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  Some residents would eventually decide that they needed to take matters into their own hands, and they would form vigilante groups and buy binoculars and guns. Some residents would grow to think, as Deborah Clark did, that this all signified the beginning of the apocalypse and the world must be coming to an end.

  CHAPTER 2

  “THE SOUTH STARTS HERE”

  THE EASTERN SHORE OF VIRGINIA is a hangnail, a hinky peninsula separated from the rest of the state by the Chesapeake Bay and a few hundred years of cultural isolation. It is long and narrow, stretching only fourteen miles at its widest spot but covering hundreds of square miles altogether. The northern border is Maryland at a gas station called Dixieland, which sells Confederate flags and tchotchkes and overstuffed hoagies, and marks the entrance to Accomack with a big sign reading “The South Starts Here.” The southern border is the twenty-five-mile-long Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, built in 1964 as a triumph of modern transportation, which connects the shore to the mainland for the cost of $12 each way. In between are little towns, clapboard churches, peeling chicken coops, salt-whipped brush, and roads that go miles and miles between streetlights.

  The shore is old. It is mostly rural. It is a place that the state senator, Lynwood Lewis, likes to think of as a seventy-mile-long small town where everybody knows everybody, and a place where agricultural traditions convinced the state representative, Robert Bloxom, that when he left the shore for college in the 1980s, he would do so carrying a fifty-pound sack of potatoes along with his suitcase. His grandfather had been a potato farmer, and potatoes had built the shore. Potatoes, but also the railroad, and also a collection of old, old families with names like Bloxom and Lewis and Bundick and Doughty, and a few other shore names that separated the “Born Heres” from the “Come Heres.”

  The Born Heres were exactly what they sounded like. They were people whose roots went way back in the registers of the Accomack and Northampton courthouses, which had some of the oldest ongoing census records of anywhere in the United States. The Come Heres were recent transplants, many of them folks who had fled Philadelphia or Baltimore in search of cheap waterfront property. They, in a shorthand description provided by one Born Here, organized international film nights and bought their coffee at the independent Book Bin instead of at a Royal Farms gas station. One could easily assess a neighbor’s longevity on the Eastern Shore via a short conversation: those whose families went back generations tended to have dense Tidewater accents—“oh’s” became “ow’s,” and “ow’s” became “oo’s.”

  A Come Here, even one who had been raised on the shore since toddlerhood, could never hope to be thought of as a Born Here. After putting in several decades, they might eventually gain the status of a Been Here, but only maybe.

  The area’s original Born Heres, the Accomac, Accohannock, and Mattawames tribes of American Indians, had been gone a long time, forced to sell their land to the ships full of Englishmen who began arriving in 1603. Over the next two hundred years the land was cultivated—potatoes and tomatoes—by farmers and also by slaves who, at the time of the first federal census in 1790, comprised a third of Accomack’s population. The county went Confederate during the Civil War, but was occupied by Union troops without much resistance shortly after fighting began.

  In the late nineteenth century, executives with the Pennsylvania Railroad were looking for ways to connect customers in northeastern industrial cities to southern farm goods, and they began to notice that the easiest, straightest route was through the Eastern Shore. Shore residents received this news with a mix of excitement and trepidation over the effect of such a modern intrusion. But a straight line was drawn between Norfolk and New York, and in 1884 the railroad opened, bifurcating the peninsula straight up the middle.

  The impact on the county was immediate. The arrival of the railroad meant the arrival of railroad towns, planned communities laid out on grids. These towns were followed by the arrival of electricity and then telephone lines. Both were symptoms of the larger economic boom that had arrived to the area. Things that northeasterners wanted—seafood, strawberries, the versatile potato—the Eastern Shore had, and the railroad provided a way to move the goods out of state quickly. The Eastern Shore became a participant in the National Produce Exchange. In this exchange, agents assessed which cities needed which agricultural goods and then immediately put the crops on a train to send them in that direction. Now, instead of supplying just a few regional cities, the Eastern Shore was shipping goods as far west as Kansas City and as far north as Toronto. In the first year of the Produce Exchange, sales on the Eastern Shore were around $750,000. Twenty years later, the sum had grown to $19,269,890. In fact, by this time, in the 1900s and 1910s, Accomack and neighboring Northampton County had the highest valued crops of anywhere in the United States, the third county being Los Angeles. Potato production catapulted from 160,000 bushels a year in 1870 to 1.3 million in 1900. By the time of the 1910 census, those two counties were the wealthiest rural counties in all of America.

