Chesapeake Requiem

March 15, 2018

A 1.3-square-mile scrap of land in Chesapeake Bay, proclaimed the soft-shell crab capital of the world, Tangier Island is just a few feet about sea level and is losing 15 feet of shoreline a year. Poised to disappear, it will be America's first victim of climate change. Veteran Virginian-Pilot reporter Swift, who lived on the island for two years, portrays a community numbering under 1,000 (with its own distinct dialect) that will disappear, too. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

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June 1, 2018
Land and culture erode on an island in the Chesapeake Bay.Journalist Swift (Auto Biography: A Classic Car, An Outlaw Motorhead, and 57 Years of the American Dream, 2014, etc.) spent more than a year on Tangier Island, among crab fishermen and their families, in 2000 and again in late fall 2015. In a graceful melding of history, nature writing, and perceptive cultural commentary, the author offers an affectionate portrait of the island and its "God-fearing, self-reliant," close-knit residents--now numbering under 500. Although Tangier currently faces new social problems--drugs, alcohol (on an island defiantly dry), and loss of young people to the mainland--the island "is more Norman Rockwell than real American town, with morals intact, air fresh, and entertainments wholesome." When Swift returned to the island in 2015 from his home in Virginia, he was particularly concerned with how Tangier was dealing with climate change that threatens to raise sea levels. Already, the island has shrunk from 2,163 acres, as documented in 1850, to 789. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers predicted that about a third of remaining acreage would vanish within the next 50 years without major intervention. Residents, however, ascribe topographical changes "solely to wind-driven waves, not climate change," refusing to believe that accelerating winds were "a symptom of a global phenomenon." Still, they feared for their future as crab fishermen. With hundreds of millions of crabs swimming by the island each year, Tangier supplies restaurants all along the east coast; New York, for example, pays handsomely for soft-shell crabs. Swift's profiles of individuals are sharply drawn and empathetic, and he captures their frustration with government bureaucracy as they hope for federal financing of a sea wall. It will take a miracle, writes the author, for the Army Corps of Engineers and Congress to act "before a storm muscles up the bay and renders the whole thing moot."A well-rendered narrative about how one specific island's fate stands as a warning for all coastal regions.

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July 2, 2018
Journalist Swift empathetically examines the complicated history of Tangier Island in Chesapeake Bay, which he calls “a community unlike any in America.” Swift (The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways) notes Tangier’s unique qualities: “Here live people so isolated for so long that they have their own style of speech, a singsong brogue of old words and phrases, twisted vowels, odd rhythms,” and the island’s centuries-old crabbing industry dictates everyday schedules. Crabbers go out on the bay in the early morning hours, so buyers, crab processing companies, and marine police “synchronize their workdays to the watermen’s schedule.” When the crabbing industry hits an inevitable rough patch, the consequences can be significant. So can younger generations leaving Tangier and the effects of global climate change and rising sea levels: “Every year sees the Chesapeake soak a little more upland into marsh, and drown a little more marsh into open water,” leaving it careening toward being uninhabitable. With understanding and insight, Swift presents a thought-provoking portrait of Tangier Island as it once was, as it is now, and as it could someday become. Agent: David Black, David Black Literary Agency.