Doesn’t Get Any Better
The subject is sheer delight. I tied up to the town pumpout station next to the Coast Guard station on Star Island in Montauk on Monday, late morning. While I offloaded what needed to be gone and topped off my water supply, what looked to be a family — a man, a child about 9, and a woman — were fishing off the end of the town dock.
Suddenly the woman began to scream, but not in fear or horror. She’d caught a crab. You’d have thought she’d guessed a phrase on “Wheel of Fortune,” or answered the door to greet the smiling Publishers Clearing House dude holding flowers.
She was on the very edge of the dock, her family holding her lest she fall in, as the crab crawled around on her line’s terminal gear, not hooked, just consuming the bait. The woman smiled down on the crustacean, continued to scream in sheer delight. The crab soon heard enough and dropped back into the harbor. The woman watched it disappear, her eyes following as though a friendly alien’s starship were departing, bound for a distant galaxy.
However far the family had driven, however much they’d paid to get here — it was worth it.
The day before I met a surfcaster buddy at the town dump. We spoke the usual weather prognosis, family updates, and crowd misery, when I asked had he been fishing, and a smile appeared.
Indeed he had. It was the first of four exchanges with surfcasters that centered on the appearance of voracious bluefish, big, very big bluefish in the surf on the north side of Montauk Point. He held his hands apart in traditional pantomime, narrowed them just a tad in the interest of truth, and exclaimed “10-pounders, 10 to 12-pounders,” then struck the arched-back-with-reeling-hand pose that meant it had been one hell of a battle. “I caught [and released] 11,” he said, his face radiating sheer delight.
I was not witness to it, but Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett told me a few days ago that two young Amagansett men came into his shop smiling ear-to-ear with an invention “that could revolutionize surfcasting.” It was a cannon, a kind of howitzer, able to shoot clam baits 100 yards offshore via compressed air using a bicycle pump, and a length of PVC pipe. I can see a battery of baited spud guns poised for the start of the fall bass run. Happiness is a warm spud gun.
Then there’s the youngest among us. We’ve been called by this summer’s beautiful weather to that holy stretch of sandy geography located between concrete mindset and the sea. Some days we “sit in each other’s lunch,” as my father put it, and yet happily unfettered.
Total strangers stretch out, barely clad, within spitting distance but with no spitting, no walls to shield normally private conversations, children with boogie boards, pails, and shovels, castle-building, tunnel digging, lost in their imaginations — and to their parents for a time — savoring that first, sweet taste of total abandon.
That was the scene on Saturday during the annual Rell Sunn benefit surfing contest at Ditch Plain, Montauk. The late Rell Sunn was a teacher in Hawaii, a graceful surfer who encouraged young girls to break with male-only convention and paddle out.
As the kids built castles, the daylong non-test pitted preteens against grandfathers and grandmothers, with entry fees and the sale of T-shirts and auction items going to help local families in need.
As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t get better than that. Sheer delight.