The Mast-Head: East End Encounter
Post-Memorial Day, it is a little difficult to decide what to write about. There are so many choices: traffic, noise, events missed, yard work.
Among other options are a pony on the beach at a kid’s birthday party, which drew the baffled attention of East Hampton Town Marine Patrol, and a maddening Montauk Highway tie-up on Sunday evening caused by the Cyril’s Fish House parking guys.
But the thing that I think will stick with me as far as the first weekend of the 2015 season is concerned has to do with three young bike-riding visitors and an endangered plant.
Sunday afternoon, a little after 1, I was driving home on Cranberry Hole Road and noticed a bicycle on its side at the edge of the pavement. A young woman astride another bike stood nearby. As I got closer, I saw that a second woman, who I thought was not much older than 20, had crawled under the pines and seated herself in a sprawl of small white flowers, apparently picking something. A young man waited in the grass by the side of the road a couple of hundred feet up the way. I thought about warning them about the ticks and the poison ivy, but it was clear that it was too late.
As it turned out, my sister, Bess, had passed these three only moments earlier. As we readied the kids for a trip to Montauk to play miniature golf, we laughed, rather unkindly, about what we had seen. “Ticks up the wazoo!” “Ha, hipsters!” That kind of thing.
Loading the car, with three kids in the back and my sister in the passenger seat, I headed east, turning onto Napeague Meadow Road. Near the big curve, where a new osprey nest on a pole is occupied, we saw them again. This time, a spray of pink flowers was bobbing from a backpack one of the women was wearing.
Almost simultaneously, Bess and I exclaimed, “Lady slippers!”
“Stop the car,” Bess cried, “I’m going to give them what for.”
Lady slippers, members of the orchid family, are protected in New York, as are the state’s other native orchids, all of which are rare. Cutting them from public land, like a road right of way, is a state law violation that can come with a fine. Even cutting them on private property is supposed to require the landowner’s permission. Anyway, in my opinion, a beautiful flower on the side of the road should be left for all to see.
With a kid in the back of the car shouting “You are an idiot!” at the flower-snatchers, I had to roll up the windows, so I could not hear exactly what my sister said. Still steaming about it when she got back in the car, she said her remonstrations were answered by a repeated, weak, “Uh, okay.”
Judging from their blank expressions, it is unlikely that they learned a lesson, although that is impossible to know. But they will not soon forget the encounter, that’s for sure.
And the season’s only just begun.