The old expression was “he or she had sand,” meaning fortitude, and I think, seeing as how it was obviously a very old expression, “sand” referred to endurance or vitality, as in plenty of time remaining in the hourglass.

This came to mind on Labor Day at the beach. Walking west in the afternoon as the stronger-than-usual tide of the past week licked its way toward its high point, I noticed a number of walls in the works. Fathers with shovels, their kids with smaller shovels and pails, heaping bucketsful of sand onto battlements meant to stave off the encroaching sea.

It was obvious that these last stands were being repeated, the endangered beach positions having been claimed a day or two before for the duration of the wonderful weekend. A game? Yes, but with a capital G for gravity.

I’ve been reading “Moon Maid,” a science fiction classic by Edgar Rice Burroughs. As most people know, Burroughs invented “Tarzan of the Apes,” but before Tarzan began swinging through the trees, Burroughs wrote about space travel, otherworldly worlds that fired young imaginations, including my father’s. I inherited a number of Burroughs’s books including “Moon Maid,” an Ace paperback edition that sold for 40 cents in 1926. It’s a doozy.

“In 2015 Mars had dispatched a ship for Earth with a crew of five men provisioned for ten years. It was hoped that with good luck the trip might be made in something less than five years as the craft had developed an actual trial speed of one thousand miles per hour.”

Seems Mars and our planet had been communicating for some time. The Mars vessel flew off course, however, so the “Peace Fleet” of the United States (having prevailed in a war that had lasted many years) launched a mission to the red planet. But one of the officers aboard the ship Barsoom — the name the Martians called their planet (you might have observed, as I did, that the name the indigenous people of Mars gave their planet rhymes with, and is only one letter away from spelling, bar room, which might indicate where the author found his inspiration) — sabotaged the flight by destroying the Eighth Ray that would have kept the Barsoom away from the moon’s gravitational pull.

It was liquor combined with a case of professional jealousy that caused Orthis to take such action. The ship sinks to the moon’s surface and is then sucked into one of its deep craters, where the crew of the Barsoom discovers fabulous plants, a sea, freshwater rivers, flying toads, four-legged snakes, forests, and centaur-like creatures — in other words, the stuff of a successful Labor Day weekend with kids. And yet, the gravitational pull of the moon is irresistible, and on Monday the Eighth Ray was about to be hijacked by the return to work, to school.

The tide was rising and no amount of digging and piling was going to hold off the inevitable. The guys with shovels ordering their children into the breach didn’t have enough sand and they knew it. Their Labor Day redoubts were being drowned by the moon, the Long Island Expressway beckoning. You could see it in their eyes.

Harvey Bennett, owner of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett, will appreciate this extraterrestrial reference, I think. He swears that aliens have genetically engineered a horseshoe crab that has begun to grow to huge proportions in Accabonac Harbor. He also reported the “first” false albacore catch of the year last week. Maybe so, maybe not.

I’m surprised I’m not hearing more reports of false albacore. It’s about the right time — maybe a little early — for them to be showing up, and yet there seems to be no great schooling activity. It won’t be long before the “mosquito fleet” of small boats will be ranging about looking for their “trifectas,” tangling with bluefish, striped bass, and false albacore on light spin tackle or fly rods all on the same outing.

It is an exciting time of year for light-tackle aficionados, or anyone else who ventures out to witness the whirlpooling swirls of prey fed upon by chomping bluefish, by striped bass waiting under the schools for scraps, and the false albacore charging through the middle of the swarms like luminescent rockets.

It’s also nearly time for the start of the annual Montauk SurfMasters tournament for striped bass. The deadline for entry is Friday, Sept. 18, but surfcasters are encouraged to sign up early, by Monday, to take advantage of “the back side” of this month’s new moon. There’s that moon again. The tournament runs until Nov. 29. Would-be contestants can visit Paulie’s Tackle shop in downtown Montauk to get the particulars.

The commercial fishing season for black sea bass ended on Tuesday. The “black gold” can still be mined by sportfishermen, however. The fluke bite has eased some. A commercial pinhooker said he believed the flatties had begun to move offshore. The recreational fluke season ends on Sept. 21.

Two Wednesdays ago I was back at Crooked Pond south of Sag Harbor, this time with Victoria Bustamante and Arthur Goldberg, both of whom were new to the pond. The exposed flats, with their wonderful array of rare and opportunistic sedges, grasses, and flowers were still thriving. I say “opportunistic” because they only appear in odd droughty years when the pond level is way down.

