Introduction

I've always hated going to “the beach.” For one thing, I have the kind of skin that the sun seems to find before anyone else’s, turning pink then deep red while others are still applying their first round of sunblock. I’ve never liked the crowds, the heat, or the pernicious sand that finds its way into all the wrong places of your swimsuit.

But I’ve always loved the ocean. When I was growing up on Long Island’s South Shore, my parents would take us down to Jones or Tobay Beach for early-morning breakfast barbecues with my Uncle Ray’s family in summer. Or we’d go in the evening, after the masses had long packed up their coolers. And we’d go in winter. That’s the time I loved it most. No one cajoled you to go into the water, sunburn was little threat, and the ocean’s steady roar felt both wild and soothing.

Feel the burn: circa 1973 at Montauk Point 

And there are no crowds. I remember taking one of my friends with us to the beach one time in winter when we were little. “It snows at the beach? Weird,” I recall her saying. To her small self, the beach was a place of perpetual summer. She couldn’t imagine it any other way. While there are stalwarts like my brother Matt who go to the beach in all seasons and in all weather, the lack of human visitors to the coast in winter always surprises me. To me, it’s the best time to go. But living now as I do more than an hour from the open ocean, I don’t get there nearly often enough. I imagine myself walking the boardwalk every day if I were closer. I pine to live nearer to the coast. However, a good job and house north of Hartford, Connecticut, along a decisive lack of ample funds, keep me inland. I take fantasy trips, though, in addition to real ones. I swipe through Zillow postings in places like Long Beach, where my grandfather lived for years, where he’d walk at least five miles each day on the boardwalk there before he came to live with us out in Massapequa. That was when his vision and hearing problems made living alone too difficult. Matt sent me a recent photo of the once rather unremarkable second-floor rental apartment where Gramps lived on Vermont Street in Long Beach, now selling for close to a million dollars. A Long Beach apartment would be completely untouchable financially for someone like him now. I check out AirBnb properties on Fire Island in places with romantic names like Kismet, Saltaire, and — my personal favorite — Lonelyville, knowing full well that I could barely afford a week’s rent in one of those places.

My daughter Molly and I recently walked the two miles from Robert Moses State Park to the town of Kismet, intending to have lunch when we got to the small town that is otherwise accessed almost exclusively by ferry. The day was hot, but there was a steady breeze off the ocean to keep us cool. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I had forgotten one important fact that my brother also forgot to remind me of when he suggested the idea: the nudists along that route. Far be it from me to judge — I have no quarrel with private nudists — except these folks literally make it their practice to make sure you don’t miss their lack of clothing, standing up to stretch or suddenly feeling the need to stroll in your direction as you approach. Molly enjoyed the $20 bowl of clam chowder in Kismet but dreaded the walk back, during which she chose not to wear her glasses. Still, this walk got me wondering: what if we walked even further? What lies beyond Kismet? Could we log even more beach miles, preferably in places where people are more amply covered, just to see what we might see.

Arguably, the South Shore of Long Island has some of the most beautiful beaches in the world, large swathes of which remain undeveloped despite their proximity to one of the most densely populated cities in the United States. Fire Island — the longest of the barriers at approximately 31 miles long* and just 1,300 feet wide at its widest point— contains the Otis Pike Fire Island High Dune Wilderness, the only federally designated wilderness area in New York State. Jones Beach Island, home to Jones Beach State Park as well as Tobay Beach, a private town beach for residents of the Town of Oyster Bay, does have some privately owned land. But most of it is public and undeveloped, aside from the boardwalk, bathhouse, and concession stands, all clustered together near the parking lots. The sand is soft and light in color and the beaches are wide and inviting, with lifeguards to boot. No wonder these beaches get so crowded.

We can thank Robert Moses for a lot of this unspoiled natural landscape. Despite the undeniable damage that Moses wrought on the greater New York City area with his deeply flawed vision for urban and suburban development, both Jones Beach and Robert Moses state parks are still public lands and not completely overtaken by private homes, largely because of his influence. Compare the South Shore of Long Island to, say, the Jersey Shore or even much of the Rhode Island coast, so much of which is either overdeveloped or private property, and you see the difference.

It has been many years since I’ve lived on Long Island and I’m not likely to ever live there again for a host of reasons. At the same time, Long Island is where I’m from and growing up there shaped me in profound ways. As anyone who is from Long Island knows, the place sits right in your DNA. Two of my brothers still live in Massapequa and they live in the lovely and largely renovated homes that their wives grew up in. People tend to stay. It’s hard to get there and it’s even harder to leave. And, though I’ve lived in Connecticut for the majority of my adult life, if you know me well enough, my accent tells you right away that Long Island is where I learned to “tawk.” So do my lectures to my Connecticut friends about their inferior bagels and pizza. Still, I’ve realized that there was so much about Long Island about which I know next to nothing. That walk with Molly called to mind the documentary, The World Before Your Feet, about a man who makes it his mission to walk all 8,000 miles of the streets in all five of New York’s boroughs. How exciting it would be to have such a plan — one that would yield unexpected results and reveal so many hidden corners of a city that you lived in; a place you thought you knew. It’s a story that tells itself with each step. So, maybe it was time for me to explore those deep roots a little more deeply?

