Eskridge tosses the many dead crabs, which represent hundreds of dollars, behind him into the bay as the four cats that inhabit the shack watch mewling. The die-out is just one of the many hazards of working the water, another idiosyncrasy of the beautiful, strange life on the last inhabited Virginia island in the Chesapeake Bay. It’s this life, and its tenuous future, that Swift documented carefully for Chesapeake Requiem.

Until the recent rash of press, Tangier was unknown and nearly unimaginable to many people in America. Smack in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, 12 miles from Virginia’s coast, it’s the second to last of what were once dozens of inhabited islands throughout the Chesapeake, their names now synonymous with ghosts: Holland Island, Goose Island, Watts Island, James Island. (The other remaining inhabited one is nearby Smith Island, in Maryland’s waters.) Once bustling with over 1000 residents in 1900 and nearly triple its current land mass, Tangier has shrunk considerably in both population and size, with its 460-some residents confined to less than two square miles, and much of that is marsh.

The one thing that hasn’t changed is the way of life. For generations, the world has known the island for the two things painted prominently on its water tower that lords over the island and the bay: A bright red crab, and a large black cross. Settled in 1778 by a single man and his family, populated profusely by his descendants to become a thriving waterman’s community and famed Methodist enclave, and now the source for the domestic soft-shell blue crab output of America, it earns the phrase “like no place on Earth.”

The shrinkage has drawn a rash of reportage over the past two years, tracing from a 2015 now-much-cited study in Scientific Reports portending Tangier’s demise by the year 2050 due to climate change. (That estimate was conservative, even in 2015; by now, it’s apparent the end will come much sooner.) That brought The New York Times, and then the local reporters, and then CNN. In June of 2017, a reporter from the network interviewed Eskridge about the island’s land loss. Eskridge, being the one Tangiermen who enjoys the spotlight, demanded on-camera that President Donald J. Trump build a seawall for the island instead of one at the border. This went viral — Tangier residents are overwhelmingly for Trump, with signs blanketing the island, a paradox that Swift doesn’t let go unexplored — and in response, the president later telephoned him to promise he would build the seawall. Like many White House promises, the wall has yet to materialize. The viral video brought more press, so much that when we visited, there was talk that a reality show had recently explored casting there.

People everywhere are suddenly paying attention to a place that has since World War II gotten precious little notice from the outside world, beyond day-tripper tourists who are in on the secret. But, like much of the post-election coverage of “Trump country,” a lot of the reportage on Tangier smarts of voyeurism: Media elite dropping in to a “different” place to report on the “unusual” lifestyle and people there. As we putter back across the harbor, Swift and Eskridge mention a piece in The New Yorker about the island that neither is happy with; they feel it just doesn’t do the place justice.