Waterfront Living

Waterfront living can mean many things. Last night, I watched for the umpteenth time, a lovely movie named The Secret of Roan Inish. It beautifully illustrated the ultimate scenario of waterfront living on a small, stony island off the coast of Ireland. The only neighbors were the harbor seals and the gulls. It’s a romantic tale, but full of heartache and hardships for an Irish family forced to evacuate their island home following World War II.

It brought to mind my own waterfront home, which I cherish, although it’s not oceanfront, riverfront, lakefront, or even pondfront. It is creekfront. Ah, but in coastal Virginia a creek is not a stream. It is a tidal body, an inlet, usually navigable, emptying into a larger body of water. Ours flows into the Rappahannock River, just short miles upstream from the Chesapeake Bay.

The view from our house is God’s own artwork, starting with the golden beams of sunrise lighting up the treetops across the water and ending the days with the most glorious sunsets above and below that tree line. I never know if I should be looking up into the sky or looking down into the stippled reflections slightly disturbed by the herons, eagles, osprey, ducks, geese, fish, turtles, muskrats, and occasional deer… oh, and my dog swimming after floating sticks. My life here is not without challenges, one of which is the threat of losing it. But when I compare my struggles to working waterfront lives, mine is a life of luxury.

People have always sought waterfront property despite storms, flood dangers, and possible isolation. We are drawn to the waters of life. On the seacoast we are sustained by the fish, shellfish, and seaweed pulled from the waters. We can’t drink saltwater, but its shear mass generates morning dew and clouds filled with rainwater we can collect. Where there is soil and fresh water, there is greenery and life.

On the rocky Aran Isles of Ireland, the folk had to create even their own soil. They built hundreds of square fields enclosed by fieldstone walls which year upon year they layered with sand, seaweed, and organic waste to create soil rich enough to grow their vegetables and rye grass for thatching their rooves. With hardship and determination, they physically BUILT their lives every single day. They thanked God for the gift of their laboring hands. In the absence of power boats, they rowed or sailed the choppy, dangerous cold waters of the North Atlantic in currachs made of seal pelts stretched over a wood frame, later canvas over that same frame, waterproofed with tar. So constant and visceral was the daily danger that each family created its own knitted sweater pattern so that a body washed ashore or dragged from the waters could be identified by the sweater.

Although Roan Inish is a real island, the story is fiction based on the tenacity of hard-working watermen who would choose to die on the sea rather than labor inland. It reminds me of life on Great Blasket Island which I visited in 2006. We took the boat out to the island which, like Roan Inish, had been evacuated in 1953. The population had decreased from 175 to only 22 when the hardships of living that isolated life outweighed the efforts to sustain it. Those families were resettled in Dunquin, on the Dingle Peninsula, where we were staying. This is the backdrop for the fictitious evacuation of Roan Inish following World War II. The government required such evacuations all along the coasts.

Lives of labor on the water are not limited to Ireland. Similar evacuations have occurred from islands in the Chesapeake Bay as it continues to erode the sandy islands until houses and schools fall into the water. The Bay’s Tangier Island has been losing ground for decades, and with an altitude only several feet above sea level is imperiled by every major storm. In fact, following the great storm of 1938, so much land was eroded that a mass exodus brought island watermen to settle in my town of Urbanna and other mainland coastal towns between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers. The natural action of wind, waves, and especially storms continues to eat away at the island. Climate Change fanatics insist it is rising sea levels due to global warming. Others claim it is the same natural process that has been ongoing for centuries. Still others point to a collapsing sea floor from draining the aquifer beneath it for human uses (it’s not that the sea level is rising, but that the land is sinking). Any of these has the same impact. The island has been noticeably vanishing since it was inhabited in colonial days.

Although this story is specifically about life on the sea, the drive to live at the water’s edge extends inland. In America, as the population moved west, settlers looked for waterfront property. They settled along lake and the river shores, or found land with a stream running through it. Water is always both life-giving and dangerous.

Even in mountainous Nelson County, Virginia, which no one would consider to be “waterfront,” in 1969 the remnants of Hurricane Camille dumped so much rain (more than 25 inches in 5 hours) on the crest of the Blue Ridge that it overwhelmed the mountain streams, transforming the mountainside into a raging cascading waterfall and mudslide. On its way to the Tye River it swept away more than 100 bridges, 900 buildings, and 124 people as they slept in their homes. Thirty-seven of them were never found.

My point is simple. Such beauty never comes without great cost as well as potential danger. Land bordered by the sea or a river or even along mountain streams is constantly succumbing to nature. The wind, currents, and pounding waves eat away at one area and deposit it as growing sand shoals (or deltas) in another. Likewise, no matter the perceived value, California’s homes on the cliffs of the Pacific and homes built on the dunes of the Outer Banks on the Atlantic, are all temporary structures. We can fight nature only up to a point, and then we must switch to Plan B.

And so it goes, and so it shall always go. If you build your home by the water, love it and be grateful to be there, but always beware.