Still, the waves have punched through the 1½ mile long island, cutting it into 3 pieces. The story of Holland Island, once the site of a bustling 19th-century village and now barren save White's house, is the tale of many islands in the Chesapeake Bay. Rising tides and erosion already have claimed a dozen in both Maryland and Virginia, and scientists say most of the rest will be consumed by the end of this century. State officials have been studying the problem, which affects more than a third of Maryland's 4,360-mile coastline and is costing the state about 260 acres along the shores each year. For Holland Island, any remedies that come from their efforts may be too late. "There's so much negativity," said White, a former waterman and minister and a semi-retired real estate developer. He lives in Salisbury and visits the island on weekends.
He knows that some people think he is tilting at windmills. But he hasn't got time for such talk. Holland Island has shrunken to 80 acres, less than half its size 50 years ago, and the pace of erosion is increasing. Blunting the battering waves "can be done," he insisted. "It's just a matter of will and ability. I have both of those, but I don't have the funds." White has asked the Maryland Port Administration to use his island as a disposal site for 10 million cubic yards of dredge material from bay channels--enough to restore the island to its footprint of 100 years ago. He also sought about $200,000 from the state and federal government to construct breakwaters and rebuild the island. Failing to win any grants, he has created a stopgap of sandbags, rocks and an old rusted barbecue grill piled next to his house.

But he has what he hopes is a more enduring strategy, the makings of which lie scattered around the island: A ramshackle Bantam excavator is beached near the house, its rusted chain sprawled by the front door awaiting repair. In the distance, a dredger sits listing in a watery gut, where White dragged it last year before the winter storms. He found a small front-end loader abandoned in the marsh and put new rings and bearings in it, but with a broken camshaft, it remains parked in the shadow of the excavator. His plan is to fill 100-foot-long textile tubes with sand from the island's lee side, then sink about 20 of them off the windward shoreline to thwart the waves. He has received permits to dredge 100,000 cubic yards of sand, which is what he figures it will take to build a breakwater the length of the island to prevent further erosion and siltation that has smothered acres of oyster beds and underwater grass. He has managed to scrape up enough to buy 10 tubes, which are tucked among the weeds and in a small shed he built by the house. But they must wait until he gets more money and help to run the machinery to scoop up the sand to fill the tubes.
He hopes to address the Maryland General Assembly to plead his case for getting dredge spoils from the northern regions of the bay. But that decision-making process could take years to unfold, and it could well prove too expensive for the state to transport the dredge material to his island. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is now guiding a $427 million project to move more than 30 million cubic yards of sandy soil from the bay's shipping lanes to create a 1,100-acre wildlife refuge at long-diminished Poplar Island. John Gill, leader of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Chesapeake Bay island unit, admires White's tenacity and has offered him technical advice and assistance, but Gill said his agency had to turn down his request for funds. "There's benefits to the natural resources, but it's private land," said Gill, who heads the service's Chesapeake Bay islands unit. "I support his objective, which is to stop the island from eroding, but I'm not sure that the geotubes will prove to be anything but a stopgap measure."

About 10,500 acres of island have been lost just in the middle portion of the Chesapeake Bay since colonial times, according to the University of Maryland Center for Global Change. Formed centuries ago when Eastern Shore peninsulas were breached by rising bay tides, the three dozen islands in the midsection of the bay help curtail erosion on the Eastern Shore and provide underwater grasses that are habitat for fish and crabs. But as the wind- driven tides batter the islands from the west, their edges wash into the bay. And unlike coastal islands of sand that migrate and reposition, the bay islands' mud clay disintegrates into the water column and is washed into the deeper parts of the bay. With few exceptions, the "hardening" of the bay's western shoreline with bulkheads and jetties prevents the formation of new islands.
White grew up on the Eastern Shore and visited Holland Island as a child. The changes astonished him when he saw the island years later "I looked around, and I didn't recognize the place," he said. A sleepy village that once existed on the island was gone, most of the buildings washed into the bay and the oyster shell roads overgrown with cord grasses and water bushes. As he walked around the island trying to orient himself, he stumbled across a small graveyard under a hackberry tree, its branches filled with the nests of herons and egrets. Brushing the weeds from a headstone , he read the epitaph for a girl named Effie Lee Wilson, born Jan. 6, 1880, died Oct. 12, 1893:

Forget me not is all I ask; I could not ask for more.
Than to be cherished by my friends so loving & so dear.

extraterrestrial

Meteor shower reports abound along East Coast 7.23.01   Reuters PHILADELPHIA   Reports of a possible meteor shower flooded police and government telephone lines along the U.S. East Coast on Monday, authorities said. The sightings of what some described as a fast- moving meteor prompted evening rush-hour motorists to pull off suburban highways west of Philadelphia. Pilots in flight issued reports of similar sightings to federal aviation officials in Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland. Authorities said eyewitness accounts came from upstate New York to Virginia.

bailout   "… As sports become ever more extreme & expensive, surely the next millennium will find the spaceways filled not with govt employees but rather daredevils … " 5.3.65 article   description of Vostok is recounted with the comment that the spherical capsule was the great surprise: "Gagarin traveled like Baron Münchhausen - on a cannon ball!"

"People say they saw what was perhaps a meteor shower, but there's nothing we can confirm," said Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Arlene Salac. A Reuters reporter saw a tapered object shaped like a trumpet bell falling diagonally through the western sky near West Chester, Pennsylvania, 20 miles from Philadelphia, at about 6:20 p.m. The object emitted a lustrous rainbow of colors, ranging from bright yellow on its downward- pointing flared end to light green and finally rust-colored red at the upward-pointing tapered end. Others reported seeing a triangular object or a fireball shooting through the sky.

People living near Montoursville, Pennsylvania, a rural community 130 miles northwest of Philadelphia, reported hearing a loud explosion after seeing the unidentified object. A state police dispatcher said one woman reported that the blast broke windows in her home. There were also unconfirmed reports of people finding debris on the ground. "It was a ball of fire," Mark Barbour of Syracuse, New York, told CNN. "It looked like something you would see from the movies." The National Weather Service reported no natural phenomena that could account for such a sight.
Police in Pennsylvania were investigating the possibility of a part falling from a plane from Philadelphia International Airport, which sometimes guides flights across the city's western suburbs. But sightings were later reported southward through Delaware, Maryland, Washington and into Virginia. There were no reports of aviation emergencies, apart from the nonfatal crash of a single-engine plane in Calvert, Maryland, near the state's border with Pennsylvania and Delaware. "We have no idea what it was, whether it was a meteor or what," said National Weather Service spokesman Curtis Carey.

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