James Island,

On a foggy fall morning I start the mile long run out of Slaughter creek as the sun breaks through the pine on the bank of the Little Choptank. The watermen from Taylor’s Island Marina have left about an hour before me on the way to their pots. It’s fall and the cooling water is driving the crabs towards deeper water where they will spend the winter. The work boats have a long ride before the real work starts. My destination isn’t quite as far today. I’m on my way to James Island.

In 1847, the earliest official survey of the Island I can find show a piece of land twenty times larger that the remaining small wisps of terra firma that cling to life today. James Island was home to a Plantation with orchards and livestock that grazed next to the bay. Many buildings and a graveyard dotted the 400 acre patch of land. Today it has been cut through twice by battering surf, erosion, and sea level rise, creating three small battered pieces of land.

As I approach the island(s) from the east I find a beautiful long clean sandy beach that curves like a bow. There is no sign of human life now or ever on the beach except for a single weathered plastic chair facing east waiting for the sunrise. This is one of the most inviting panoramas on the bay.

The beach gives way to a thin layer of underbrush that shields the lee side of the island. A small opening in the viney brush yields a short trail to the center of the island, an open airy big woods of old pine trees. I can hear the waves hitting the windward side of the thin strip of land. The trail leads to a picnic table and a fire ring covered in dry pine needles, a tinderbox waiting for a spark. A few more steps and I’m facing the open bay, several miles across. The gentle breeze on the lee of the island is replaced by a much more forceful wind that whips up the waves which pound the sharp edged coast.

The windward side of the island shows a different face. The land drops straight down into the choppy water. The strong clay soil holds as fast as it can under the relentless pounding. Signs that the dry earth is succumbing to the sea are everywhere. Broken tree trunks stand like canons failing against the invasion from the western shore. Hundreds of trees lie dead in the water. This island is short on time.

James Island isn’t alone. Barren, Hooper’s, Bloodsworth, Holland, and South Marsh Islands to the south as well as the modestly populated Smith and Tangier Islands are all losing ground, quite literally.

Poplar Island stands alone as the only island in the Bay that is actually gaining ground. For the past eight years the Army Corps of Engineers has been sending shipments of dredge spill pulled from the channels that lead into Baltimore Harbor to Poplar Island. A system of rip rap and dikes holds the wet spill until it becomes firm ground. Poplar Island is scheduled to be renewed by 2012. James Island is the next project for the Corps.

On a recent paddle around Poplar Island, I had a close look at the work being done to rebuild this remote patch of land. Heavy equipment thunders down the long wide dirt roads that cross the island. Pink and green survey flags stand in long rows along the new shoreline. The fresh ground rises at least ten feet above the Bay and looks worlds apart from the original remaining tract with its tall pines and marshy edges. When complete, Poplar will be a somewhat visitor friendly wildlife refuge providing much needed

offshore habitat for Chesapeake floral and fauna. Huge rocks will hold their ground against the weather on the windward west side giving the island longevity that the rest of the Bay's coastline can only dream about. This will be the new look of the Bay's shoreline.

Weathered and dwindling, much like the old culture of the Chesapeake, the Bay's islands are being reduced to mere shadows of their glory days. Change is inevitable. As our landscape evolves at speeds that exceed what we know as its natural geological pace, our culture follows in lockstep. James Island and the rest of the Bay's islands must adopt a stony face turned into the wind, or slide beneath the rising tide.