High Tide in Dorchester by Tom Horton

eroding for centuries as wind and wave and ice take their toll. But there’s a new ballgame now. Emerging climate science has documented an ominous acceleration of the sea level rise that formed the Chesapeake over thousands of years since the last Ice Age retreated. The latest sea level rise projections for the Chesapeake region are two feet or more by mid-century, and as much as six feet by century’s end. That’s a combination of higher water and sink ing land around the Bay. The threat still seems distant to most of the millions of Marylanders and Virginians along the Chesa-

I’m making a film in the Chesapeake Bay landscapes of my boyhood, posing for a close-up with ball and glove where sixty years ago I shagged flies out front of my dad’s fishing cabin. The camera backs away and I’m ass deep in salt water ~ this is where center field used to be. The tall piney woods around the long-gone cabin, thick enough I worried then about getting lost, are skeletal now, falling into the water. C i nematog rapher Dave Ha r p and I are longtime collaborators on Chesapeake projects and knew what we’d find. The great estuary’s 11,000 miles of tidal shoreline have been

Photos by Dave Harp

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