Last Moment

I returned one last time to my old field in Amagansett. 

The field had been disced, the soil quite dry. 

I was visited by a young fox; it hardly knew I was there.

Two-thirty now, in Southold, on my last visit to the barn. It's quiet, the air is still.

I offer my curing racks to another farmer, and I receive some heirloom tomatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, and pickled beets in return. I hand off my French shallots too, because this farmer has chef clients and I would like to see these get more attention than I could give them. 

And now the drive west under the long, slow sinking of the late autumn sun, heart just a little heavy. 

Memory Lane

After a short visit to the garlic farm last week I finally had time to head to my old neighborhood. I wanted to know what has happened to what anyone I grew up with would simply have called the farm. 

On a wedge of land between Oxhead Road and N. Washington Avenue, this property and the neighbors around it were largely a mystery to me and most of my friends even though it was only a half-mile away, as the crow flies. Sure, we went by it all the time, but never set foot, never interacted. I didn't even know, or do not remember that I knew, that the farmer was a black man, Long Island's only African American farmer. 

I was relieved to see that the triangle wasn't filled with new, plastic-sided homes, but something was different.

I rounded the pointy tip, the most acute corner I know, to read the sign which did its level best to explain. Hobbs farm, I had now recollected the name, was no longer in the family. 

The old barn had me thinking a church was involved. I could see that there was a a segmented garden -maybe a community-type plot.

And so I left it, glad to see the farm was still there, but sure that it was no longer as before. And since I was but a half mile from my childhood home, I decided to pass on by to see how it has changed since my mother was forced to sell it as part of her divorce settlement.

Maybe there is a German word for the feeling one gets when they see the shape of their childhood house dressed in different clothing. I know those oak trees like I know the back of my hand, I can walk around them in my mind, isolating lichens and patterns of bark. I know the scent of the thin soil, the patches where only moss will grow, the colonies of black ants. I do not know those cars, or those new shrubs, or how they've changed the orientation of the drive.  I don't know who is inside my room.

My school bus stop, down the road, between those pines. Remember the anxiety of your first time, wondering whether or not you're in the right place, or worse, that you had missed the bus entirely. Running for the bus, yelling wait! A bus from the south was always better than one from the north.

On our road, we lived at the pinnacle of what we called a hill. The drainage was poor here, so that after heavy rains, a large puddle would form. It seemed that all the town could do was to place what we called cannon balls on either side of the pond. I was fascinated by these sooty black orbs with flame atop. I cannot believe I never tried to take one home (or did I?). Standing water was not common to our stretch of the woods, so I was also in love with these puddles, several inches deep, which we had to skirt by passing through the yards in order to get to or from our bus stop. I was disappointed when a formidable puddle in the morning had drained by the end of a school day.

To the left I jumped a ramp on my bike and went over the handle bars. To the right I passed through at night, jumping the fence to get to friends. This is where we trick or treated until we switched to eggs. The house at the top of the hill, on the left, belonged to a man who burnt his trash. The house on the top to the right had a free-roaming dog named Randy who always managed to visit our barbecues. The house at the top belonged to a man who died in his driveway as he worked his chainsaw on trees fallen by hurricane Gloria.

Just a few doors down, behind this house, I rode my first horse. Led by a brunette in riding pants and boots, three times around, it cost only a dime. I may have been five or six. 

Sixty Five MPH Spring

I've been relishing spring green and salmon, some of the best I can recall, at highway speeds for a couple of weeks now. First on my trip to the upstate garlic farm, and this week on my trip out to Amagansett to check out a possible location for next year's crop. 

I cannot recall ever winding my way through the Long Island Pine Barrens in early spring, since my trips to the farthest reaches of the southern prong have always been reserved for summer days at Montauk. 

The colors this year rival or best autumn's, in my view. The russet and salmon reds are the most brilliant I've seen, contrasting with long-holding chartreuse.

