Outdoors

It’s fall, and pleasant, but dry. It’s another round of the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good? The white and purple asters in the yard that are flowering at a great rate — white wood aster, smooth aster, stiff aster, panicled aster, calico aster, wavy-leaved aster, and heath aster in the order of flowering — with the white wood asters beginning in mid-August. Some goldenrods are chiming in as well, and the bees are going crazy gathering pollen, but as is the state of things in the past several years, none of them are honeybees.

On Friday, Surfers Healing came to Montauk once again. Israel (Izzy) Paskowitz and his band of Hawaiian surfers travel the East Coast each year visiting popular beaches to take autistic children surfing. Parents travel hundreds of miles to give their kids a day in the waves, an experience that calms and delights them more than just about any other, they say. 

Have we escaped a superstorm? In 2011 we had Irene at the end of August, in 2012, it was Sandy at the end of October. We missed the bullet last year, but the tropical storm season is not over, and when it is, the northeaster season will be right at its heals.

The glaciers are melting, the seas are rising, the globe is warming. Yet, the Farmers Almanac, which is right most of the time, says we are going to have a hard winter. I have yet to see a wooly bear to measure the brown against the black, and have no idea what the winter will be like.

One of our Ditch Plain regulars, while sitting on a bench in front of the former East Deck Motel, noted that David Schleifer, retired New York City firefighter, surfer, and the kind of fisherman whose name causes fish of all kinds to quiver in fear, looked like he was sitting on the toilet out toward the horizon.

Most of September is summer, but in my eyes all of September is fall. Lots of wonderful things start happening at the end of August. The rich and the rowdy leave for the city. There is less traffic on the roads and highways. The days are cooler and the air less humid. Striped bass and neotropical warblers begin their fall migration southward. Snowy tree crickets and katydids sing the loudest. Asters and goldenrods break out in whites, blues, purples, and yellows. Beach plums ripen. Cranberries begin to ripen.

I live across the street from Noyac’s Long Beach, a barely more than 100-foot-wide isthmus between Noyac Road and Route 114. The isthmus, with its county road, Long Beach Road, separates the inner Sag Harbor Cove from the outer Noyac Bay, part of the Peconic Estuary.

When I heard the news, I thought of his big laugh, big smile. Then the memories began to flood like the tide around the Montauk Marine Basin docks. Carl Darenberg Jr., “Carly,” was always there, like big Carl senior, and Vivian, his mom.

A week ago, Capt. Skip Rudolph and his wife, Vickie, took the Adios charter boat offshore on an overnight to tuna country. He’s been busy guiding anglers to our rich, inshore grounds for striped bass and blues. It had been a while since the Adios had gone to where the Continental Shelf dives into offshore canyons formed eons ago by rivers of melting glacier.

North American “life zones” as defined by Clinton Hart Merriam in the early 1900s are equivalent to the world’s biomes. They are deserts, northern coniferous forests, or taigas, temperate deciduous forests such as those occupying Appalachia, alpine forests, evergreen tropical forests, and rain forests, and the tundras of Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia, and Siberia, and grasslands. Biomes tend to keep their identity for millennia.

Botany again, but before we begin, I should single out an axiom that often goes unnoticed. Someone somewhere somehow knows something that most of us don’t know. Last week I told you about a Mrs. Pychowska who botanized locally in the late 1800s at a time when almost every biologist, botanist, or naturalist was male. A reader, Julie Sakellariadis, emailed me the day after the column came out. She knew about Mrs. P., who was both the wife of Count Pychowska and Eugene B. Cook.

“They’re marauding all over,” was how Peter Spacek, The Star’s cartoonist, described the bluefish now invading Montauk waters. If any species can “maraud,” it’s Pomatomus saltatrix.

They are ferocious feeders from baby snapper to 20-pound “chomper.” Their aggressive chomping not only feeds them, but also the less aggressive striped bass that often school beneath the chomping to suck up the scraps descending from the carnage. Just as geese are beginning to fly, big bluefish are flocking to Montauk’s aqua-copia for their fall feed.

The author Thomas Berger died recently. After “Little Big Man” one of his titles was “Sneaky People.” It portrayed a kind of negative utopia where women dominated in the business world and elsewhere, and their rise to eminence was based on deception and craftiness. Farcical as his novel was, many would say that’s how men came to rule the corporate and political spheres, and in many cases they would be right.

The annual Rell Sunn surf contest was held at Ditch Plain Beach in Montauk on Saturday. Each year the tournament’s entry fees, raffles, and auction raise money to help disadvantaged members of the community.

I was sitting with one of the world’s most noted algologists and marine phycologists in the world having lunch in a restaurant in Amagansett with him and three women. We had just listened to the address by the National Audubon Society’s president at the Nature Conservancy’s headquarters in East Hampton.

Aboard Leilani, 5:55 Tuesday morning. She and the other sailboats are wrapped in pink gauze, the light fog lifting along with the sun.

