Outdoors

    There is so much we don’t know about the natural world, which, in many ways, is a good thing. Nothing wrong with a little mystery or sense of wonder.

    Take the unusually bright fall colors on the East End this year. I suspect it has to do with the equally unusual absence of a strong northeast storm or brush by a passing hurricane to salt the trees and turn them brown.

    On Sunday the South Fork Natural History Society hosted memorial service for the late Christopher Roberts, who passed away in August. Chris was a long-standing naturalist, musician, D.J., TV show producer, and landscaper who also worked for me in the East Hampton Town Natural Resources Department on and off. There was nothing environmental that he couldn’t master in a short time, be it wetland mapping, plant and animal identification, nature preserve caretaking, oil spill cleanup, or what have you.

    Acorns falling on the roof, isn’t that a phrase from a popular song? Acorns have been falling on my roof since the last week in September. Most of them get caught in the gutter and are easy picking for jays, squirrels, chipmunks, white-footed mice, and raccoons. Long Island’s forests are derived primarily from the eastern deciduous biome centered in the Appalachians. While key Appalachian states like North Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania have more oak species than any other states or other countries, Long Island has its share.

    “Beam me up,” said Harvey Bennett, owner of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett, although it seemed he was already over the fulsome moon on Monday. Striped bass had been moving his way through the week on their migration from the ocean beach at Hither Hills in Montauk west along Napeague and still farther west to Wainscott and beyond.

    It’s getting to be that time of year again, that time when we love fall at its most colorful moment. Fall has been creeping up on us since the last day of summer. Summer birds have been leaving for the south and northern birds have been stopping by on their way south while others have been arriving to spend the winter here.

    I wish I were fluent in Spanish, not only so I could trade tongues in what is now our bilingual community, but so I’d be able to read “Don Quixote de la Mancha” in the original. That aging crusader, just itching for a joust, is Everyman, or at least — it dawned on an observer standing beneath the Montauk Lighthouse looking seaward early Friday morning — Every Fisherman.

    I believe in wormholes, invisible funnel clouds that now and then lift us to other places or, as happened on Friday, just other times.

    Should have seen it coming. An archaeological fair held over the weekend at Second House, the house that cattle were driven past for summer grazing upon Montauk’s vast grasslands back in the 18th and early 19th centuries, brought visitors back to a time even before Second House when arrow and spear points were wrought from the white quartz dropped here by the last glacier that receded about 10,000 years ago.

    Stuart Vorpahl, an East Hampton Town historian, doesn’t have an office on the town’s campus of historic buildings. His office is in his house on Muir Boulevard in East Hampton. He knows his history, but in a community where the attention is often directed to the situation at hand, history has a very small role to play, if any at all, and thus Stuart is rarely called on to reiterate the local past, which he knows by heart.

    Another week without ticks, while the tree crickets are still filling the night with their monotonic stridulations. Blowfish are back after a relatively long hiatus (I know why, but I won’t tell), but the winter flounder are still but a few. Scallops are scarce, slipper shells are having a banner year. The hickory nuts are dropping like flies. The acorn crop isn’t half bad, at least on the shoulders of the South Fork moraine. The scarlet, black, and white oak acorns that are now falling on our roofs were two years in the making. The chestnut oak acorns only take a year to mature.

Fall is here with all its glory. Ticks have gone missing!

I know a lot about nature, but very little about art, especially fine art. A lot of artists, as well as a poet or two, live in Springs. Some of them are not only respected artists but also environmentalists, thus “artist-activists” in my way of thinking. Good for art, good for the environment, good for nature. They feed on each other.

   Fall is coming down the tracks and the asters and goldenrods are taking over the countryside. The two are part of the sunflower family, formerly the compositae, now the Asteraceae. The East End of Long Island is rich in aster and goldenrod species, having more than 20 local species combined. In the world of flowering plants, the sunflower family is the most ubiquitous in species, and one of the reasons for that is the way the different members disperse their seeds.

    There’s more to fishing than the catch, and whether they say it or not, fishermen pursue more than fish when they take to the sea to face both its healing and destructive powers.

   The great migration south is about to begin. It will include millions of birds, millions of fish, many different bats, and quite a lot of butterflies and dragonflies. Although at the boreal latitudes, many mammals, including two species of caribou, use their legs to march long distances, in the temperate zone where we are, migration is a matter of wings and fins. Shorebirds, terns and ospreys, to name a few, have already started down. Some of them go thousands of miles, deep into South America, a few like the Arctic tern, all the way to Patagonia.

   It wasn’t that long ago in the history of the United States that small communities made the world go round. Urbanization took a back seat to farming, fishing, hunting, and gathering fruit and vegetables from the wild. You would be hard-pressed today trying to survive in a big city if you had to grow, catch, and gather your own food.