The tupelos were turning red. Autumn was on its way. White water lilies covered the pond. A pair of painted turtles were sunning on a glacial erratic. Frogs jumped into the shallows here and there. Whirligig beetles churned the water’s surface. Tree swallows and purple martens were overhead, calling and hawking insects. A lone (of course!) solitary sandpiper was skipping from lily pad to lily pad, having the place all to itself.

During the past three weeks monarch butterfly adult and larval observations have been dribbling in by phone or email, but one tiger swallowtail, a spicebush swallowtail, and a few cabbage whites represented the day’s butterfly population at Crooked Pond. Even though it was already the season for them, we did not spy a single monarch butterfly. There were some milkweeds around, but no monarchs.

Yet, already this year, there have been more monarch reports than last year at this time, maybe because they have become like the bald eagle, osprey, coyote — objects of everyday fascination in the world of nature.

When I was growing up in Mattituck across the bay, I probably saw a monarch now and then, but among the butterflies I only remember the swallowtails. They had those distinctive trailing edges. However, when I dropped out of college for the second time, enlisted in the Army, and ended up studying Russian at the Army Language School in Monterey, Calif., in 1958, my knowledge of butterflies hit a growth spurt.

Pacific Grove, where I made my residence after leaving the barracks life, was home to a grove of buttetfly-gathering trees famous in California. What did the butterfly trees gather every fall and winter? Half of the West Coast monarch population! People came from up and down the coast just to see the pines and eucalyptus with their bundles of quiescent monarchs coloring the green needles and leaves orange. So did I.

Then in 1964, I not only observed monarchs, but began studying them closely while a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, north of Los Angeles, well south of Monterey. I started my study by reading the late McGill University professor Fred Urquart’s treatise on migrating monarchs. He and his wife, Norah, a zoologist, had been studying, even raising and tagging them, since 1938. They knew by following the trail of their tags every year that they flew south starting in late summer, a few ending up in Texas, 1,500 miles away. But Urquart didn’t know until 1975 — long after I left the study of monarchs, became an ichthyologist, and landed a teaching job at Southampton College — that they flew all the way to the state of Michoacan in the mountains of central Mexico, almost 2,500 miles from their starting point in Ontario.

It turns out that monarchs, which only fly during the day, can cover 80 miles a day. Ours fly westerly along the ocean dunes when they arrive from the north, then turn south when they hit New Jersey. They seem to like to fly into early fall’s preponderant southwesterlies, but some other meteorological and/or cosmological factors must be at work in guiding them along. Apparently, it’s in their genes. Come the end of summer, they head south, even though they sprung from larvae hatched from eggs by a third or fourth generation adult reaching the north in the late spring.

Why all the way to central Mexico? Apparently they like the peace and stillness of the pine and fir groves there, just as the West Coast ones seek out the Monterey pines each year. And it has worked for generations upon generations up until recent decades. Thereafter the population began to suffer greatly. There is mounting evidence that commercial weed killers genetically infixed in corn, soybeans, and other Midwestern crops have practically eliminated the milkweed species that monarch larvae feed on. It’s the same foodstuff that gives them the toxic glycosides that make them unpalatable to most would-be predators.

Orioles and grosbeaks can tolerate the poison stored in the wings of the emerging adults more than most other birds, but they take only a handful of the flying adults, as these birds have raised their young and fledged them by the time the monarchs are emerging from their pupae.

Ill-placed and ill-timed storms can take their toll. According to recent genetic studies, monarchs wouldn’t be able to fly such long distances without a special gene that enlarges and strengthens their wing muscles.

A look-alike, the viceroy, takes advantage of its similar coloration and escapes considerable predation even though it does not have chemicals that make it unpalatable to most predators that feed on butterflies.

So we shall see. There is a petition circulating in Washington, D.C., to list the monarch as an endangered species. Mexico is very proud of its monarch “biosphere” and its worldwide listing among heritage sites, but it will take more than Mexico’s watchfulness to keep the population going. Even the West Coast population is diminishing, the cause of which is not being investigated.

Locally, a friend and professional geologist-hydrogeologist, Peter Dermody, is a longstanding monarch tagger, one among many operating across the country. Sadly, however, he wasn’t able to tag a single Long Island monarch last year. Let’s see how the fall pans out.

There’s a healthy crop of goldenrods and asters springing into bloom, not to mention the myriad nectar-producing ornamentals flowering locally. Will this be the year that the monarch population begins to make a comeback, following in the tracks of the eagle, osprey, piping plover, peregrine falcon, and the rest of them?

Maybe, maybe not.

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

“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.”

“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.

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].

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.”

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].

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.

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.

