The Doctor Who Watches Over an Island

Remote Bay Community Of Tangier Counts on Visits

Dr. David Nichols, flies his helicopter once a week to minister to the community on the Chesapeake Bay's remote Tangier Island. (Marvin Joseph -- The Washington Post)

TANGIER ISLAND, Va. -- It first appears as a smear on the horizon, barely visible through the helicopter's windshield on the hazy expanse of the Chesapeake Bay. Soon an outline emerges, then houses, a church, white picket fences and a weedy, forlorn airstrip.

"That would be it," says the pilot, David B. Nichols. He first visited this isolated place as a young doctor 27 years ago, when he promised people he would keep coming back to provide medical care.

They had seen other doctors come and go. He said he wouldn't do that. He promised to be back. And once a week, weather permitting, for almost three decades, he has flown the 25 miles from the mainland to this sun-bleached outpost in the middle of the bay.

He did so again one day last week -- 58 now, with a shock of white hair -- setting down on a storied island, where life and the weather can be harsh, and where the 600 or so residents are still haunted by vestiges of the strange disease to which Tangier gave its name 40 years ago.

It is a rare genetic illness that causes high cholesterol and heart disease, and while no one on the island officially has it, the symptoms seem to be widespread.

But Nichols treats many maladies here.

"We see everybody," he jokes. "Young, old, beautiful, ugly."

"Doctor," comes the familiar retort, "you're better than a thousand dead men."

He hugs them. They caress his face and stroke his hands.

He's not one of those 10-minute doctors, they say.

They are enchanting people, he says.

During his day-long visit last week, Nichols examined an 88-year-old woman with a broken shoulder, revived a 51-year-old waterman suffering from dehydration and had a 37-year-old woman with a spinal fracture evacuated to a hospital in Maryland.