So, I’m standing at the beach with a late-summer visitor, an old friend, looking across Coke bottle-green waves to the horizon, and he says, “You’re so lucky.”

Lucky? Made me think. Sure, I’m lucky in the cosmic sense. I’m alive, in relatively good shape. But, he meant, I’m lucky to be living in Montauk. That’s true too, but it’s a different kind of lucky, like a magnet must feel stuck to the door of a refrigerator. I’m here because forces, seen and unseen, drew me here and required that I stay.

I looked around me that day. The smell of fresh oil paint was in the air. The itinerant painter was at it. He had his paintings on display against the fence, primitive beach scenes, and he was working on a new one. There was the surfer who owned her own landscaping business, the retired fireman and bow hunter who hosts a drum circle each week, the retired eye surgeon, the tall man with the flowing white beard who claims credit for every sunny day and believes the chamber of commerce should give him a stipend. The man with the successful catering business was checking the waves. They were all checking the waves.

Over on the bench was the man with the mind that’s slipping, with the incredible memory, who grew up here and remembers things I experienced that I forgot years ago. Down the beach a ways was a gathering of kids, the next generation of Ditch Plain “groms,” surfers, the children of surfers who will probably — like their parents — be the parents of surfers one day.

Some of these people are my good friends. Others are familiar, fellow magnets. We are stuck to this particular beach and return to it daily like breeding salmon, the steering wheels of our cars unable to pass Ditch Plain Road without turning just for a look at the sea, the waves. Park the car, stroll down to the beach, sit on a bench or one of the logs, take a walk, lie in the sand, get a cup of coffee at the Ditch Witch — get straight.

“Keep your head at the beach” is an old mantra, one that I was indeed lucky to have absorbed from my parents, for whom the beach was a sacred place. Both were from upstate New York, outdoor people, he a hunter, she a farm girl, neither comfortable inside the house. It didn’t matter the weather. We went to the beach every weekend, Jones Beach when I was a kid. The only other people walking in the snow along the boardwalk in winter seemed to be European. Is the need to be out in the wind and weather a cultural thing? I think so.

And, its appreciation is not something kids should have to wait for until the day they stand next to a friend and say, “You’re so lucky.”

There are the “important” things, school and career, but my visitor reminded me of my requirement for spiritual sustenance on a daily basis — a church, if you will — a place within reach, which rhymes with beach.

The small bumper sticker caught my eye a few days ago in a parking lot at the beach. Its message included the ubiquitous heart hieroglyph that stands for the word “love.” Montauk, the whole East End was suffused with silver light that reflects off the sea at the time of the autumnal equinox when the sun sinks lower on the horizon. I call it Silver September.

Fall fell on Sept. 23, when the center of the sun crossed south of the equator. This year, the crossing was attended by a number of events that would have sent the ancients scurrying. The blood-red eclipse of the supermoon, for instance, and the discovery of water on Mars.

The ancients aren’t the only ones. This week in Mecca during the Hajj, Muslim pilgrims approached a wall symbolizing the Devil with stones to take part in the ritual of “stoning the Devil.” Apparently the Devil took offense and over 700 celebrants died in a stampede. By contrast, Pope Francis, preaching, “let him who is without sin cast the first stone,” kept his in his pocket and completed triumphant visits to Cuba and the United States. No judgment here, I’m just sayin’, the trepidation of the spheres seemed to be especially trepidacious, and it was against this backdrop my eye caught the bumper sticker, which read: “I [heart] peeing in my wetsuit.”

What joy. And, on top of that my friend Peter brought me a black sea bass he’d caught at the spot called the Pocketbook, about six miles north of Montauk Harbor. I headed, gutted, and scaled it using my new scaler of Japanese design, and then fried and ate it with sauce of ginger, garlic, and soy. The point is, it’s important to appreciate the simple things during such transformative times.

Peter said he caught two sea bass and would have caught more had a contagion of dogfish (sand sharks) not descended on the spot. He reported seeing a few schools of false albacore, a presence confirmed by Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett, who keeps track of what’s going on in Gardiner’s Bay. So I reckon the fly fishermen and light-tackle aficionados will begin casting their brains loose after falsies, although the weather promises to keep them at bay for a few days.

“There was a 26-pound [striped] bass taken at first light at Indian Wells this morning,” Bennett texted on Monday, “so the blood and moon and eclipse were good for something, but I couldn’t stop howling at the darn thing.”

