Connections: Then and Now
Taking a swim in the bay on Sunday, I was once again struck by how incredibly beautiful the waters of Gardiner’s Bay are and how lucky our family has been to have a slot on the sands facing them.
To be honest, my swim was more of a paddle, and by paddle I certainly don’t mean S.U.P. but a belly-down flop on a boogie board. The tide was relatively low, the water as clear as I ever remember, and there were no hazards lurking, like jellyfish or overactive crabs.
My son and two of my grandchildren were taking it easy on the beach, although the youngest, 6-year-old Ellis, managed to forget about Pokémon for a while and went kicking vigorously on another board in shallow water in both directions regardless of the tide, which tried to send me eastward. His sister Evvy was immersed in the fourth Harry Potter novel.
We had built our house on Gardiner’s Bay in the early ’60s and it is still a paradise to me. I’m not sure if the lack of many shells along the beach was good or bad news, however. A few small oyster shells dotted the sand, as did a few conchs, and one fat mussel had been devoured. There were a handful of clamshells, to be sure, but not as many as I expected. And in years gone by there would have been jingle shells and quarterdecks in rows, at least that’s how I remember them. Not a scallop shell was to be found, but a couple of clumps of Sputnik grass, the tubular, slimy seaweed that put in its first appearance here in the 1950s at around the time the Russians put a satellite of that name in orbit, reminded me of old times.
When we built our house on Cranberry Hole Road, it was the only winterized one between the Devon Yacht Club and the Smith Meal fish factory. Worried about winter’s northeast storms, we forwent big windows with wide water views. Since that time, houses have gone up on both sides of the road, and although they have big wide windows and undoubtedly have insulation and heating, they are empty more often than not come cold weather.
And if the bay and the bay beach have remained wonders of nature, so too has the land there. Years ago, without prompting, Larry Penny, then the East Hampton Town natural resources director, explained its topography, writing:
“The water table is only a few feet below and fresh groundwater continually wicks up to supply the bearberry and heather with enough water to keep them thriving. Trees don’t stand a chance, except for the pitch pines in the little hollows, as the winds sweeping across from south to north in the summer and vice versa in the winter keep any from getting a toehold. This close-knit dunes plain as far as I can tell is the only one of its kind in New York State, maybe all of America.”
Imagine that — the only one of its kind in the state! I hope the new homeowners in the area understand what Larry had to say about the land on which they were able to build. The community preservation fund does what it was meant to do here, and I wish it could do more.