Sure, they loved him. He was their father, a brother, an uncle, a husband. They loved him, but they didn’t know, or appreciate, his inner fisherman. The extended family was spread out on the downtown Montauk beach on vacation a week ago.

While we humans are fighting all over the world, killing children, women, and men, as well as doing in all kinds of rare beasts such as elephants, rhinoceroses, scaled anteaters, and whales for keepsakes, the local fauna are raising families. And I imagine, except in the war-torn and poached parts of the globe, they are doing the same the world over. It is a pity that the most intelligent animal of all lags behind the others even though this very same animal is a reader, polyglot, writer, emailer, and maker and user of all tools ever devised.

Biogeography is the study of flora and fauna and how they got where they are today. It also applies to humans. We are pretty sure that Asians began to settle North America not quite 20,000 years ago when glaciers covered half of the northern hemisphere and sea level was 100 feet or so lower than today. Many, if not all, came by way of the “land bridge,” now submerged, between Siberia and Alaska. Many mammals and other vertebrates came to the Americas by the same route.

It’s hard to describe. The sound was a rapid quacking like pleading ducks. No, it was more a staccato croaking, frogs imitating a motorcycle, frogs ululating, but it had to be a species of goose I’d never heard before passing by the sloop Leilani on her mooring as I lay on my bunk in the middle of the night that had fallen through Friday’s gloom.

Naming has come a long way since the days of yore. Now it is used to immortalize individuals, mostly politicos, famous athletes, fallen war heroes, and firemen and police shot in the line of duty. It is also used to name new roads in new subdivisions before they exist and to rename existing roads, beaches, parks, libraries, bridges, museums and the like. There are so many things to name and rename it boggles the mind — so many names that there should be a department of naming.

Jason Behan said it was like that scene in “Jaws” when the residents of Amity go to sea after the killer shark in every manner of craft and with every sort of weapon imaginable. He wasn’t talking about the weekend’s shark tournament. He was describing the scene that has continued to unfold around Montauk Point in recent days with a growing fleet of fishing boats converging on a school of striped bass, the likes of which veteran anglers say they have never seen.

It seems like we are halfway through summer, but in reality we’re less than a third through. The roads are already super-clogged with vehicles, many of which are spiffy and go from 0 to 60 in less than 10 seconds, which is all well and good if you are on the Autobahn, but on Old Northwest Road or Accabonac Highway it’s a bit much.

Most every experienced surfer knows how to rate the pucker factor in increments of fear, as happened early evening on the Fourth of July in Montauk. Dozens were caught off guard by a rapidly building swell and forced to “scratch for the horizon” — paddle seaward to escape a serious pounding. 

The Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation freed an 800-pound leatherback sea turtle on Sunday that had gotten entangled in a lobster trap line in the ocean about a mile offshore.    

First, a short note to cheer you all for the 4th of July. On Monday I received a communiqué from Kara Jackson, who handles the news for the Nature Conservancy. She said the first eagles to breed on Mashomack, the Nature Conservancy’s pearl on Shelter Island, in more than a century are just about to fledge their chicks. They could easily be in the air on the 4th. Wouldn’t that be terrific?

“This year we have five satellite tags.” Carl Darenberg, owner of the Montauk Marine Basin, said casually on Monday, with every expectation that I would understand what he was saying. How strange. The “satellite-tag” sentence speaks to our time, late June 2014, and this place, Montauk. Imagine explaining its meaning to someone prior to Oct. 4, 1957, the day the Soviet Union put the first satellite into space.

In these parts, the accomplishment was memorialized by baymen, who named the slimy seaweed of mysterious origin plaguing the bay at the time “sputnik grass.”

On the evening of June the 11 I drove 43 miles on the back roads in Southampton Town listening for the breeding calls of whippoorwills and chuck-will’s-widows. I’ve been living in Noyac for 35 years and discovered a paved road right down the block that I had never been on, Old Sag Harbor Road, which connects Brick Kiln with Millstone Road where the old Bridgehampton Racetrack was situated.

“There’s something going on in the ocean,” Chuck Weimar said as he strode along its shoreline on Sunday. Naturally, something always is, but to hear it from the veteran fisherman, captain of the Montauk dragger Rianda S, meant the “something” could be abnormal.

When pressed during an afternoon sail aboard the sloop Leilani on Monday, Dr. David Nelson allowed that before slipping into semiretirement two months ago he’d helped restore vision to 15,000 eyes, give or take, over the course of his 40-year career as an ophthalmic surgeon. What those eyes might have missed!

Earlier in the day, he’d peddled his bike from Montauk to East Hampton and back, then paddled out for a short surf session in shapely, waist-high waves at Ditch Plain not far from his house. The doctor complained of knee pain, and why not?

We are on the verge of the longest day of the year, the summer solstice. For those living on the equator, it’s just another day. For those on the tiny island of Spitzbergen in the Arctic Ocean off the northernmost coast of Norway, there will only be day, no night.