A few hours after I saw Uppards from the air, I visited the area by boat with Schulte and Carol Moore-Pruitt, who also traces her roots to Canaan. Over the past few years, she has come to be regarded as its unofficial historian, the keeper not only of shards of information about the inhabitants — “It used to be beautiful green grass, chickens, roses, fig trees,” she told me — but also of physical fragments that wash up where the town once stood. She told me that 10 years ago she found an English whiskey bottle from the 1600s. One lingering problem with Uppards is that the remnants of the Canaan cemetery, now half underwater, have proved difficult to collect and move. Though some bodies have been relocated, bones and parts of coffins continue to wash into the tide regularly. Pruitt-Parks told me that once she was waiting for a ferry on Tangier’s dock and saw a femur on a nearby bank.

Canaan — and Uppards Island — matter to the people of Tangier for two reasons. The first is that even in its tattered state, it protects the rest of Tangier from the erosive northern currents of the Chesapeake. As our boat drew nearer, Schulte told me he thinks Uppards is now losing about 10 feet of shoreline a year. And, he said, “If you lose Uppards, you lose the town of Tangier, because then the town would be unsheltered.”

The second reason residents care about Uppards is that it represents a possible future. “I’m not a pessimist,” Moore-Pruitt told me. “But I see what’s happening. Without a sea wall on the east side, or a sea wall on the west side, Tangier will just be in the history books. It will be like this place, like Uppards.” We had come ashore from her small boat. She looked around and spread her arms and said, “But isn’t it beautiful?”

It was indeed — but also windswept, lonesome, strange. She began leading us past tidal pools and along the beach, a mix of silt and peat held together by the thin roots of marsh grasses. The lapping of the Chesapeake was ripping away the peat at the water’s edge. As Moore-Pruitt narrated, we walked by piles of oyster shells — middens, most likely, dating back to Native American settlers — and soon came upon a large scattering of red bricks, smoothed and made porous by time and weather, that had probably served as the foundation of Canaan’s homes. Not far away was a large iron ring, sunk into the mud, which marked the top of an old freshwater well. All around us were old bottles and dead bushes and gnarled stumps, including the skeleton of a large fig tree. “That died three years ago,” Moore-Pruitt said, blaming the intrusion of saltwater, which made survival for most plants difficult. Beyond the fig tree were a number of weathered marble headstones from the old Canaan graveyard, lying flat on the beach. Schulte began turning them over to read the inscriptions. The familiar Tangier names — the old families that had come here from Cornwall hundreds of years ago — still echoed: Margaret Pruitt, Polly Parks.

Moore-Pruitt led us farther eastward. Over the next few weeks, I thought of her many times — this woman who takes her small boat to Uppards almost every day, weather permitting, to walk the beach, stepping gingerly over fallen headstones while searching for bottles and buttons or taking a moment to appreciate the blooms of a dying rosebush planted by someone (an ancestor?) more than a century ago. Sometimes, she told me, especially in summer, she brings along her grandchildren to help her gather things exposed by the tide, even though, as she put it, “the sun is so hot you can barely stand it.” She had found toy marbles and old coins and coffin handles; she had also discovered arrowheads and a Native American ax head of smoothed stone that must have preceded the settlement of Canaan by many centuries. But every week, she said, there was a bit less land and brush. And every visit was an effort to gather the final, sodden artifacts of a place that would vanish, almost completely, within a few years.

We walked for a while more. Eventually, we reached an area beyond the remains of Canaan where the empty beach stretched through mud, marsh grass and scattered oyster shells. Schulte said he wanted to keep going farther, along the eastern shore of Uppards, and Moore-Pruitt agreed to return later in her boat to pick him up. Schulte said that he thought he might have seen a living pine tree during the flight on the Cessna. “I want to go see if I can find it.”

Standing on the beach, Moore-Pruitt said, “Sometimes it’s so hard to imagine this was a town.”

“It’s like no one ever lived here,” Schulte replied. Then he turned and began walking to find the last tree.