Bennett: “Porgies are still in the bay, snappers all over, but this could be their last week. Bunker all over the bay, albacore and big blues in the rip, but too many sea robins. The horsefoot was released on last night’s moon. Bug, what are you going to do with a 300-pound horsefoot anyway,” Bennett said referring to the conclusion of an experiment he claims was conducted in Accabonac Harbor during the summer by aliens who genetically engineered a horseshoe crab (“horsefoot” in Bonac parlance) to grow to otherworldly proportions. My question is, where was it released to?

I’m skeptical, but then again a whole lot of people were throwing stones at the Devil and consuming the body and blood of Jesus just a few days ago. And the moon bled, for God’s sake, and water on Mars? Perhaps that’s where the horsefoot went.

Paul Apostolides of Paulie’s Tackle shop in Montauk reported a steady take of striped bass “up front” under the Montauk Lighthouse and the Moorland rocks, as one might expect given day after day of east winds pushing bass and their prey within casting distance.

The deadline to enter the Montauk Surfmasters fall classic tournament is Sunday. It gets under way on Monday. Would-be entrants can apply at Paulie’s. On Saturday, the organizers will be offering a casting clinic by Craig Cantelmo and the Van Stall company, reel manufacturers. The clinic is aimed at kids, but is open to anyone. It will cover safety tips — you don’t want to hook the back of your head. It will be held starting at 8 a.m. at the beach access down the road from Paulie’s Tackle shop. I say suffer the children (of all ages) who “heart” peeing in their wetsuits in the September silver while there’s still time.

The fall is here, my favorite time of the year. The Hamptons are still the Hamptons, but the traffic is diminished, things slow down, the sky is beautiful, and the leaves turn myriad colors before they fall to the ground in November. It’s the time of the great bird migration and the harvesting of fish and shellfish, just like in the old days.

A week and a half ago three ospreys circled about 300 yards up over my house in Noyac, 100 feet off the bay. The uttered their “peet” notes, pausing after each, and circled and circled and circled slowly off to the west. I called back to them with the same whistled note that I have perfected over the years and they answered. In my mind they were saying, “Good-bye, see you next spring.” Isn’t it amazing that ospreys, like so many other of God’s creatures, have psyches of their own and perhaps even a world view, or as the Germans say, “weltanschauung.” Yes, they have to take care of the basics, i.e., satisfy the four basic drives — food, shelter, health, procreation — but these three ospreys were preoccupied with the wonderfulness of being able to make lazy circles in the sky under a full sun and on such a lovely day.

When it comes to shelter, wild birds find it under tree leaves or in nests, mammals, under trees or in holes, the human mammal in houses, condos, and apartments that have a very long history in the making. Human shelters in the Hamptons have become more than places to eat, sleep, and get out of the cold; they’ve become statements of wealth, standing, and traveling to and from them with ease.

Architects who design them and landscapers who wrap them in foliage would add the word “beauty.” In a way they are artists, and architecture is one of the great arts, along with painting, sculpting, ballet, symphonic music, and the rest of them. Around here they go up pretty fast and are in a large way responsible for the “trade parade” that greets each morn and says “so long” come later afternoon.

Having grown up in the Depression and during World War II, the house as a magnificent thing rather than a cozy place is beyond my ken. And what I have the hardest time understanding is why one house has to be razed to build another in its stead. My first 22 years on Long Island were spent on the North Fork. During the period, as well as I can remember and from listening to my parents, not a single dwelling was razed locally in order to build another.

Long before recycling became a modus operandi for the generation Xers and millennials, it was a way of life in Mattituck. Almost nothing was thrown out; almost everything was reused in one way or another. Yes, certain structures were rehabilitated and in that rehabilitation new materials replaced old ones, but the old ones, such as bricks, timbers, slates, pipes, etc., found their way to lots where they would await reuse. The one closest to home was the site of the North Fork Wrecking Company. As in the Arlo Guthrie song “Alice’s Restaurant,” you could get just about anything you needed there.

Tearing down houses and imploding buildings to construct new ones didn’t get started in a big way until the latter part of the 1900s. Now it’s a common

occurrence. One house in particular that strikes a chord is the one in which the late coastguardsman and fisherman Norman Edwards lived in on Atlantic Avenue in Amagansett only a block up from one of East Hampton Town’s his- toric districts. It was razed last year and replaced with a Farrellized edifice al- most instantaneously.

