The virus was probably abetted by Tangier’s close ties of kinship and history. But those ties have also given the island its best chance at stopping covid-19′s spread, as residents do everything they can to save the lives of neighbors who are, in many cases, lifelong friends or blood relatives.
A Trump flag on Tangier Island. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
By Peter Jamison, Washington Post
TANGIER, Va. — The news at the dock was bad.
As a handful of masked passengers stepped off the Courtney Thomas, one of the only boats still traveling to and from this remote island in the Chesapeake Bay, Susan Parks looked for the oxygen machine that was scheduled to arrive for her patients. The home-health aide could see it was not among the packages and mail being unloaded. The boat’s captain, Brett Thomas, had another reason to look somber as he stepped off his boat beneath a clear December sky.
“I don’t think Mr. Leon’s doing too well,” he said quietly.
A man walking by looked up.
“He’s had a rough go of it?”
“I think so.”
For eight months, the 450 residents of Tangier Island were spared a single case of coronavirus. Now Leon McMann, 89, a Tangier resident who had still been working on his boat the previous winter, was sick. So were many others.
McMann’s daughter and his son-in-law, Mayor James “Ooker” Eskridge. The physician assistant who runs the island’s sole health clinic. Her husband. School teachers, church elders. Thomas’s grandparents. The young and the old.
Over the centuries, Tangier, separated by 12 miles of water from the mainland, has preserved a unique and quirky heritage. Its residents — conservative, religious and intensely social —speak in a maritime brogue that confounds the ears of outsiders. They are simultaneously threatened by and skeptical of climate change, which scientists say could make the island uninhabitable within the next five decades. Most are fiercely devoted to President Trump, who called Tangier’s mayor to tell him not to worry about rising sea levels.
But they are also fiercely devoted to one another. And after the first infections appeared around Thanksgiving, the islanders reacted in a way that once again sets them apart — and that few would have predicted based on their politics.
Across the United States, the pandemic has divided people. Here it has united them. As Americans elsewhere argue over mask mandates, business closures and vaccines, Tangier has carried out a lockdown stricter than those in many large liberal cities. Face coverings are not only required in public spaces indoors; their use outdoors is widespread.
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