Holland Island, February 1905. Seven watermen digging a channel hit iron where there was only clay.
In the frost, the mud around it was steaming.

Holland Island was a low marsh island in Maryland's part of the Chesapeake Bay, home to a few hundred oystermen and their families, with one store, one school and one Methodist church carrying a debt. The oyster harvest was failing, and the young people were leaving for Baltimore. That winter the men set out to cut a boat channel straight through the marsh, to save two hours of sailing a day. Four hundred yards in, a shovel rang against something that should not have been there.

Within a year the beds around the island were full of oysters the size of a man's shoe, and families who had left came home. But every spring the schoolteacher walked the shore with her father's surveyor's chain, and every spring it came up shorter. What was the iron screw really doing to the island?

Tell us in one word in the comments: what is your island, the thing you are trading away a yard at a time for a good season?
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This story is a work of fiction. Real places and historical periods serve as the backdrop; the characters and events are invented. Images are illustrative.

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