An Almost Perfect Montauk Walk

Photographs by Daphne Stern

Scuba divers who heard rumors from far away that November diving in Fort Pond Bay is a magnificent experience get ready to submerge in the Caribbean clear water where, they say, you can spot a pearl in an oyster from sixty feet up on the bluff. Amy is helping Sean O'Neill from Jamesport get into his gloves. He is armed with a spear gun with steel-tipped arrows and word has it that there are blackfish down there big enough for some exquisite meals.

Fellow diver Brandon Hewes from Southampton might appear to be standing on a tropical atoll but he is in Fort Pond Bay a few weeks before Thanksgiving.

The 2009 bait fish hatch seems to be of record proportions. Fishermen like Captain Skip Rudolph report that there are huge clouds of fish food swimming around in the oceans and the bays this fall, so many that the gulls and terns are getting stuffed. Surf fishing up and down the beaches is breathtaking. Striped bass and bluefish are heavy and hungry and are expected to stay that way up until a serious cold front blows in.

Local tribes once used the fruits of the red sumac bushes as cosmetic body paints.

The Hither Woods paths are now deep in crisp, brown oak leaves.

Down a side trail and there is the beckoning aquamarine water.

Erratics are sizable boulders of rock not native to the area that about 10,000 years ago dropped out of the retreating glacier and found its perch. Before human records were kept these erratics were the signposts of the aboriginal peoples. Those that have never been moved are most revered. In Hither Woods there are erratics that have stood in the same spot since the last glacier disappeared north.

The view from Rocky Point across Fort Pond Bay toward a white water tower on the dunes beyond.

Every "Danger" or keep out sign in Montauk sets off suspicious alarms in the minds of tens of thousands of Montauk visitors who profoundly believe that hidden somewhere beneath the landscape is a super-secret government project to travel in time. They are looking for what they call "the portal," through which people may step and be chronologically transported. What is behind the danger sign? The portal seekers believe that every such a sign must hide the secret entrance to one of the time portals, the true story of which is "avoided" by the established press for sinister reasons you might listen to for hours if you had an interest.

The Lost Boulder or, as it is locally called, Split Rock, is the granddaddy of all the East End erratics. People for a thousand years have used it as a guidepost and meeting spot. For the many ghosts and haints on the East End, it is the best table in the house on Halloween and All Souls Day.