High tides surging from a narrow creek destroyed the car Kathy Blake once parked in her gravel driveway here. Over the past two decades, the water has ruined half a dozen of them.

Since October, when one of those floods filled the first floor of Blake’s home with 6 inches of water, she’s been living in a camper with her husband and granddaughter, in that same driveway.

Not far away in this tiny community on Maryland’s lower Eastern Shore, Chesapeake Bay waves have eaten away at the land Gary McQuitty uses to offer hunting trips. Last year, he had to move a duck blind inland. McQuitty expects to have to move it again soon, as the waves creep toward his hunting lodge.

The evidence of rising seas stretches to Dorchester County’s mainland, too, up the winding road toward the county seat of

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