For more than 20 years I have walked St. George Island. It's a beautiful island. Full of birds, even in the winter.
For most of those 20 years I worked as a reporter, which I enjoyed. Being nosy came naturally, extending well beyond my job and certainly into the nooks and crannies of St. George Island. I came to know the months the spider webs held morning dew, when the fishhawks were sitting upon chicks rather than eggs, the condition of that patch in the road hiding a peep-show view of the tide rolling beneath the asphalt and even, occasionally, a piece of bootlegged construction.
So I was pretty interested to learn we were not only sinking as an island, the bay is rising as well. Net loss is now being measured in feet and the collection of data recording just exactly how many feet and predicting just how fast has become part of an agency of the state government.
For a more full report please visit: http://onceareporter.blogspot.com/
In the last quarter of the 20th century St. Mary’s County Maryland still had outhouses, tobacco farms, fishing villages and plantations. One of the last live radio stations in America carried the only available daily news. There were a couple of traffic signals, a couple of dress shops, small community grocery stores and a Navy base that most military personnel considered a hardship posting.
Still, just as the first English settlers had determined 350 years before, there were always some who saw the remote and marshy peninsulas for what it is: a marketable paradise.
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