It was only 10 years old and served Norman and his wife, Lynda, well during that time and was a pretty house to drive by or visit. Then, poof, gone in an instant! And what of the stuff of which it was made?

Such is the way of the construction business, especially the second-home business, as practiced today. Granted, a few houses are moved off site and relo- cated before new ones takes their place, but only a few.

What a terrible waste! And at what a price to the aesthetics of the community and the congestion on the roads? When I lived in Oregon I was surrounded by Douglas firs, huge majestic trees 200 feet tall. Now the only Doug fir that I see are the boards and studs in the lumberyards and on their way to some second home, absent of branches, shaved clean and symmetrical, hardly a substi- tute for the real thing.

It’s one thing to cut down a living tree to mill into lumber. It’s another thing to throw the lumber away or bury it when you’re through with it. Wood can last a very long time. Europe is full of 1,000- year-old houses made mostly of wood, and we have several 300-year-old wood- en houses right here on Long Island, such the Mulford house in East Hampton and the Old House in Cutchogue on the North Fork.

So let’s get right down to it. We cut down more trees than we need to in order to feed the appetites of the well-to-do, thus leaving few trees to take up the carbon dioxide that is overheating the atmosphere and we call ourselves eco- logic and sustainable?

Maybe those circling ospreys were trying to tell me something has them “peeted” off. After all, they come back to the same abode year after year and as long as that abode works after a little rebuilding now and then they continue to use it throughout their lifetimes. Were they snickering?

The subject is sheer delight. I tied up to the town pumpout station next to the Coast Guard station on Star Island in Montauk on Monday, late morning. While I offloaded what needed to be gone and topped off my water supply, what looked to be a family — a man, a child about 9, and a woman — were fishing off the end of the town dock.

Suddenly the woman began to scream, but not in fear or horror. She’d caught a crab. You’d have thought she’d guessed a phrase on “Wheel of Fortune,” or answered the door to greet the smiling Publishers Clearing House dude holding flowers.

She was on the very edge of the dock, her family holding her lest she fall in, as the crab crawled around on her line’s terminal gear, not hooked, just consuming the bait. The woman smiled down on the crustacean, continued to scream in sheer delight. The crab soon heard enough and dropped back into the harbor. The woman watched it disappear, her eyes following as though a friendly alien’s starship were departing, bound for a distant galaxy.

However far the family had driven, however much they’d paid to get here — it was worth it.

The day before I met a surfcaster buddy at the town dump. We spoke the usual weather prognosis, family updates, and crowd misery, when I asked had he been fishing, and a smile appeared.

Indeed he had. It was the first of four exchanges with surfcasters that centered on the appearance of voracious bluefish, big, very big bluefish in the surf on the north side of Montauk Point. He held his hands apart in traditional pantomime, narrowed them just a tad in the interest of truth, and exclaimed “10-pounders, 10 to 12-pounders,” then struck the arched-back-with-reeling-hand pose that meant it had been one hell of a battle. “I caught  [and released] 11,” he said, his face radiating sheer delight.

I was not witness to it, but Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett told me a few days ago that two young Amagansett men came into his shop smiling ear-to-ear with an invention “that could revolutionize surfcasting.” It was a cannon, a kind of howitzer, able to shoot clam baits 100 yards offshore via compressed air using a bicycle pump, and a length of PVC pipe.  I can see a battery of baited spud guns poised for the start of the fall bass run. Happiness is a warm spud gun.

Then there’s the youngest among us. We’ve been called by this summer’s beautiful weather to that holy stretch of sandy geography located between concrete mindset and the sea. Some days we “sit in each other’s lunch,” as my father put it, and yet happily unfettered.

Total strangers stretch out, barely clad, within spitting distance but with no spitting, no walls to shield normally private conversations, children with boogie boards, pails, and shovels, castle-building, tunnel digging, lost in their imaginations — and to their parents for a time — savoring that first, sweet taste of total abandon.

That was the scene on Saturday during the annual Rell Sunn benefit surfing contest at Ditch Plain, Montauk. The late Rell Sunn was a teacher in Hawaii, a graceful surfer who encouraged young girls to break with male-only convention and paddle out.