   The plan was to sail the sloop Leilani to the porgy grounds on the east side of Gardiner’s Island from Montauk Harbor on Sunday, preparing clam baits along the way. We’d done it before: stayed the night at an anchorage in the cove on the north side of the island, and feasted on grilled porgy washed down with a glass or two of wine, making the return trip the next morning.

   The edge of the world’s oceans is the shore, and it is continually modified by storm times. It comes and goes, builds and jettisons. In areas where rocky land masses dip directly into the sea, the shore may be less than two feet wide on average. Where more sand is delivered than taken away, the shore, then the beach, can be hundreds of feet wide. There is no surface geologic formation in the world longer than the shore.

   Before I begin, I received an inquiry from Jim Monaco, a book publisher who lives in the south Sag Harbor hills, about deer and the underbrush. He has no ladyslippers, lilies, or other pretty flowers in the groundcover of his nearby woods, only huckleberries and blueberries. True, deer eat orchids, lilies, and other pretty flowers, as do rabbits, squirrels, and other wild beasties in our area.

    Kenny Bouse described how he and his brother began their fishing careers in Montauk 62 years ago this way:

    “We took off from Bay Shore on an old ’51 flathead Harley. We didn’t know where the hell we were going. We got to the Lighthouse. I said, ‘What do we do now that the road stops.’ We found some Bubbies haulseining and they told us how to get to the docks.”

    The party on the banks of Fort Pond Bay in Montauk Sunday celebrated the rescue of John Aldridge after his surviving 12 hours at sea over 30 miles offshore with the help of buoyant rubber boots. He was known as Johnny Load, a nickname with undefined coinage. He is now known as Johnny Boots.

   The water is rising. Well, not all over, but in many places locally. Chatfield’s Hole in East Hampton’s Northwest is well and good, having almost dried up last summer, as are all of the other ponds in that area — Staudinger’s, Crooked, Two Holes of Water, Scoy, Little Scoy. and Wood Duck Ponds. The quiet little pond that wants a name, just north of Swamp Road where it meets Two Holes of Water Road is so full that it now runneth over into Northwest Creek.

   It’s a jungle out there and I don’t mean New York City at night, I mean out there out here. Whether you walk in the woods or through an old field, try to catch a clam or two with your toes, or sit outside at night under the starry sky, at this time of year there is always something lurking, ready to unsettle you.

    It’s likely we were put on this earth, or, depending on your point of view, we evolved on this earth, for no other reason than to bear witness. Homo sapiens seem to have no other meaningful purpose. From a global point of view, we tend to muddle things up when we act. Best to just keep our hands in our pockets and watch and, as a few East End witnesses did this past week, marvel.

   As you ride along some of our scenic routes where you used to be able to get a good look at the water, be it a pond water, the ocean, a bay, or a creek water, you will often find the view obscured by one of the world’s tallest grasses, the common reed, or phragmites. Linnaeus himself in the mid-1700s first described the reed and gave it its first scientific name, the binomen Arundo phragmites, one of thousands he created. Phragmites stems from the Greek for “growing in hedges,” and describes its tendency to form vegetative walls that block the view.

    Asked if it was true that the low number of boats signed up so far for the no-kill SharkEye tournament might cause it to be canceled, Carl Darenberg of the Montauk Marine Basin, which is hosting the event, said, “If we have 10 boats, it’s enough.”

   Nick Joeckel laughed, sort of, in telling how customs agents shook him down for two brand-new pairs of sunglasses in the Jakarta airport on the way back from a 10-day odyssey during which he surfed some of the best waves on the planet with 10 friends who had dreamed of surfing Indonesia together since they were kids.

    They returned on June 22 bruised and cut from bouncing off the reefs of the Mentawai chain of islands, but with surfing batteries fully charged.

   The native deer population has been blamed for a lot of things, hosting ticks, causing highway accidents and vehicle damage, eating favorite ornamentals, even defecating on manicured lawns. For several years now deer have also been blamed for removing the underbrush or subshrub groundcover across the South Fork.

   Twisted in rope and moving with difficulty, a leatherback turtle, estimated at 600 pounds, was rescued by the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and U.S. Coast Guard last Thursday.

   The struggling turtle had been spotted in Gardiner’s Bay by a boater aboard the Madeline, from Quonset, R.I., who alerted Coast Guard Station Montauk, according to a statement released on Friday by the foundation.

   What’s with the wind? It has come out of the west and southwest every day for the past two weeks now. A southwest wind prevails this time of year, but not at 20-knots plus, and not with so much accent on the westerly component. The pattern has kept small-boat operators at bay, especially in the afternoon.

   It’s a mixed up world, that’s for sure. There are some who have the point of view that world ethnic groups, world languages, world religions, and world nations shouldn’t be mixed up and homogenized in the same melting pot. Others say it’s inevitable, why fight it? The human being is one of the few species that is racing toward one cosmopolitan worldwide identity.