Flow. It’s what we want, not hangs. I have a friend who moved way down south to a dirt-road town called Pavones. It’s located on the southeast side of the Sweet Gulf, Golfo Dulce, not far from the Panamanian border, where some of the finest waves in the world peel along the Costa Rican coastline. His name is Harry Abrams, but we call him Flowmaster.

Harry came to mind on Friday after I attended the opening of the “Surf Craft” installation at the LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton. The show is a curated collection of old and new surfboards, each chosen for its place in the unending quest for perfect flow on the face of a wave.

I thought a lot about Flowmaster recently because I’m working with a talented group of locals toward the opening of the Oceans Institute of the Montauk Lighthouse Museum. Our first installation features surfboards built by Long Island board builders in the mid-to-late-1960s.

The boards, shaped by Charlie Bunger, Bob Hawkins, Jack Hannon, Peter Lutz, and Jim Campbell, were based on shapes pioneered by West Coast board builders like Dale Velzy and Hap Jacobs, who in turn came up with their designs through the experience of wave riders going back to fishermen, explorers, and anyone else who used Nature’s pulse to push them toward terra firma. At one point, the thrilling flow of the journey became the goal. To hell with its end.

Harry Abrams surfed, smoked Camels, and shaped surfboards. Back in the ’60s, while working for Bunger Surfboards in Babylon, he became obsessed with the size and shape of skegs, the fins that give surfboards their stability, allow them to turn, and hold the face of a wave. His fins got longer and more flexible until they looked like the tails of thresher sharks. The idea was to create a surfboard that would snake down and along the face of a wave.

Flowmaster had gone down the rabbit hole in a sense. The fins never worked as well on a wave as they did in his head. We snickered, starting calling him Flowmaster as a rib, and yet he was on the right track. As time went on, fins did get longer, more flexible. Flowmaster doesn’t surf that much anymore. The Camels saw to that. But he still talks flow. The last time I saw him, in Pavones, he told me he was writing a surfing ballet to be performed onstage. Ridiculous? Just wait.

On Saturday, my old friend Louis Gippetti showed up in Montauk from his home in Massachusetts. Like me, Louis is a postwar product of Levittown who got into the world of surfboard riding, design, and building in the late ’60s. We sat on the beach and talked about those times, about Louis’s designs for a flexible surfboard — way out there. We laughed, but not hard. He told me that back then he’d sent one of his designs to George Greenough of Santa Barbara, surfboard designer extraordinaire. Looking back, it was sort of like sending, from out of the blue, a design for a new kind of house to Frank Lloyd Wright.

In return mail Louis received a drawing of a bolt of lightning scratching the sky above the sea. Louis observed that between the extremes of design lies a vast “gray area” to be explored. Louis bought a new surfboard on Monday designed by Mikey DeTemple, a professional longboard surfer who calls the East End home. No money changed hands until Louis and the salesman caressed every curve in the rails, the almost invisible concave toward the nose, the sweet, subtle rocker in the tail “that holds in the foam ball” of the wave for stable nose-riding. Their words flowed as though spoken in awe above a child just breached.

The LongHouse show features a whole section devoted to the designs and concepts of Bob Simmons, who experimented in the ’50s with “planing” surfaces that he translated into boards of balsa wood, and a section that features the same George Greenough who used kneeboards to find the “slot,” the perfect trim spot in a wave.

On Sunday, beautiful Sunday, Kyle and I awoke on Lake Montauk aboard our sailboat Leilani. Fish broke the mirror surface just after dawn, causing rain bait to take to the air.

Later, we took to the one-man outrigger canoe my daughter, Melissa, and I purchased last summer from a couple moving back home to New Zealand. While attending the University of Hawaii, Melissa joined an outrigger paddling team. Our canoe is 18 feet long and weighs just 22 pounds — fast, moves like greased lightning across the smooth water.

Melissa drove out from Springs to join us. “You lean into the ama,” she said, the Hawaiian name for outrigger. She told how her coach trained them by making the six-man canoe team extend the paddle with only the top hand as far forward as possible and grab it lower down with the other hand only when the flow of the canoe threatened to steal the paddle from them. This to increase the length of the stroke.

She took off like the proverbial bat, digging deep with the paddle, gleeful, almost desperate it seemed, to feel again the flow of a craft whose design evolved over hundreds if not thousands of years, and just two months after giving birth to my granddaughter.

And later the same day, I tied a second reef in the mainsail of Leilani, our Bristol 29.9, her hull designed by Halsey Herreschoff, grandson of the genius Capt. Nathaniel Herreschoff, to see if the smaller sail would balance better with the jib in the high, gusty winds we’ve been experiencing of late, to see if it would create a sweeter flow. It did.