Add to this the dark greens of pitch pine, and...

the whitened-green of blooming, roadside russian olives, and...

sheep sorrel and old grasses...

and you have something I could hardly take photographs of, with my phone, while speeding down the highway at 65 mph. It all made me wish, much like two weeks prior, that I didn't have purpose other than finding and photography.

Wine Libel

Last weekend I was out on the North Fork of Long Island with my brother. After doing what we needed to do, we stopped at five or six wineries. I had a long drive back, so wasn't up for much tasting, but just wanted to pick up some wine. I was a bit taken aback by the cost. Most were 18 to 25 dollars or more. At first I thought that these must be exceptional wines, until I tasted one producer's 26 dollar pinot noir that had me looking for water. Okay, okay, I was told that pinot noir grapes don't do well on the North Fork. So I tried the 38 dollar pinot noir -only slightly better, but sour still comes to mind. Let's go in a different direction, how about a merlot? Ack! Even at 18 dollars, it was far worse than anything I'd buy for $10 at a wine shop in NYC. The taste host (is that the name?) then told me they just got a new winemaker this year. Oh, so you know these wines suck. I honestly don't know much at all about wine, but I know when I want to keep drinking one. I suppose I discovered why this winery was offering its tasting for free.

We went to Pindar, probably Long Island's best known winemaker. A few years ago I saw a Pindar sign on some upstate vineyards, but the woman behind the counter insisted, at first, that when it says L.I. estate wines on the label, it's from the North Fork. I was asking because I wanted to know why we would be paying such high local wine prices if the grapes are being trucked in from who knows where. She later told me it could be 10% from somewhere else. I relented.

Here is where I show an amateur's connoisseurship. I couldn't stand the labels on the Pindar wines and I simply couldn't buy any that had those graphics (a good example). Probably stupid, but since all of their lower priced wines had these labels, I simply passed. I bought their most understated label Merlot at considerable markup, and have yet to drink it.

There has been research on how the suggestion of high quality affects people's positive reaction to the product. Label graphics are as powerful as someone's suggestion. Is that what is going on here? I have no idea how these wines taste, but my graphic taste simply refuses cheesy graphics. I find those above acceptable, if not absolutely favorable. I have yet to taste three of the four wines I purchased that day. Betsy and I did twist our tongues around the Pellegrini Cabernet which we thought was all tannin, needed to breathe heavily, and couldn't have been worth $25 a bottle but for the local price mark up.

Local doesn't always make better. Full disclosure: When I was in grad school I painted cheesy graphics on bottles of over-priced wine sold in a tourist town in New Mexico. I received two dollars a bottle and they went like hotcakes. The wine wasn't memorable.

Plum Island

I learned from Pruned that a Long Island haunt of mine, only seen from afar, and painted too, is now up for sale by our federal government. If you travel to the far end of the north fork of Long Island, park at the ferry terminal, and walk another quarter mile or so, you will find yourself on a spit of land that points to Plum Island.

I imagine it was beach plums that aroused its nomenclature, but in the end this plum in the sound was only known for housing the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, a research facility that stored many of the most notorious animal diseases of the world. Despite the lot of negative press in the last twenty years, I did not realize it had been shut down. The promotional documentation looks beyond that recent history, making the island look like a charm.

I haven't been to that very tip in some time, but it's worth a drive or even bike ride in good weather. On the way, you can hit some of the north fork nurseries, stop at a farm stand or wineries. And after a few tastings, you can entertain making an offer on our notorious, yet charmed, island.

Mushroom Maze

If you have the time, read on. This is my largest post ever, with 64 photos.

My brother had lured me to a new county park, called Manorville Hills (sounds like a subdivision and probably was eyed as one, once). It is part of a 6000 acre preserve of NY state lands and Suffolk County park lands in the Pine Barrens region of Long Island. The sign above says it all. This is probably one's best spot on Long Island to get away from 'it all.' A wilderness zone, the Pine Barrens, our glacial landscape, the maze. The air was crisp on Sunday morning, scented with the autumnal decay I tend to associate with upstate NY, but there it was making us feel alive.

