number of fragile spots on the island, particularly at the southern end. I wish I had a time-lapse drone view over a decade so everyone could see in case tragedy comes without warning. Just like the slow water rise that will eventually eradicate Tangier, Smith, and Hooper’s islands like it has with now-sunken islands of the Chesapeake, it’s a matter of when the hurricanes will arrive and how bad they’ll be: an unpredictable factor, but neither the storm that took my roof off, and another that completely flooded the cottage where I used to live, were forecasted.
Having had to sleep where you worry if you’re going to get out of bed into water isn’t a great way to live. I know on the other islands people live like this all the time, but it isn’t something I can psychologically manage. I understand and respect those who do. If I was a $6 million woman, would I buy this house where it is and move it back from the water and up on stilts and stay here until I die? Absolutely. I’d probably go down before the island.
—See an island memories photo collection on Mary’s Instagram, or find a listing of her past island articles on her Substack.