  Presidents came to see its majesty: Grover Cleveland hunted ducks on the barrier islands off the coast; Benjamin Harrison hunted quail near the town of New Church. One time Harrison visited and ended up having dinner with a local family that had named their youngest son after Cleveland, Harrison’s bitter political rival. But Harrison was a good sport about it and gave the boy a ten-dollar bill, at least according to the generations of Eastern Shore storytellers who adopted this anecdote as a favorite.

  Wealthy people needed buildings. The farmers who had been living in humble two-room cottages began to use their new fortunes to build houses: A-frames, Cape Cods, colonials. Some of them built smaller houses, and then built bigger houses right next door as soon as they could afford to, and then bigger houses after that. They connected each of the buildings with passageways, producing a maze of rooms that became the shore’s most defining architectural silhouette: “big house, little house, colonnade, kitchen.”

  The Eastern Shore residents built barns and feed stores and restaurants and sheds. To accommodate the tourists who were now coming in on the trains to hunt and take in the scenery, the residents of the Eastern Shore built hotels. In 1931, they built Whispering Pines, a resort complex with a manicured lawn of azaleas, and a restaurant that served oyster stew, chicken salad, cooked tomatoes, pickled beets. It had ninety-five bedrooms, each with a private bath. People came to visit Whispering Pines from all up and down the Eastern Seaboard. They swam in the pristine pool. They admired the grounds. Color fliers were made: “The showplace of the Eastern Shore.”

  THE ECONOMIC BOOM of Accomack County was like the economic boom of farming communities all over the United States, with some measures of uniqueness. And when the economy shifted again, the long, slow bust would be like the one in farming communities all over the United States, with some measures of uniqueness: the railroad had made the Eastern Shore. And, as Eastern Shore historian Brooks Miles Barnes put it, “The internal combustion engine unmade us.”

  When the railroad had been responsible for shipping out produce, the collective crops of multiple farmers could be held, in freight cars, until prices reached a favorable exchange. But then came the era of the personal automobile. Originally, paved roadways had been seen as a godsend; farmers no longer had to pay a portion of their profits to the railroad in transportation fees. But there were also unintended effects. When farmers began acquiring their own trucks, they began making their own deals, undercutting one another’s prices and driving the crop value down. An early bellwether of trouble was in 1928: Farmers that year couldn’t get nearly what they once could for a bushel of produce; they couldn’t even recoup the cost of production. Those who were accustomed to financing their crops’ planting through loans—a typical practice, to be repaid at harvest—found themselves underwater. One year later the Depression began.

  As decades crawled on there were other issues, some real and some magnified in the perception of hardworking farmers. Saline levels dr
opped in the bay, disrupting the marine-life balance that supported the crabbing and fishing industries. Chain grocery stores replaced independent operations; they bought in bulk but paid less for what they bought. Potatoes, once the shore’s specialty crop, were now being grown all over the country, with growers nationwide racing one another to the bottom of prices that were difficult to sustain. Consumers began buying crazy new snacks, like the innovative and modern Dorito. “Shit chips,” one descendant of potato farmers remembered his father calling these snack foods in the 1950s and 1960s, because it wasn’t clear exactly what was in these Doritos and Fritos and Tostitos. Certainly nothing as wholesome as a potato. Farmers were sure it was partially these snacks’ fault that their businesses were struggling.

