Steven White tried for decades to save a small island for someone he’d never met.  Waves were slowly whittling it away. He told me the tale as we chopped through the water in a tiny boat on Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay. 

“Holland Island once held sixty houses,” Stephan pointed out as we approached what had once been a neighborhood that stretched two miles down the shore. “It was a bustling community that had sixty-eight kids in school until rising tides forced them to abandon the building. My home is all that remains above water.”

Working alone, he hauled hundred pound stones across Chesapeake Bay to shore up the place.