By Kahrin Deines/Medill – Smith Island, MD

Only one excited voice and the whirr of overhead fans broke the rapt silence of the open-air tabernacle where Smith Island’s annual “camp meeting” takes place.  

Itinerant Methodist preacher Eric Clark was working his way – and his audience – into a fervor.  Between breaths and pauses to call for ‘Amens,’ his voice crashed in waves, washing over his audience, and calling on them to cleanse their ways.  

“Everybody in this room is probably aware that the human person, the human being, is comprised of three parts,” Clark began.  “He has a spirit, he has a soul and he lives in a dirt trailer called his flesh, the outer man.”

Clark’s message is probably akin to the sermons of the Methodist preachers who traveled to Smith Island for the first “camp meeting” revival 117 years ago. 

It’s that way with many things on this little island in the Chesapeake Bay, where the men still struggle to wrestle a living from the sea, the women still stay up late to “pick” the meat from blue crabs, and time in general seems to move at a slower clip.  

Of course, not all things are constant.  The metaphor of a trailer was not available in the days of Joshua Thomas, who began the revival tradition on the bay’s barrier islands during the period of American religious upheaval known as the Second Great Awakening. 

Today preacher Clark’s warnings about the inroads that earthly temptations can make upon the spirit now also have an unlikely parallel in scientists’ warnings about the impact of global warming.  

According to Dr. Donald Boesch, president of the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science, the Chesapeake Bay’s waters will likely rise between two to four feet over the next century, compared to an estimated rise of one foot in the last.  

Such a rise could submerge much of Smith Island, where the average elevation is two feet above sea level and the maximum elevation is five. 

Concern about how a rise in sea level might impact places like the historic island led Maryland’s Governor Martin O’Malley to ask Dr. Boesch and others to assess global warming impacts for the state.  Their report is now completed and will be released in the next few weeks.  

It’s hard to know what impact the scientists’ climate change impact assessment may have on the islanders’ outlooks, though.

Although island pastor Rick Edmund has testified before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works about the threat sea level rise poses for his parish, experience may dampen the scientists’ alarms.  

“If they’re correct, we’d be under water,” said Eddie Evans, one of Smith Islander’s “watermen,” who depend on the Chesapeake’s blue crab, oysters and fish for a living.  “I’m 70-years-old, been here all my life, and so far I’ve not seen it.  The same subject [sea level rise] was going on when I was going to school as a young, young boy.  I’m not saying it’s not been a small amount, but it’s very unnoticeable.”

Talk to any old-timer on the island and they can tell you about how people one and two hundred years ago were able to live on other parts of the splatter of land banks that make up Smith Island.  They might also tell you how the solitary lighthouse that appears to have erupted on its own from the bay’s depths was once attached to the island.

Even the town’s small museum has a display dedicated to illustrating the island’s loss of land since the 19^th century.  

It’s hard, though, to be worried about something that’s been happening for as long as anyone can remember.  

“Well, we know that we’re eroding.  We’ve been eroding since the early 1800s,” said Jennings Evans, a former waterman and the person other residents point to as the town historian.  “We’ve been losing here lately, I guess about 10 acres a year on this island.  When this island started out it was about 10 miles long by 6 miles wide.  Now, I daresay, it’s 8 miles long now.”

With erosion a constant in local history, and urgent worries focused on the new crab catch restrictions, sea level rise can seem fairly routine.

“People don’t lose a lot of sleep over global warming because they don’t know when it’s going to hit, they’re not sure it’s going to hit, and a lot of them have religious faith, so they say,  ‘The Lord – when He wants us to go, He’ll get rid of us,’” Jennings Evans said.  

“So that’s the way they figure it,” Evans said.  “And I’m the same way because I’m getting old now and if global warming’s going to get me, it better soon hurry up because there’s many other things that could get you before global warming.”