I had recently purchased the Long Island Greenbelt Trail Conference's map set. Thinking, of course, that this is all I needed to make the magic happen. My brother wanted to begin at the county park lot, the one with the empty sign. There were no markings, no signs, no trail blazes. We opted to start on a road, one which we could reasonably locate on our map. The road we took was called Hot Water Rd. Not sure if it was that anyone traveling it would be getting into hot water or that nearby Brookhaven National Lab was making some hot water. Either way, I began wishing the LIGTC maps were made of Tyvek, like the well-made NYNJTC trail maps. After the day's folding and unfolding, it began to fall apart.

There are a lot of roads in the Pine Barrens. In this landscape, roads, paths, footprints die hard. Many are easily over 100 years old. One of the first thing anyone unfamiliar with the area will notice is that your path, road, or trail is, um, well below the natural grade. This image is the side of Hot Water Rd, a few hundred yards from the shot just before it. You can also see that the road is 'sunken in' in that shot.

This trail, er, road, er, canyon is a good example of how easily this region is damaged by human activity-caused erosion. Our hiking did it no favors, but the ATVs, dirtbikes, and trucks have really done most harm.

The pine barrens are, well, barren, for a few reasons. People had difficulty farming the sand that lies just beneath the extremely thin topsoil. It was far enough from NYC to avoid major development pressures until the last decades of the 20th century. Preservation and open space movements had begun in earnest in the late 70s and by the generally well-off 90's, it became politcally sound to do so by both Republicans and Democrats. And, it appears, that Long Islander's interest in hiking and mountain biking the barrens had grown along with that movement. So what was once our version of a swamp -a useless dumping ground, became an ecological niche to be explored by all.

There are some farms to the north, south and east of the glacial moraine's kame and kettle landscape. In fact, Hot Water Road passes this farm and compost pile. But here is where things started to get tricky. Our map had indicated a number of roads and paths along Hot Water. But by our count, we had passed at least twice as many as were indicated on the map. We had no clue how far we had come, if at least understanding where we were relative to the 6000 acres: south side, near the private property north of County Road 51 also known as 'the farm.'

I was in charge of direction, map reading, and getting us out of here in one piece before sundown. The craziest hike I had ever done was in Hell's Canyon, Oregon -a three day, lousy hiking partner, map-less, compass-less, run-out-of-water, snow-on-top, desert-on-bottom, excursion over 4000 feet of elevation when I was 25. Can I say with comfort we are not getting lost 5 miles south of the Long Island Expressway?

Our trail conference map offered only one major color-blazed trail in the region, the Paumanok Path - a white blaze. I didn't want to double back for the return trip, so we devised a route from Hot Water Road to the PP. We were looking for a blue-blazed trail, marked on the map, that linked with the white-blazed PP. This we would take back west toward the parking area, with only a couple of miles off of a color-blazed trail to the car. I forgot my compass, but being near equinox, it was easy to keep track of our direction relative to the position of the sun.

Hot Water Road was supposed to turn sharp, NNE, at the mapped turn a foot path extended past a place called 'Bald Hill' -but this did not happen. Hot Water seemed to have been freshly excavated and extended where there was once only a foot path. Finally, I spotted a blue blaze! We turned northward. There were so many trails, foot paths, and roads connecting to this blue-marked trail that were not on our map, we really had little use for it. There were also blue-blazes all over the place, turning left and right, some on the bottom of trees, some with white. If it were a cloudy day, without compass, it surely would have been a maze. It's not exciting to everyone to use your sense of direction to compensate for maps, but I enjoyed the opportunity to put myself to the test.

We finally linked with a white blaze, the Paumanok Path. With it to follow, things were much easier. It was still hard to figure out where we were on the map or how far we had walked, but I was getting better at estimating distances. The trail is sandy, but easy to walk. Only on some hills did the sand bog us down.