  Eventually, beginning in the mid-twentieth century, people left. They went north into Maryland or Delaware, in search of jobs. Or they left for college—the so-called brain drain experienced all over the country—and didn’t come back, and the remaining population aged and the shore gradually emptied. In 1958 the passenger railroad left, too: when businesses turned to trucks for their shipping needs and families turned to cars for their vacation needs, there wasn’t as much use for a railroad.

  For the people who remained, poultry was replacing produce as the county’s biggest employer. The chicken magnate Arthur Perdue was from the Eastern Shore, just over the border in Maryland. He’d been a railroad agent who left that industry to grow his family’s egg farm into a profitable business in 1920. Eventually he, along with other Eastern Shore farmers, realized that raising broiler chickens could lead to a better profit than raising egg-laying chickens. The land was good for chicken raising: mild climate, sandy soil that facilitated drainage, low building costs. Perdue opened its first mass chicken production factory on the shore in the late 1960s.

  By 2012, Perdue and Tyson were the two largest employers in Accomack County. The Delmarva peninsula, which included the Eastern Shore of Virginia as well as parts of Maryland and Delaware, was annually farming 558 million birds, producing 3.6 billion pounds of meat, employing nearly fifteen thousand people (Accomack County, in particular, ranked sixty-fourth of the more than three thousand counties in the United States in terms of its poultry production). Thirteen hundred of those jobs belonged to “growers,” the modern term preferred over “farmers” for the workers who housed and fed the chicks until they were big enough for eating. The growers provided the buildings and the manpower; the chicken companies gave them the birds, the feed, the propane, the vaccinations.

  The rest of the fifteen thousand worked directly for the poultry companies. They were members of the “catching crew,” whose job it was to round up the birds by hand and transport them to the factories. Or they were members of the slaughtering teams, or they were janitors cleaning the machinery in the factories, which smelled pungent and burnt when you drove past them but were Clorox-clean inside. There were “deboning” jobs, and “trussing” jobs, and “eviscerating” jobs, which required, as qualifications, only the necessity of being eighteen years old with the ability to lift fifty pounds, and a willingness “to stand for several hours . . . work in wet and extreme hot or cold conditions . . . work around dust, feathers and various cleaning chemicals,” as one Perdue job ad specified. For this a worker might make $9–$12 an hour. A single person could live on that here, if he scrimped.

  Those jobs were steady—people always needed to eat, so they were somewhat recession-proof—but they were precarious in other ways: according to one aspiring politician stumping about the economy on the campaign trail, “We’re one bird-flu away from economic destruction.”

  People held meetings about the environmental impact of these plants, whole standing-room-only meetings about chicken poop runoff, with half the attendees arguing that chickens were polluting the land, and half arguing that chickens created vital work that might not come otherwise. These meetings were about the county’s economic future, about the soul of the county, and about an old-fashioned place figuring out the best way to adapt in the modern world.

  By November 12, 2012, the same thing had happened on the Eastern Shore that had happened to rural communities all across the country: the shift of family farms to corporate ones. The closing of small businesses and the arrival of big-box stores, which brought much-needed convenience but also left main streets emptying. In the 1910 census, the Eastern Shore population had been fifty-two thousand; in the 2010 census, the population was forty-four thousand, a nearly 20 percent decline.

  AN AVERAGE PASSERBY wouldn’t have known this about Accomack, any of it. Most outsiders who came to the shore at all were vacationers on their way to Chincoteague Island, home of the swimming horses, where Marguerite Henry had set her 1947 Newbery Honor Book, Misty of Chincoteague. Or they were on their way to Wallops Island, the NASA facility that employed engineers and rocket scientists and had a visitors center for tourists. If vacationers bothered to drive through the mainland, they likely stayed on the one main road, hopping out of their cars only long enough to buy boiled peanuts from one of the summertime roadside stands.

