The Drowning of Money Island by Andrew S. Lewis

Author:Andrew S. Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2019-10-02T16:00:00+00:00

KATE, MAE, AND I had been sitting on the porch for a while when Mike finally came outside, freshly cleaned. He wore a pair of jeans that were too big—they were bunched at the waist and cinched by a leather belt. He was still losing weight and regaining strength, though he still suffered from back pain and numb hands, especially after an hour or two of pulling pots. Also, the chicken fat injections that he’d been getting from the doctor weren’t working as well as they had been at first. He sat down next to Kate and handed her a tube of ointment. Kate lifted up the back of Mike’s T-shirt and gently worked the ointment into a sore on his shoulder. “Now, I’ve got shingles,” he said, shaking his head. “You’ll find out what it’s like when you get older.” Despite the aches, Mike was smiling.

Down on the beach next to the house, the birds continued to harass the horseshoe crabs that had piled up on the sand, fighting for a place to lay eggs. “Guess I ought to go down there and turn them over,” Kate said. It was a joke. She was referring to how, in recent years, after the drastic decline in the Bayshore’s horseshoe crab and red knot populations, and the state’s subsequent ban on all harvesting of the crabs, more and more environmental groups and tourists were showing up to walk Bayshore beaches and turn over those crabs that had been flipped upside down by the waves and were thus unable to right themselves. There was even a group of “experts” who taught volunteers how to properly right the crabs without hurting them.

None of the crabs on the beach needed flipping over, so Kate’s sarcasm was clear. The DEP, Blue Acres, and all the environmental organizations with which they partnered, with their deep pockets and dreams of returning the Bayshore to open space again, seemed to only have the crabs and birds in their plans. These volunteers would drive hours from Philadelphia or Princeton to flip a few dozen horseshoe crabs over, or donate a chunk of their income to fund others to do so, but most of them would walk or drive right past Mike and Kate. Or worse, they’d have the nerve to knock on the door to lecture them about sea level rise and the need to retreat from Bay Point. “Why can’t we both live here?” Mike asked no one in particular, as he remained hunched over. “I know these people have educations, but do they have life experience?”

It was only four days before, on June 12, that news had broken that President Trump had called the mayor of Virginia’s Tangier Island, which sits in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay and, according to the Army Corps, is shrinking by about fifteen feet a year because of the same combined forces of erosion, subsidence, and sea level rise impacting the Bayshore. Tangier had recently been thrust into the national spotlight

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