The Mast-Head: In Praise of Pranks
On my way through Sagaponack on an errand Monday afternoon, I noticed that the plastic coyote that had been placed in the middle of a field south of the highway was gone. Thus ended what had been one of the area’s all-too-few solid public pranks.
The plastic (or whatever it was) coyote sure had fooled me. Driving that way earlier this winter, I spotted its gray figure a couple of hundred yards out in the rye cover crop and pulled over quickly.
It was too tall to be a fox, I thought. It had to be the Sagaponack coyote that had caused a stir about a year ago!
That it did not move a muscle hardly mattered to me; when I got back to the office, I excitedly described what I had seen. Problem was that it was in the same place in the same posture the next day, and the next, and the Monday after that.
The roster of great South Fork pranks is too few, in my opinion. Why our public spaces are so lacking in humor, I don’t know. Nor do I know why some people, myself among them, enjoy the occasional gag. I suspect that the attraction is that they are often a visual trick, a pun, or a joke in real time, to break up the relative monotony of day-to-day life.
My favorite prank here has to have been the now-gone Route 114 submarine, which appeared, floating, in a road drainage sump the Town of East Hampton had dug, improperly and probably illegally, on preserved farmland. That it was allowed to remain there for about two years, I thought, spoke well for the sense of humor of local officials.
Then there is the Napeague giraffe, or perhaps giraffes (I think this one might be an updated version), hidden in black pines in the state park. The effort to walk a life-sized fiberglass giraffe that far off the road and into a narrow gully boggles the mind.
There have been a few others, but perhaps the biggest center-stage prank for me occurred around 1975 when the movie version of “Jaws” was released. One morning my young teenage buddies and I were hugely impressed to see a large, black shark fin bobbing in Town Pond.
Thing is, not content to enjoy it for the simple and amusing sight it was, we resolved to catch it. It was raining that day, if I remember, and though we had a rope long enough that we could walk in two teams to snag the thing, one on either side of the pond with the rope between us, we got plenty wet.
Streaking, another kind of prank, was a thing that summer, and, once we had captured the fin, we discussed giving that a try. None of us will either confirm or deny guesses about what happened after that.