The Mast-Head: In the Dunes

A new house is going up across the street from mine. It is large, with separate two-story sections joined by a steel-framed atrium or what might be a barn-like social space or indoor swimming pool. It’s hard to say. 

When my parents first moved the small cottage that would be my boyhood home onto a waterfront lot that had come down through the Edwards family, theirs would be the easternmost winterized house on Cranberry Hole Road. The stink rising on an east wind from the Promised Land fish factory made living any closer unthinkable until the bunker boats sailed away for good in about 1968, and the migrant laborers who ran the giant steam boilers moved on in search of other work.

As kids, my brother, sister, and I were allowed to roam in the vast unspoiled sandy heath across Cranberry Hole Road, which extended, interrupted only by the railroad tracks and the thin strip of Montauk Highway, all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. Fragile shells and rounded stones were proof that the low dune landscape had once been a beach, presumably at a time of higher sea level or before the Napeague isthmus reached out from what we know as Hither Hills to join with the Devon highlands.

After a rain, we knew to check a place in the lee of a dune where bits of Native American pottery and charcoal were likely to have been exposed. I collected them and quartz fragments that my father explained had been left over from one of the original inhabitants’ toolmaking. 

There were two spots in the wind-scraped dune where clay fragments and stones had accumulated, only a few feet from where my neighbor is putting up a weekend place. I realized much later that the lithic debris had come from a day’s or even just a few hours’ work. Over time, as I accumulated pottery shards, it became obvious that they were from a single, unusually thin-walled vessel. Marks made with a scallop shell in the soft clay before it was fired were the only decoration.

The remnants of the fire that might have been under the clay pot were small. They were perhaps from a night’s rest or single meal taken on a break from toolmaking rather than a long encampment in the dune. 

Early Saturday, after a cup of coffee and piece of toast, I put on my coat and walked to the ocean. The route from the end of my driveway is roughly south-southeast, over a portion of town nature preserve into Napeague State Park. For a while, I followed an abandoned fish factory rail spur then crossed the main Long Island Rail Road tracks and the highway. 

Deer bones lay in several places in the dry leaves. I followed deer trails through the pine woods south of the highway before coming into the open grassland and onto the ocean dunes.

On my way home, I heard music and the sound of hammering as I stepped off the rail spur. Workers at the new house had arrived. A percussion-heavy track with Spanish vocals floated over the bearberry. I waved to a man on a ladder as I passed and thought about the last people who had worked on this spot a couple of hundred years ago, or a couple of thousand.

The man waved back, and I went on my way.