Tangier

His movie might have been spurned by Tangier's born-again Christian elected leaders, but that didn't keep Paul Newman away from the Chesapeake Bay island. The famous leading man had been booked for a private tour of Tangier on Thursday, apparently in anticipation of the filming of a PG-13 movie called "Message in a Bottle." Despite the Town Council's March 9 rejection of Warner Bros.' proposal to film some scenes on the island, Newman kept the date.Charter boat captains in Crisfield, Keith Ward and Curtis Johns, gave the actor a ride to the island and escorted him to the hardware store.

The first step to being successful at fly fishing is tying a fly creatively enough to make it seem real to the fish you're trying to catch. Considered by many to be something of an art form, tying flies is an acquired skill. With hopes of learning how to tie their flies or how to get better at it, 400 to 500 anglers from Maryland and neighboring states are expected to attend the 11th annual Tiefest, which is presented by the Kent Narrows chapter of Coastal Conservation Association Maryland.

Could the folks of Tangier, Va., be serious? They really don't want Paul Newman and Kevin Costner, two of America's most famous leading men, to make a movie on their little island in the Chesapeake Bay? That's what we heard yesterday morning, after word spread that the Tangier Town Council had voted unanimously against allowing Warner Bros. to make "A Message in a Bottle" on the island over the next three months. A town meeting was scheduled for last night, and a good many of the island's 750 residents were expected to attend.

Hamburgers, like movie stars, are sometimes cast in new roles. There is a lot of that going on at Hollywood Burger Bistro in Canton . The menu is dominated by hamburgers made, according to the restaurant's website, from hormone-free California beef. The cutesy names of the burgers — the Lindsay Lohan, made with Irish cream; the Jim Kelly, made with buffalo sauce; and the John Waters, made with crab dip — are part of the appeal. But whatever you call it, a burger has to work.

Reducing an arena-sized show to nightclub dimensions is always a mixed proposition. On the one hand, you lose a lot of spectacle in the transition to a smaller stage, while on the other, you gain a degree of intimacy impossible in hockey rinks.Such was the case when the triple bill of Winger, Extreme and Tangier played Hammerjacks over the weekend. Compared to most arena shows, Saturday's had little in the way of visual flash, with minimal lighting and only a touch of dry-ice fog onstage.

TANGIER ISLAND, Va. -- It's three weeks to graduation and the Tangier Combined School Class of 1999 -- eight girls and one boy -- has little time for sentimentality. What with fittings for caps and gowns, senior portraits, the senior trip to New York and the prom, their final days are a blur.After 13 years together, they know full well the choices they're making now will set most of them on course for lives far from the safety of this close-knit, deeply religious community of 600-plus inhabitants who think of themselves as one big extended family.

TANGIER, Va. -- This bay island has made national news for saying no to filming a PG-13, Kevin Costner-Paul Newman movie, which the Town Council found objectionably coarse.Whether one agrees with the decision or not, it had a profound basis -- placing values over easy money in a place that could use the income.The decision was an outgrowth of less-publicized events here that go to the core of bay restoration efforts and offer a fascinating foretaste of environmental politics in the next presidential campaign.

TANGIER ISLAND, Va. -- Tropical Storm Isabel ripped through the harbor of this Chesapeake Bay outpost last fall, destroying a rough-hewn collection of crab shanties and threatening the precarious hold that islanders have on their way of life. The hard-crab season is off to a sluggish start in still-chilly waters. Rebuilding the shacks will be crucial for harvesting soft-shell crabs when they begin molting in the next few weeks, and federal officials are trying to come up with a plan to help pay for the repairs.

Maryland winters can be particularly ferocious or quite benign. The winter of 1779, which earned the sobriquet of "The Hard Winter," left icebound ships in the Chesapeake Bay loaded with desperately needed supplies for George Washington's Continental Army, shivering in winter quarters at Morristown, N.J. The coldest winter in the past 100 years was the winter of 1917-1918, which roared into Maryland, dropping three times the normal amount of snow and...

Watts Island, Va. -- You might say there's not much of value left on Watts Island, an eroding speck in the lower Chesapeake about five miles east of the somewhat larger speck which is Tangier.The human residents are long gone. There was a graveyard, but the sea has taken it. The headstones were saved and preserved on Tangier. Tales of the last resident, a cultivated man who owned the island and lived a hermit-like life there for many years, are folklore now. There were goats for a time, but no more.

Tangier's is an oasis. It's a new restaurant in Canton offering flavorful Moroccan dishes in a tasteful setting. The soothing orange and brown walls, dark tile table tops — this space was formerly Meridian 54 and, before that, Red Fish — combine to take you away from the hot summer clime of Baltimore into a cool, sheltered spot. The food, traditional Moroccan dishes drawn from the recipes of relatives of chef Alan Suissa, is exceptional. Dine here, and you're not in Canton anymore.