As the kids built castles, the daylong non-test pitted preteens against grandfathers and grandmothers, with entry fees and the sale of T-shirts and auction items going to help local families in need.

As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t get better than that. Sheer delight.

I live on a fifth of an acre but there is still enough room to accommodate a visiting deer or two. I rarely see them, but I see their discrete fecal piles here and there, a couple of new ones each week.

The deer move along the perimeter, where I have rows of plants in pots, most of which are not ornamentals but exotic weeds or natives. Apparently, the deer sample this and that plant, especially the budding tips, but rarely eat much more. I check them each morning to see what parts or plants are missing.

In June and July the deer ate 75 percent of the daylilies, which were closer to the house and not in pots. Since then it’s been here a nibble, there a nibble, and seldom more. It turns out that spotted touch-me-not, or orange jewelweed, now just coming into flower, is the favorite on the menu. This impatiens species is succulent, but I would think not very tasty. Both leaves and stems are nibbled away, but never the entire plant.

The flowers of the daylilies were orange and so were those of orange milkweeds, or butterfly weeds, which were also removed overnight. Perhaps, the deer are cued in on the color orange, which might explain the rarity of the once relatively common Turk’s cap lily in the wild in the past 30 years.

Another orangish flower, Bidens frondosa, or beggarticks, is about to pop out. A few of the leaves of these now three-foot-high plants have been taken; let’s see if my hypothesis about the deer’s penchant for orange flowers holds up. All of these plants, save the daylilies, harbor poisonous saps to some degree. Perhaps the deer are taking their daily medicine, in the way that I take six or seven each day. The jewelweeds are also called “poison ivy weeds” because supposedly Native Americans rubbed their juices on their skin to ameliorate the rash from poison ivy.

In the spring, before there were flowers, the deer contented themselves with nipping off the tops of goldenrods and asters. Once the goldenrods began to flower they were left alone. The asters are just starting to flower. Actually, by taking the tops off, the deer are doing little harm, and may even enhance the plants come flowering time. In the landscape business it’s called “forcing.”

Three poisonous vines are present in my backyard, many times in goodly quantities. Asiatic bittersweet and poison ivy, both of which I removeas quickly as I find them, and Virginia creeper are toxic. The deer don’t touch the bittersweet or poison ivy, but, for the first time in years, have been eating the Virginia creeper leaves. Apparently, deer, like humans, also have acquired tastes.

Other poisonous plants in the yard — including yellow sorrel in the genus Oxalis, winged sumac, white snakeroot, common milkweed, three members of the tomato family, common nightshade, bittersweet nightshade, and horse nettle — as well as lily-of-the-valley, periwinkle, and pokeweed, are not touched at all. Periwinkle and lily-of-the-valley comprise my “lawn.”

Thorny plants such as the lily catbrier, roses, wineberry, and black raspberry are also left alone. Yews contain a chemical that is used to fight different cancers; the deer frequently chew off the new yew sprouts near the outside stoop.

The one thing the neighborhood deer that I have been entertaining for at least 25 years never do is take the entire plant. There is much sense in that. If grazers and foragers took the entire plant they would be eating themselves out of house and home.

On Sunday I had the pleasure of leading a small group on a poke-and-look nature walk along the Long Pond Greenbelt trails south of Sag Harbor, sponsored by the Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt. “Poke-and-look” because we shuffled along slowly, conversing, asking questions, answering them, and taking in the wonderful flora on either side of the trail as we wended our way towards Crooked Pond.

Crooked Pond is my favorite of the Greenbelt chain of ponds that stretches from Otter Pond on the north to the tip of Sagg Pond on the south, where it meets the ocean. It’s my favorite pond because it is in the very center of the South Fork and the watershed divide running east to west runs through its north half. North of this divide, water runs off to the Peconics, south of it, to the ocean.

Its surface is the very surface of the upper glacial aquifer, the top layer of freshwater under the ground across Long Island, and the only one that stretches from Montauk Point to New York City. The pond’s water level rises and falls as the aquifer fills with rainwater or loses it to evaporation. Normally, it is a typical freshwater pond with half the surface covered water with lily pads. The edge is defined by some sedges and rushes; behind them are tupelos, sweet peppers, swamp azalea, red maple, and other wetland woodies.

