The Soul of Ditch Plain

I want to talk about beaches and why the Town of East Hampton should do everything in its power to purchase the former East Deck Motel property at Ditch Plain in Montauk and turn it into a park.

I love beaches and have experienced them in many parts of the world — Hawaii, California, Europe, South Africa, Canada, Indonesia, and the Caribbean. Some are defined by dramatic tides or by soaring cliffs. Some are palm-lined. Others are rocky. They can be broad, narrow, isolated, or stretched between cities and the deep blue sea. There is fine sand, coarse sand, coral sand, and sand made of shells ground to a paste. For the record, the fine, quartz, granite, and garnet beaches of Long Island have no equal.

But, in this case I’m addressing not only the physical characteristics of beaches, but their spiritual value, “spiritual” as in what they mean to the soul of a people and a place. My father was fond of observing that beaches were the only places on earth where mostly naked people could sit in each other’s lunches and feel perfectly happy. 

Beaches are places where the confinements we normally impose on ourselves, and what would elsewhere be grating intrusions, go by the board. Beaches are the only places I can think of where the Motley vulgus, as H.L. Menken referred to the human race, acts more like a hive or colony than a gathering of individuals. Blankets, conversations, and lives are free to overlap, children require no preliminaries to form castle-building communes, and in a few years their own tribe of wave-riding, life-living comrades whose own children will eventually return to the familiar sand like nesting sea turtles. My closest friends are people I first met barefoot.

And, speaking of colonies, here in the township of East Hampton, the insistence that beaches are public spaces that cannot be privatized is embedded in the charter set down by English settlers 300 years ago and still enforced by the East Hampton Town Trustees. It is a concept derived from English common law and was, no doubt, shared by the settlers’ Algonquian predecessors.

This tradition is the reason that the plan by new owners of the East Deck property to build a physically imposing and exclusive private club was so vehemently opposed by hundreds of members of the Ditch Plain and greater surfing communities last summer. Ditch Plain Beach with the “trailer park” to the east, its Shadmoor bluffs and hoodoos to the west, is “home” to generations of Montaukers, as well as a popular oasis to strip-mauled visitors from away.

Here’s what should happen: The town should find a way to purchase the five-plus acres of the former East Deck property using the community preservation fund. The old East Deck should be razed and the land should be combined with the town’s easternmost parking area, known as the “dirt lot,” which includes the adjacent town-owned land between the lot and the East Deck property. 

A low-impact park should be created. The dirt lot should not be expanded, but either paved or otherwise stabilized. The town might charge out-of-towners to park at the dirt lot to help defray the cost of the park’s maintenance. The park should have modest restroom facilities and showers like the ones at Gin Beach at the end of East Lake Drive. It could have an area for public grills like Hither Hills State Park. The East Deck’s pool might stay. Why not surfboard lockers, like at Waikiki?

The park, in the town’s hands, would also be maintained in keeping with orthodox erosion-control thinking — no hard structures, let the beach grow and retreat with the help of periodic nurturing, the cost of which would be made more palatable to state and federal partners because of the beach’s public status, and as a resource recognized (I’m confident in saying) by the Surfrider and Surfing Heritage Foundations, groups that work to protect beaches, and public access to them. 

The town’s history of preserving open spaces is a proud one, as is its history of preserving access to them. Nearly 70 percent of Montauk is preserved in public parkland. It is why people come here. An opportunity to turn back time, to indulge in antidevelopment, makes perfect economic as well as environmental sense. Dear East Hampton Town Board: A Ditch Plain Park is a no-brainer.