TANGIER, Va. - Christmas on Tangier Island this year means silk poinsettia swags hauled over on the mail boat, fake firs and faux mistletoe - and holly berries made of plastic or wax. For the first time in more than three decades, the tiny Virginia fishing village will not be decked with boughs of lustrous fresh holly. "There's been such a dwindling away," 77-year-old Virginia Marshall says from her rocking chair. She's talking about the end of the famous Holly Run, a tradition that she and a passel of small-plane pilots from the mainland have organized for the past 36 Decembers, which brought loads of holly to the barren island.

TYLERTON - "JUST 58 of us now." It was the talk of those sitting around the store last week in this Smith Island village. An elderly lady, resident for more than 90 years, had departed for a mainland nursing home, or "gone off" as they say on the island. Across Maryland and most of the world, it is growing numbers of people we worry about, but here on Smith, one of the Chesapeake's only two inhabited offshore islands, it's a grim countdown in the opposite direction. Look at the numbers for Tylerton, one of three towns on this marshy bastion of bay watermen eight miles off Crisfield.

TANGIER ISLAND, Va. -- Tropical Storm Isabel ripped through the harbor of this Chesapeake Bay outpost last fall, destroying a rough-hewn collection of crab shanties and threatening the precarious hold that islanders have on their way of life. The hard-crab season is off to a sluggish start in still-chilly waters. Rebuilding the shacks will be crucial for harvesting soft-shell crabs when they begin molting in the next few weeks, and federal officials are trying to come up with a plan to help pay for the repairs.

There are things that awe us to rapture -- grand canyons, wild cascades, the immense rolling ocean. And there are other things -- cool-rooted flowers, sunrise in a meadow -- that awe us to silence, that "seal the hushed casket of the soul," as John Keats said. The Sahara at night awes to silence. Yet the ordinary has a way of impinging on the sublime. While I was stretching my limbs atop the world's tallest sand dunes, my traveling companion, Mark, who had come to the Sahara hoping the great dunes might be the elixir for his broken heart, was shut away in a concrete toilet, victim of a bad bowl of tagine stew.

Maryland winters can be particularly ferocious or quite benign. The winter of 1779, which earned the sobriquet of "The Hard Winter," left icebound ships in the Chesapeake Bay loaded with desperately needed supplies for George Washington's Continental Army, shivering in winter quarters at Morristown, N.J. The coldest winter in the past 100 years was the winter of 1917-1918, which roared into Maryland, dropping three times the normal amount of snow and...

Q: My husband and I will be traveling to England this year and hope to replace pieces of our "Sun" pattern tableware, made by Stonehenge Midwinter, a member of the Wedgwood group. Are there places in England that specialize in discontinued china?A: There are a number of china-matching services in England, but you don't have to travel to Britain to find "Sun" replacements. You may want to check your local china or antiques dealers to see if they know of any local companies that provide matching services.

There are things that awe us to rapture -- grand canyons, wild cascades, the immense rolling ocean. And there are other things -- cool-rooted flowers, sunrise in a meadow -- that awe us to silence, that "seal the hushed casket of the soul," as John Keats said. The Sahara at night awes to silence. Yet the ordinary has a way of impinging on the sublime. While I was stretching my limbs atop the world's tallest sand dunes, my traveling companion, Mark, who had come to the Sahara hoping the great dunes might be the elixir for his broken heart, was shut away in a concrete toilet, victim of a bad bowl of tagine stew.

TANGIER ISLAND, Va. -- On pleasant evenings, teen-age islanders congregate on the steps of the weathered post office and converse in a lilting parlance that traces to their Elizabethan forebears. Ofttimes the talk is of leaving. "There's more to do" on the mainland, explains Sandy Dise, 15, a 10th-grader whose roots run generations deep in the scant island soil. "And you don't have to take a boat when you want to do it." "We're losing the young people," laments Mayor Dewey Crockett, who is also assistant principal of the school, music director and organist at Swain Memorial United Methodist Church, and the undertaker.

As we pull out of the harbor at Crisfield, Tangier Sound is pleated with waves. Gulls hoping for a handout sail alongside, suspended on air currents like objects in a child's mobile. I've hitched an early-morning ride on the mail boat to Tangier Island, Va., a place of legendary skipjack captains, watermen and age-old traditions. I've longed to visit this place since first sailing past it years ago. Although it's called an island, Tangier is more like a dense little archipelago -- chunks of sand and salt marsh split by tidal canals called "guts" that are linked by small, arched bridges.