When it’s high, it’s hard to walk around it without getting your feet wet. On this particular day, we were lucky. It’s been a dry late spring and summer. The evaporation rate had been driven by the hot sun, and a large portion of the shore, which normally would be underwater, was exposed to reveal a unique wetland flora that you only find during such droughty conditions.

Jean Held was along. She knows the ponds in the greenbelt system as well as anyone. She’s been observing and photographing them for 50 years or so and knows the plants along the shores as well as I do. When we reached the pond’s west edge behind Dai Dayton, the society’s co-leader, my eyes caught this little pinkish foot-high daisy-like flower that resembled an aster, but asters weren’t out yet. While I was mumbling to myself and searchingthrough the dusty catacombs of my gray matter, Jean came to my rescue. It was the state-endangered rose coreopsis and there were several, all peeking in bloom, I might add. I had seen my last in the late 1980s during a similar dry period on a trip with Russell Hoeflich, but on the east side of the pond.

It was accompanied by a most unusual assemblage of other small flowering plants including the thread-dew, a sundew insectivorous plant with twinkling pink-purplish stems glistening with the tiny glandular drops that insects are attracted to. Tony Hitchcock, who with his wife used to run the Hampton Classic event each year, explained that because the soil was bereft of minerals after thousands of years of leaching out, the sundews had evolved to get their minerals from insects that were trapped in the gooey threads. Then another walker pointed to one of them that had recently entrapped a small moth and was in the process of digesting it.

Within that many-colored tapestried carpeting were white-headed pipe­worts, yellow perts, small greenish stems of Juncus and Carex rushes and reeds, and many more, almost all in flower. Above them the tupelo branches reached out, their leaves already turning burgundy red. Last to leaf out in the spring, first to turn and fall at the end of summer, that’s the tupelo, pepperridge, bung tree, or black gum, call it what you will. The perfumey scents wafted out from the line of sweet peppers, Clethra alnifolia, standing tall beneath them and just coming into bloom.

Search the pond’s perimeter with a turning head and you see the entire shoreline interrupted by a large glacial erratic here and there, but nary a phragmites stem. How this pond escaped the onslaught of this Eurasian invasive that has taken over so much of the shores of other ponds in the area is a mystery. I guess it’s too long a row to hoe by a rhizome underground from Long Pond a few hundred feet to the north.

There are a few other ponds on the South Fork that have similar flowery edges during dry spells, but none as far as I can tell have the rose coreopsis. The roots and other propagules of these patient opportunists wait quietly under the water, under the ice, under the snow, for the chance to burst forth when the water recedes and the shore expands every so often when rainfall is scant. Apparently, they never fail to take advantage when such an opportunity comes along every three or four years.

In the 1980s the Long Pond Greenbelt system was up for grabs. Southampton Town, the Nature Conservancy, Group for the South Fork, the Southampton Trails Preservation Society, and many individuals worked tirelessly to see that most of it fell into public and not-for-profit hands, and it largely has.

Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].

The single-engine plane struggling against Monday’s hefty southwest wind towed a banner advertising a rent-a-butler service.

We were alone on a secret beach, insulated from the crowds on that glorious summer day, and so the plane with its non sequiturious message — a crap duster seeding the clouds with yet another Hamptons pretension — made us feel like members of a cargo cult. We lay dazed in the hot sun and laughing, stunned as though Coke bottles had fallen on our heads, their source and use a mystery. “The gods must be crazy,” indeed.

Not far offshore an empty boat rocked at anchor. But then again it was not empty. One man stood on the deck. A buoy and flag floating nearby indicated divers down. The presence of spearfishermen completed our primitive template.

The ancient fishing method is becoming more and more popular among younger fishermen on the East End, an interesting turn of events, a sea change if you will. I believe it’s a long overdue recognition that there’s more to catching a fish than catching a fish.

Spearfishing puts the fisherman in the query’s habitat. What anglers must do by feel — and the best of them have a pronounced sense of touch as well as an accurately imagined view of what’s happening down below — spearfishermen see with their own eyes.

If they are fishing for striped bass, they can see what the bass are feeding on. Spearfishermen are eyewitness to the submarine play of light, to the explosions of prey species, the sculpture of bottom features.

The sport has its dangers, of course, including fish that bite, the cold (in this part of the world), and cerebral hypoxia, or shallow-water blackouts. On the other hand, spearfishermen can choose their catch. There is no “spear-and-release,” but neither are thousands of fish wounded by anglers who catch and release like they’re doing the fish a favor, and others who catch more fish than they need in hopes of landing a trophy.

