Relay

Stephen Longmire

The man in Preston's wanted a guidebook to local harbors, "so I know where to eat when I sail to Block and Sag." The crew of this impeccable Greenport maritime outfitter didn't bat an eye, but it came as no surprise Mr. Block-Sag didn't know where to eat out. There is a difference between being on a first name basis with a place and knowing it well, just as there is a difference between presuming someone prefers a nickname on first acquaintance and intimacy.

"Why do you say that?" a colleague recently asked when I said George-eek-a. "George-ick-a," he corrected, with local tradition on his side. Not being a near neighbor to the brackish pond, it is a name I know from maps and signs, not the mouths of loved ones.

"Language is the archive of history," Emerson writes somewhere. We carry the past in our mouths and our minds, often unwittingly. It is worth restoring to consciousness, as we caress its names with our tongues. They know what our grandparents - or our neighbors' grandparents, as is increasingly the case - knew.

It is curious to have a community that guards its traditions so fiercely where property changes hands so often. Each sale is a potential rupture in local cultural memory, and the birthplace of another instant native.

Is Sag Sagaponack or Sag Harbor? On a small sailboat there's little room for question - but on the Jitney? Both these neighboring communities were named for a ground nut valued by our Indian predecessors, whose memories have been trodden pretty thoroughly underground, though they surface in place names we doubtless mispronounce. Sag Harbor, which is linked to its oceanside neighbor by Sagg Road (where the shorthand seems explicable, as does the archaic spelling), was expected to serve as a port for Sagaponack's farms, midway between East and Southampton. Each of these earlier settlements had its own harbor, Northwest and North Sea.

Speaking of bodies of water, recently I asked a friend who has spent most of the past 60 years on Lumber Lane in Bridgehampton what he calls the pond that forms when it rains on a farm field down the hill from his house, near Scuttle Hole Road. (A scuttle hole being the trap door in a saltbox roof, hence a back door, or quick way out.) A body of water that appears periodically can't be on many maps.

"Babinski's Pond." What would it be called without the Babinskis, whose farm this pond can't be helping? The disappearing and reappearing pond, at times reliable enough for ice skating, is not unlike the history held in local place names. It melts in our mouths.

Stephen Longmire is a reporter and photographer at The Star.