Just how close the South Fork is to Connecticut was underscored Sunday when smoke from a tractor-trailer fire on I-95 could be seen as far away as Montauk. I noticed it myself while trying to piece back together the stairs down the dune in front of the house after it was twisted nearly off its pins in the nor’easter of the previous weekend.
From my vantage point along the southmost arc of Gardiner’s Bay, I first assumed a boat was burning somewhere in the vicinity of Crow Shoal. Then, through binoculars, it appeared that the blaze was at the animal disease laboratory on Plum Island, hot enough to burn up any escaping pathogens, I hoped.
The black smoke rose thick and straight, rising at least hundreds of feet, before higher-level wind leveled off its top, giving the impression of a mushroom cloud. With the wind more than 10 knots from the north-northwest, had there been dangerous airborne microbes they might have begun falling on Long Island in less than an hour.
It turned out that the smoke was from a gasoline tanker involved in a three-vehicle crash in Old Lyme. There were no injuries reported. A three-mile stretch of I-95 South was closed for hours as firefighters knocked down the towering flames and then cleanup ensued.
In the thousands of years before automobiles, people understood that Connecticut was a lot closer than it seems today. Native people moved back and forth in canoes.
After English and Europeans arrived, shifting political alliances touched off the Narragansett-Montaukett War between 1653 and 1657. In one attack a sachem from present-day eastern Connecticut stormed ashore at Fort Pond Bay, killing 30 and burning a Montaukett village.
Elizabeth Garlick’s 1658 witchcraft trial was several days’ travel away in Hartford. East Hampton would remain part of the Connecticut Colony until 1664.
During the American Revolution, Lt. Col. Return Jonathan Meigs launched a whaleboat raid from Guilford, Conn., pausing overnight on the North Fork and then rowing into Sag Harbor early in the morning to surprise the British loyalists stationed there.
This weekend, I plan to take Cerberus across the Sound to its winter berth up the Connecticut River. I’ll sail over the same water that people have been using to get back and forth since just after the glaciers receded, perhaps accompanied by a few of their ghosts.