  Which was a shame. Because there were many, many beautiful places on the Eastern Shore: a historic movie theater, a picturesque vineyard, and a donut bakery that would have made Krispy Kreme weep with jealousy, if only anyone off the shore knew about it. There was the Onancock Wharf, where sailboats docked and their inhabitants disembarked to eat crab cakes, and where kids participated in fishing competitions. There was Jaxon’s Hardware in the town of Parksley, which sold everything from candy to clothing to butter dishes and ammunition; the kind of authentic general store that posh vacation destinations spend fortunes to reproduce. Not all towns in Accomack were the same, either. Kirk Mariner, a writer who had grown up in the relatively more working-class New Church and then moved to the well-heeled Onancock, liked to demarcate the difference as such: “In New Church, we cut our grass. In Onancock, we mow our lawns.” Of Saxis, a tiny fishing community on the western part of the county, Mariner explained, “Saxis isn’t the end of the world, but you can see it from there.”

  Doors went unlocked, bake sales and brisket fund-raisers were well attended, and when two cars passed on the road, both drivers would raise the tips of their fingers off the steering wheel in a wave. The grassy shores and open sky made the land breathtaking—“God’s country,” people said. There’s a reason that the Come Heres want to go there.

  But all of the past century’s change had resulted in one particular outcome: the Eastern Shore was no longer the richest rural place in America. It was a place that was falling behind: only 17 percent of adults over age twenty-five had bachelor’s degrees, compared with 35 percent in the rest of highly educated Virginia. A fifth of Accomack’s residents lived below the poverty line; a quarter of Northampton County’s. They were among Virginia’s poorest counties.

  Route 13, the county’s main route, ran the length of the Eastern Shore, and it was the only route that was well lit. The other streets veined away from it, winding off at odd angles or ending abruptly, past hundreds and hundreds of now empty houses that lingered and rotted by the side of the road. At night, hardly anybody went on any of these roads. People went to bed early so they could get up early for work—the agricultural jobs that remained required rising with the sun. Besides, even if someone had the inclination or money for a late evening out, there weren’t a whole lot of places to go.

  In November of 2012, the Eastern Shore of Virginia was old. It was long. It was isolated. It was emptying of people but full of abandoned houses. It was dark. It was a uniquely perfect place to light a string of fires.

  CHAPTER 3

  “ORANGE IN THE SKY”

  HELEN HASTY’S LAND exemplified the rise and recession of Accomack County. The acres she lived on used to be known as Smith Brothers Farm. The Smiths were her ancestors. They had grown potatoes, and on Sunday afternoons half a century ago, her grandfather would take the family on long drives to judge whether the crops had been planted in str
aight lines. In those days, the potatoes on the shore were harvested by migrant workers, who arrived each season and stayed in a labor camp on the property. As a girl, Hasty was afraid of their cussing but still loved accompanying her grandfather when he doled out the farmworkers’ weekly paychecks.

  Then crop prices dropped and the money for those paychecks started coming in more slowly, until it dried up altogether. The last year of the Smith Brothers’ incorporation, Hasty was their only employee. The year after that, the family started leasing the land out to corporate farms. When the corporate farms switched from potatoes to corn and soybeans, which don’t need to be picked by hand, the migrant labor camps went unoccupied. Occasionally, tourists stopped by to inquire about the history of the buildings, or amateur photographers who thought the camp had a sort of haunting beauty.

  Hasty now found herself part of another defining Accomack story. At half past 1 a.m. on November 13—twelve miles away from where Deborah Clark had called in the first fire three hours before—Hasty went to let out her dog, who wouldn’t stop barking, and saw that those old migrant camp buildings were now aflame.

  “It’s two houses, and it’s right on the turn,” she told the 911 dispatcher, trying to give directions for the buildings that no longer had an address. “We didn’t hear nothing, we didn’t see nothing. We let the dogs out—they go in there all the time . . . I mean, the buildings are not insured, they’re vacant, they’re just old shacks that been there a hundred years. Oh, it’s getting bright now, it’s lit up both sides of the road. Oh my God. There she goes.”