People often forget that two of New York City’s five boroughs are physically located on Long Island. And the Brooklyn neighborhood of Coney Island is located on one of Long Island’s five barrier islands. However, what once made it an island is now largely filled in and Coney is an island pretty much in name only. As much as I dislike going to a crowded beach, I do enjoy an occasional trip to the spectacle that is the Coney Island Boardwalk. Before its current renaissance, some parts of the boardwalk might as well have been haunted, especially in winter. If you had visited in the late 1990s, as my husband and I did, right along the Boardwalk, you could still find the old, rotting wood-and-metal shell of a roller coaster on the grounds of the former Steeplechase Park, which closed in 1964 (the year I was born). Inside the rusted chain link fence that surrounded it, several feral dogs seemed to have taken up residence. Overhead, the squawks of gulls could easily be mistaken for children’s delighted screams as the distant scrape of the elevated D Train evoked the rattle of the coaster’s cars that the now long-gone children had once ridden in. There was (and still is) the imposing structure known as the Parachute Jump, built for the 1938 World’s Fair, which to this day I cannot believe my seemingly unadventurous mother parachuted from when she was young. More recent visits with my family included a trip to the New York Aquarium and a walk on the boardwalk with the promise of a Nathan’s hot dog and an ice-cold soda after a long day.

In addition to Coney Island, there are four other barrier islands: the aforementioned Long Beach, Jones, and Fire islands, along with Westhampton Island. There are also two barrier spits: the largely developed Rockaway and the far less developed Southampton. To clarify: barrier islands and spits are not a coastal feature unique to Long Island. These long, narrow strips of sand and dune are a common occurrence along coastlines as they build up over time and serve to protect the mainland from erosion from surf and storm surge.

That walking documentary got me thinking about these New York places and how they connect to each other. So, I started researching these barriers. Having had at least set foot on all of them, it occurred to me that, in the span of these 100 narrow miles of coast facing the Atlantic Ocean — from Norton Point AKA Sea Gate on Coney Island, heading east to the end of the Southampton barrier spit, you would encounter two almost completely different worlds. And I got to thinking how important yet fragile these coastal features protecting Long Island are – piles of sand held together by a network of grasses and little more. It also occurred to me that one day they might simply be no more.

The truth is that, like coastlines everywhere, these islands are in a state of constant change. The sands move in and out, east and west. Human intervention through dredging and jetties and groins allows for build up in some areas while others become more and more narrow. And then there are storms. In a 2007 whitepaper titled “Long Island’s Dynamic South Shore” written for New York Sea Grant, we are told that only nine hurricanes had made landfall on Long Island since 1858. “Fortunately, because New York is fairly far North, we have not seen very many hurricanes.” That was written five years before the “superstorm” known as Sandy. Unlike 1985’s Gloria, which was considered one of the worst storms of the 20^th century, but which caused relatively little damage because it exited quickly and came at low tide, Sandy ravaged Long Island’s South Shore along with many other places on its trip North. A confluence of high tide, a full moon, and the hurricane force winds meeting a cold air mass from the North caused storm surge the likes of which had not been seen since the unnamed hurricane of 1938. That earlier storm had caused the last major breach through Fire Island, cutting Shinnecock Inlet, now a harbor and major fishing destination. In 2012, “New” inlet — AKA New “Old” Inlet AKA the Wilderness Breach for reasons that will be explained later — was the result of Sandy. Sure, temporary inlets across the barriers from ocean to bay get cut all the time but usually are small and quickly reclosed by engineers or close themselves naturally with time. “New” Inlet is still there and is likely to stay there, at least for now. What will happen when, not if, the next superstorm hits, I wondered?

So, maybe it would be a good time to have a look at it all. I’m not getting any younger, the sea levels are rising, and climate change is doing who knows what else to the coastline. Would it be possible to walk the length of each of these five islands and the two spits, taking the inlets— new and not-so-new — and other obstacles into account of course. It’s only 100 miles. I’m in decent shape and I could map it all out to walk 5-7 miles on each leg. Once I got going, would I need a map anyway? Ocean is on the right when I head East; on the left when I head West. I can handle that. Bring a hat and a backpack with an extra hat in case of blow-offs, sunscreen, snacks, water, and a cell phone. No wild animals to worry about (maybe?). And I could stay overnight in some cool places along the way. How about a night of “glamping” in Watch Hill or a funky airBnB on Long Beach? And just think what I would learn about the landscape and the people, animals, and plants that live there and how the barriers work and why they even exist in the first place. And I could see how people are working to preserve all those things and what can and needs to be done. Who knows? Maybe this walk could help in some way — even a little. It’s a plan with no planned outcome. Just do it and see what happens. How hard could it be? The beach, any beach really, always feels so familiar even though you know it is ever-changing. There are all those shells to collect and birds and sea life to identify along the way and you can easily clock five miles before you even realize that now you will need to walk those five miles back to your car, hoping the wind is in your favor.

And so, in a reverse Lewis-and-Clark move, I would work my way from West to East.That’s where it began. We'll see where it goes.