The landscape of the barrens is not the familiar wilderness. It offers no promontories, no bodies of water, no vistas or streams, no moments of grandeur or big sky, nor any obvious landmarks. Hills climb to 300 feet, but once atop you cannot see much through the leaves. Its understory and canopy seem unchanged for the length of it. For those who would describe it as boring, I simply offer that you are not looking close enough. The true beauty of the barrens is in the details, the moments.

Its middle autumn, the leaves are still on the trees, the understory dappled with low, diffuse light. The canopy of oaks mingle with occasional pitch pines, most not very tall so that it is never very dark in the woods. The evenness of light in union with the glacial hills, kames and kettles, flattens distance. You feel you are within, as in a body of water. Each rise gives expectation of a vista, but only offers a new bottom land to descend into.

The trail cuts through heath -mainly ericaceous plants. In this woods there is canopy and low understory -nothing between. Occasionally, noticeably, in small clusters, the heath grew three times as tall as it ordinarily had and was still bright green with no obvious answer why.

Pitch Pine stand.

Mossy bottom land.


Sassafras, roadside.


More moss.


Small glacial erratic.


Large.

The road we ate lunch on. Ticks are an issue when hiking here. On a sandy road, it should be of no concern, but the trails are often brushy footpaths. A quick leg check every 15 minutes is my solution and has become my habit after my experience in the Connecticut woods. We wore no repellent. I had shorts and found no ticks after 7 hours in the woods. My brother, on the other hand, had light-colored pants and we found two ticks crawling up on a particular stretch (grassy road) late in the day. The ticks were black and I feel comfortable IDing them as male black-legged ticks. We both had a spell with a swarm of very small mites on the front of our shoes/pants' ankles. I tried to see how many legs they had, but then I recalled stories of pant legs brushing larval tick nests and them having six legs and boom, destroy all monsters! Unlike hard adult ticks, these squished easily.

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Now, without much wordy interruption, the mushrooms of Hot Water Road, the Blue Trail, and the Paumanok Path, autumn 2009. Please click for a double-size image, and leave your ID tips.

I found a lot of Indian Pipe.




Closeup -Indian Pipe.

To my delight, the relative of Indian Pipe I saw at Weir Preserve: Pinesap, Monotropa hypopithys. Its red color is outstanding. Of course, neither or these are mushrooms, but they don't photosynthesize -so I put them here.

Closeup.

This turned into those below (looks like not-fully popped corn).

Rotting shrooms.

And at the end of our day, heading for the car, some asters...

I saw about five individual feathers, hawk I think, throughout our 12-mile hike. This one I took.

Preaching On The Loose

Not long ago I made a post with this photo of what I thought was Purple Loosestrife. Planted near a town center, on a wetland edge, along a road, near a parking lot in a town with many gardeners and less than a quarter mile up river, near the Stony Brook Grist, a preserve dedicated to native plants and habitats.

I grew up on Long Island. I didn't see nor hear of purple loosestrife until I went to college in the Hudson Valley, where I was in awe of its August beauty in the wetlands and roadside ditches. I didn't know what I was looking at. That was 20 years ago.

Without any doubt, it is purple loostestrife -key identifier, the lanceolate leaves whorl at 90 degrees to the previous set. Someone recently planted these -by the looks of it, in the last couple of years along with some catnip.

Long Island has been relatively clear of purple loosestrife, a plant that has been around since the mid-19th century. Why? Some say its because another invasive wetland species, Phragmites australis, outcompetes it in brackish wetlands.

This little planting of loosestrife is about 25 feet from Stony Brook's brackish estuary. Alongside this estuary is a mixture of native plants, but also plenty of mugwort. If you travel a short distance upstream, which is easy to do when the tide is coming in, you will find fresh water and a perfect roost for the millions of seeds loosestrife is capable of producing.