How about a spearfishing shark tournament? Chum up a few 300-pound makos, a dusky or two, perhaps a curious great white and then slip into the water with a speargun? Bet there’d be few competitors.

In any case Montauk’s Star Island Yacht Club is holding its 23rd annual two-day mako, thresher, and tuna tournament starting tomorrow and Saturday with overnight fishing permitted. How ’bout slipping over the side into a chum cloud at night?

Those who prefer smaller fish, and a great deal less danger, have plenty to catch. Bluefish continue to be taken off the sand beaches of Montauk and west, although the gorilla blues of the past couple of weeks seem to have moved off — perhaps because of the unusually warm ocean.

Harvey Bennett, owner of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett, rambled: “False albacore and bonito are here big time, bass all over ocean beaches, fluke, porgies all you want, tinker mackerel at the ‘hanger dock’ ” — the name for the old Navy dock on Fort Pond Bay long since replaced — “and Three Mile Harbor, bluefish in Napeague Harbor and blowfish. Porgies all you want in Gardiner’s Bay.”

Bennett also repeated the rumor that a 150-pound shark was either seen or caught near the White Sands motel on Napeague. Could be a fiction. It’s the season.

We all think of getting away this time of year. Not away, in a geographical sense. It’s nice here, but “away” from it all without leaving, like Kyle and I succeeded in doing on Monday, lying in the sun, gazing up at the crap duster as it struggled against the wind. Laughing.

“Beam me up,” Harvey Bennet said, meaning to his home planet, “but leave the porgies here.”

A few weeks ago I was in the hamlet of North Sea with two California friends from my yippie days in Santa Barbara. We stopped at Conscience Point, where the first settlers to settle Southampton, from Lynn, Mass., came ashore in 1640. We then went on to Scallop Pond, which is a longstanding tidal pond receiving saltwater from Great Peonic Bay twice daily by way of the two Sebonac inlets and West Neck Creek farther to the west and southwest.

Scallop Pond is one of those coastal ponds of which Southampton has so many and is one that almost never closes like those that dot the town’s ocean shoreline. For many years there was a dairy farm on the pond’s northwest side that was owned and operated by the owner of Standard Oil of New Jersey.

Now that property is owned by the individual who owns Robins Island to the north and is kept in its natural state like Robins Island.

By the looks of it on Google Maps and when standing next to it, the salt marsh on the south side of Scallop Pond, which stretches all the way to Bullhead Bay to the southwest, is in fine shape and as big or bigger than any other tidal marsh on the South Fork including the one bordering Napeague in Amagansett.

California’s coast has a different geological origin and is not well known for its tidal marshes, called “sloughs,” the way Long Island and the rest of the East Coast is. My friends were in awe at its expanse, interrupted here and there by a few small treed hummocks, remnants of the land that covered the area for a long time after the glacier retreated when sea level was much, much lower than it is today. Beyond the marsh one could see the oak, hickory, and beech forest that makes up the Wolf Swamp Preserve, which, like most of the marshland, is owned and managed by the Nature Conservancy.

There were at least three osprey nests on poles scattered across the marsh, not all of which were active this summer. Two ospreys were sitting on one, a few great white egrets where working the marsh close by. Like all of Long Island’s salt marshes, the Scallop Pond one is ditched in a reticulate fashion to control the breeding of the salt marsh mosquito, an invention of the 1930s. Notwithstanding the extensive ditching, with time slowly filling in, something was lacking that is so noticeable in the other ditched marshes on the South Fork and elsewhere on Long Island. There was hardly a stem of the Eurasian reed Phragmites australis poking its head up on the horizon. The only phragmites we saw was a narrow ragged interrupted band along the dirt road leading in to Scallop Pond as we entered.

The marsh aroused unhappy memories in my buddy from U.C. Santa Barbara college days. He grew up on the east side of San Francisco Bay, whose shore in his childhood and up into the 1960s was used as a dumping ground for municipal waste from the East Bay area. I was reminded of my time in San Francisco in the late 1950s and 1960s when the west side of the bay was also a dumping grounds for city garbage. That deposition has long been stopped and the marsh is growing back in patchwork fashion. Ironically, one of the new marsh species taking over is not phragmites, but saltwater cordgrass, Spartina alternifolia, a longstanding native in our marshes, but, ironically, an unwanted invasive in the Bay Area.

