Crab Orchard Review Vol 12 No 1 W/S 2007

Lee Zacharias island. It was 1938 before electricity arrived; until 1956 the only phone was at the Coast Guard station. At the beginning of the ’80s, islanders still collected rainwater in cisterns. Still, I might have guessed. Even in 1990, the village I first saw in 1972 had been transformed; for once the water tower was built, development took off. Already the incongruous brick Anchorage Inn had heaved up its four stories, and the village had grown suburbs, great cottages that sleep twelve crowding up against the marshes. By 1991, Papa Howard’s, the big old island house with a crooked chimney that my students and I rented in 1990, was a chic shop full of windchimes and handmade tchotchkes. A few years later as the Cedar Island ferry chugged into Silver Lake, I spotted new green shingles and freshly-painted trim on the dormers of Sam Jones’ Castle, the derelict cedar-shake mansion that had presided over the bottom of the harbor vacant, leaking, and for sale ever since Sam Jones was buried with his horse in the woods near Springer’s Point. Where gaillardia and pennywort used to push up through the sandy cracks of his cement parking pad, there was a lawn so chemically green it looked radioactive. Next door the old fisherman’s motel had been torn down; in its place a brand new inn with private balconies, aqua vinyl siding, and a fancy wedding tent out front. O’Neal’s Dockside, where my son used to buy bait, is no longer dockside but relocated to the highway, and the wooden archway on the dock that promised bloodworms and fresh mullet has lost a leg and faded. The harbor and the creeks are jammed with neon-colored kayaks, and the beaches where I used to walk for hours without encountering another person are criss-crossed with the tracks of four-wheel drives. The Coast Guard station is empty, its crew sent to Hatteras; from the lookout tower, once as trim and white as a sail, aluminum siding in pied shades of gray and dirty white flaps loose.

The cedar shakes of Wayne Teeter’s fishing shack have been re-faced with planks the raw red color of the clay soil back in the Piedmont, and between it and my beloved cottage at Windmill Point, where a pastel wooden skiff used to lie rotting in the sand beside a pile of crab traps, there is a brand new dock with a big fancy screened gazebo.

An island is not meant to progress. To watch an island develop is to know your own diminishment, to mark the years off your life like days off a calendar, to count not what has been added but what has been lost.

And yet in the mornings, when I watch the fishing skiffs glide toward the Ditch at the mouth of Silver Lake, when I ride my bike through the clear and sparkling air around the curve of marsh up past Back Road 248 ◆ Crab Orchard Review