“I’ve lived here my whole life and haven’t seen a difference,” he continues, then shakes his head at excavators on barges piling gray stone in front of the refuge’s outer bank. “The whole sea-level rise-it’s BS,” he says, talking loudly over the boat’s motor.
Some, like Marshall, don’t believe there’s any risk to living on the island. Which is why, even though Smith Island emerged relatively unscathed after Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012, the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development offered Smith Island residents a buyout to move. But erosion nips away at Smith Island’s banks at a rate of roughly 2 feet each year, and a 2008 report predicted that by 2100 Smith Island will be “almost completely under water as the Bay’s average level goes up nearly one-foot.” Smith Island comprises the wildlife refuge and a stretch of islands directly south, where roughly 280 residents live in three small villages about 5 feet above sea level. Smith Island too is disappearing, its land eroding as it submerges into the Chesapeake. Marshall pilots us to the outer banks of the wildlife refuge, where the horizon is nothing but the blue waters of the Chesapeake and a faint speck in the distance-the remains of Holland Island, whose 360 residents fled rising waters and eroding soil in 1922, and which serves as a constant reminder to the people living on Smith Island that they might be frogs in a pot of slowly boiling water. To our backs is Smith Island, the last inhabited offshore island on the Maryland side of the Chesapeake. It’s a clear, bright August morning, and Marshall, slugging cans of Diet Coke, steers us straight for the approximately 4,500 acres of tidal marsh that make up the federal Martin National Wildlife Refuge. Twelve miles off the coast of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Tim Marshall and I knife through the salty, choppy waters of the Chesapeake Bay in an aging white fishing skiff.
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