Long Island salt marshes were also badly mistreated, not by garbage dumping, but by ditching and filling with dredge materials right up into the 1970s. Fortunately, such misfortune never befell the Scallop Pond and West Neck Creek salt marshes, as it did the ones in Three Mile Harbor, Accabonac Harbor, and Shinnecock Bay.

Phragmites, sometimes called ditch reed after the way it intrudes along the edges of vector control ditches, is rampant in the marshes along the edges of those water bodies. Fortunately, the large volume of sandy materials from the numerous dredgings of the Napeague Harbor inlets over the years were deposited on Hicks Island and close-lying beaches, not on the marsh itself. Thus, Napeague Harbor salt marshes have relatively little ditch reed growing in them.

Long Island’s salt marshes were considered wastelands right up unto the 1960s. Then a man from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, Tony Taormina, got busy and championed not only Long Island’s salt marshes, but also its freshwater ones, and with others wrote state legislation protecting them on Long Island and throughout New York. Vigorous enforcement of the state’s rules and regulations protecting marshes by the likes of Charles Hamilton and others situated at the regional office in Stony Brook quickly put an end to marsh degradation. Today, save for the earlier ditching and invasive phragmites resulting from it, Long Island’s salt marshes have recovered.

They would survive well into the future, but another challenge lies ahead. Rising sea level, which created them early on, now threatens to take them away. A casual observation of the Scallop Pond marshes forebodes just such a happening. The moon tides coming in from the Great Peconic can reach all the way to the dirt road on occasion. Storm-driven tides flood over it. Such evolution is good for inhibiting the growth of phragmites, but ultimately leads to the marshes’ drowning. Some of the marshy islands in Jamaica Bay in New York City have already gone under and attempts to revive them have been only partially successful to date. The Great South Bay bordering the Atlantic Ocean is full of such marshy islands, many of which are beginning to suffer the same fate.

Thus, our outing to the Scallop Pond marshes was both reassuring and nettling. The planet is warming up, glaciers are melting at a faster rate than ever, the seas are rising. Will the our salt marshes be spared? That is the question.

Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].

“Schoolie” bass were stacked up in one of the Gardiner’s Bay inlets the other morning toward the end of an outgoing tide. A Springs resident who shall remain nameless reported that he had decided on a whim to don a mask and snorkel and let the current take him along for a ride.

“It was like a reef. So many fish,” he said, describing the schoolies and showing their size with his hands spread about shoulder-width apart. “There were tons of porgies, too,” he said, which he saw as he made his way back through the inlet on the slack.

Anglers give all sorts of names to familiar fish based on their size or appearance. Schoolies, it seems, are a cut above “rat” bass — the really small ones. At the top end of the spectrum, you have “cows,” the big breeder linesiders, which many people who care about the resource believe are better off left alone.

Bluefish have their own size-related parlance. Snappers are the little ones, then there are “cocktail” blues (like a cocktail wiener or onion, perhaps?), and “gorillas” and “gators,” and so on. A big fluke — like the eight-pound family dinner treat that Annalee Ficorilli caught a week ago while on the Lazy Bones out of Montauk — is a “doormat,” for obvious reasons.

Small black sea bass are among the fluke and porgies in Gardiner’s Bay, with a few keeper “biscuits” above 14 inches in the mix. Bigger bass are all around the Montauk rips, and the south side rock piles are holding onto their hot-spot status for the bottom-fishing crowd.

“Fishing is absolutely fantastic right now,” Paul Apostolides of Paulie’s Tackle in Montauk said on Tuesday. There is a good fluke bite on at the Cartwright grounds with “jumbo” sea bass mixed in, he said. “The bass are hit-and-miss right now with some at the North Rip, Alaska, and the Elbow. Porgies are everywhere.”

Apostolides said that porgies can be caught by casting a hook rig baited with a sandworm right from the ocean beach off downtown Montauk. “One of the most fun things to do,” is how he described it. The beach porgies are huge, he said, well above the 10-inch limit and big enough to fillet.

Bluefish are on the north side of the Point for surfcasters to mess with at dusk and dawn, with some bass around. “There are plenty of fish, but not many players,” he said, something those who prefer a little solitude with their angling might care to note.

