‘No babies, no toddlers’: The Virginia island where land and people are disappearing

Detailed summary

Every year, Tangier Island loses ground the sea and people to old age or easier lives on shore. Those who are left are searching for ways to save their historic town.

When Gil Pruitt was growing up on the shrinking island of Tangier, winters were much colder than today, with ice sometimes covering the bay. Children on the West Ridge, a slightly elevated filament of land on the island’s western side, would walk to school together in packs to make the cold easier to bear. Gil would wait until the kids who lived a bit farther down the road walked by, and then rush out to shelter among them. “As a smaller kid, you’d walk behind the tall kids, to let them block the wind, because the school was on the other end of the island,” recalled Pruitt, who traces his ancestry back to some of Tangier’s early settlers in the early 1800s.

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