To me, this is not a story about a plant. It's a story about people still uneducated, still planting these plants. That means that information is not getting out. That also means those gardeners who are sick of hearing about invasive plants have not heard the end of it. While we are enlightened and free individuals able to make our own choices, solving big problems requires individual and collective action. To people it's just a plant choice, but to some ecological systems, it's a disaster.

In 2007, Suffolk County government passed a "do-not-sell" list. While many of those invasive plants have a phase-out period, such as japanese barberry -2014, most weedy plants (i.e. plants we don't plant much anyway) have been banned in 2009. Maybe its a poorly updated site, but a quick google search pulled up at least one wholesale LI Nursery still selling purple loosestrife.

I drove out to Bridgehampton to see my brother's place of work. On the way, I passed two, what do you call them -wedding halls, with extravagant plantings and a white fences. Both had masses of purple loosestrife blooming away. It's August, they look gorgeous at a time when much doesn't here on Long Island. So do the happy brides.

Hiking Avalon

On Long Island's north shore lies a landscape called Avalon Park and Preserve. Its part designed landscape using many native plants, part preserve of native woodlands, and part cultivated fields of native flowering plants. This is the approach from Mill Pond in Stony Brook.

The woodwork is over the top for a preserve. All the decking, furniture, and gate is oiled. You can see how tightly the decking is cut around obstacles like trees.

It's a grand entrance that to a sensitive person might seem to undermine the preserve's mission. The slope is cut into to provide room for the wide walkway. These cuts will be sources of erosion, all the while plants will grow over the walkway and need to be hacked back. That said, I enjoy walking on wooden plank pathways because of the sound it makes and because they generally preserve land adjacent to the pathway.

Eventually the wooden walkway does end, changing to an edged pea stone pathway. Further in, asphalt paths mix with the pea stone paths. The landscape these paths traverse is attractive and completely constructed, despite its naturalistic appearance.

After you explore this landscaped portion, called Avalon Park, you can go on to the much larger Avalon Preserve and East Farm Preserve. Cross over Rhododendron Road (an event during flowering season) and take the red trail to a few miles of woodland and field trails of different color blazes. The yellow and orange trails pass through old farm fields cultivated for massive displays of native wildflowers. All the trails can be walked within a couple of hours with ordinary footwear.

A colony of Joe Pye Weed at the edge of Mill Pond.


The wooden truss bridge (despite the cables) over Mill Pond.

This appears to be an Aster. Anyone?

Coastal Sweet Pepper Bush, Clethra alnifolia, had scented flowers.

This white-flowered shrub was growing adjacent to the pepper bush. Anyone know this one?

Afterward you can walk to the beach at Sand Street (half-mile), or even further to West Meadow Beach (about 3 miles) which has recently been overhauled (finally!!) to be completely open to the public. I have rented a canoe at the marina near Sand Street Beach, across from the Three Village Inn -search the Yellow Pages for Stony Brook Boat Works to find their listing.

Gathers Moss

I visited my friend and high school art teacher this past weekend. She lives in Stony Brook, LI. Many who came later to this enclave cut down or topped up their oaks to force a lawn. But in her neck of the woods, the canopy of oaks and understory of mountain laurel and introduced rhododendrons reign predominant. Her garden is a place of dappled light and deep greens. She has many hostas, ferns, and snakeroot. I introduced her to snakeroot's cousin, the purple perennial ageratum, two years ago to her delight. In recent years, but with this year standing out, her garden has become quite the home to moss.

Stepping stones float on a cushion.

The moss is luxurious visually and soft to the touch.


The old driveway.

What I really like is the light and shadow play on the mossy paths.

Hmmm

I saw this the other day in Stony Brook, on L.I. Spotted while passing in a car, I was pretty certain it was purple loosestrife. I haven't seen much of loostrife on Long Island, but occasionally in people's gardens. Here it is planted in a town park, at the edge of an estuary.