Apostolides said that there were tons of bait around and that snappers were starting to fatten up and could be caught in Fort Pond Bay, where there have been reports of mackerel taking sabiki rigs, which are tiny multiple-hook setups favored by the late-season herring fishing crowd.

David Kuperschmid, fishing solo in Gardiner’s Bay last week, said he caught a tinker mackerel while bottom fishing.

Harvey Bennett at the Tackle Shop in Amagansett has announced that the first person to walk in the shop wearing sandals and a “toga” and sporting a shaved head will get a free diamond jig on Saturday, Dalai Lama Day, at least on Bennett’s calendar.

The news from his shop is that an early run of false albacore passed through at the Ruins north and northwest of Gardiner’s Island last week. “Come Labor Day, it’s going to be full of them,” he said.

“Peanut” bunker, or young menhaden, are plentiful, with schools of them pelting waders’ ankles in the shallows. Clamming has been good, and is a fine way to spend a lazy day on the water.

Bass to 10 pounds are all over the ocean beaches, notably responding to offerings of clam bait, Bennett said, and porgies are plentiful and large. There are fluke at Napeague, though you might go a couple of days without any action, and then land a two-footer, he said.

In the coming week, he expected anglers to be chasing the last of the inshore fluke. “They always move this time of the year,” he said.

“No, really. Take it. I’m giving it to you. I want you to have it,” says Mother Nature.

We agreed during a sail on Rob Rosen’s catamaran on Sunday evening — the soft wind quietly pulling the cat out of Montauk Harbor into Block Island Sound to watch the moon rise — that the bubble of exceptional weather had changed us. We had become accepting.

The summer’s end is nigh, but with no sense of crescendo. An awed hush had taken its place. The tight strings of summer exigency — we gotta have a barbecue, go fishing, drink wine, and watch the damn sunset — were loosened. People had ceased looking Nature’s gift horse in the mouth, on edge to feel her autumn shoe drop.

Even the news that a bull shark, estimated to weigh about 250 pounds, was caught earlier in the day by Peter Hewitt’s small dragger, close to shore between Culloden Point and Gin Beach in Montauk, was met with a less than panicked acceptance.

Sure, why not? We have never seen so many fish. Schools of dolphin pass the beaches of Napeague on their daily hunts, striped tropical species languish in the shade of mooring balls in Lake Montauk where legions of mummichogs, baby bunker, and other prey species take to the air en masse to escape their fate as food.

Bull sharks are not necessarily friendly. They are aggressive eaters and not picky. Bulls haunt shallow, near-shore fresh and saltwaters and are known to travel great distances upstream in rivers, up the Mississippi as far as Illinois, for example. They are known to attack and kill people. Perhaps that dip in the bay you planned for tomorrow’s cool-down is not all that necessary. 

Oh, and the shark was released unharmed. Perhaps a kayak paddle instead in Fort Pond, if you’re not worried about the blue-green algae. Hard for bulls to get into the pond.

A visit to Paulie’s Tackle shop in Montauk on Monday afternoon found Gary Stephens, a.k.a. Toad, extolling the fluke bite. A 13-pound fluke had been caught, he said, as well as a 135-pound thresher shark “right off Cartright.”

Paul Apostolides reported big bluefish a regular take on the north side of the Montauk Lighthouse, bass on the south side “on poppers, kneedlefish, sand worms, however you want to catch ’em.” Again, the fluke and thresher news was delivered in an uncharacteristic ho-hum.

My God, we’re getting used to this, I thought. It’s like living in Hawaii, where weeks and months of sunny, 75-to-80-degree weather are the norm, where there is usually enough surf to ride, and the fishing is exceptional. No rush to experience Nature’s aloha, rather an unconscious willingness to let her seep into our lives at her own pace, let her write the script.

 “I’m tired,” Harvey Bennett said on Monday after a less-than-crowing announcement that “the first albie” — false albacore — “of the season” had been landed in Cherry Harbor on the west side of Gardiner’s Island. He owns the Tackle Shop in Amagansett and he’s tired, but smiling, I reckon. I’m going out on a limb to prognosticate an excellent run of false albacore and, hopefully, green bonito, the latter among the most delicious fish swimming.

Yes, I know. It can’t last and shouldn’t. But, whatever fall brings will arrive gilded in the sweet afterglow of a summer that has, once again, defined the beauty of this place. I say, “Thank you.”