Daniel Fromson is a copy editor for the website of The New Yorker. For the Elizabethan era is essentially of the quick, although its dead have lain entombed for centuries.
On Easter Sunday , a foot sailboat motored into the Chesapeake Bay. He recorded himself with a handheld camera, as if starring in an adventure film of his own creation. Sailing without radar or other instruments, he had dropped anchor that evening and spent the night in the cabin, a warren of unfinished wood, dangling wires, and peeling metal foil suffused with a distinctly lived-in shabbiness.
Now, however, he stood on deck in the afternoon sun, glided into a marina, and tied up at a berth amid stacks of crab traps and thickets of salt-marsh cordgrass, silencing an engine that had no reverse.
Shaped like an apple turnover, Tangier Islandβofficially Tangier, Virginia, as its inhabited portions are knownβmeasures three miles by one mile, sits just a few feet above sea level, and is so grooved with waterways and pounded by waves that several acres, every year, simply vanish into the bay.
For a few days, the sailor prowled the island with his video camera. He looked younger than his 65 years, with blue eyes that flickered between glowing and dim, framed by delicate, childlike lashes. On either side of a strawberry-shaped nose, his ears jutted crookedly from a bald skull.
