Island News, for Once, Isn't Human

What with the rain and the recession and more rain and the hurricanes that weren't but scared people away nonetheless, it was a pretty quiet summer for the folks on Long Island's East End. The last time a whole summer went by without a major tabloid moment, Jackson Pollock was still slinging paint around.

 

On the other hand, for the East End's critters, it was a summer for the ages. And absent any celebrity car wrecks, gallery busts, A-list divorces and the like, most of the news that mattered was about creatures of the sea, air and woods.

 

Where to start? There was the first beaver seen on Long Island in more than 100 years, reported by The East Hampton Star, probably a young male who made it across the Sound, maybe on a piece of driftwood. It was photographed in Napeague long after beaver lodges and felled trees indicated that one might be around. Beavers were indigenous to Long Island and trapped out of existence long ago, so more power to the perseverance of this one.

 

There were the whales, especially humpback and fin whales, seen in large groups reasonably close to Montauk for the first time in almost a decade. Whale-watching excursions from Montauk were popular in the 1980s and '90s, but after 2002, the whales had moved more than 45 miles offshore. This summer they were back - humpbacks, which can weigh more than 70,000 pounds; fin whales; minke whales, tails slapping like cars dropped into the sea - wondrous reminders of the mysteries just out of view.

 

There was more - an 800-pound endangered leatherback turtle, the largest of all sea turtles, found dead on a beach in Springs, apparently after being struck by a boat, its body like a startling bit of marooned marine sculpture; surfers attacked by hungry bluefish in July like something from a bad Hitchcock knockoff; armadas of dolphins; New York State's announcement that there are now so many wild turkeys on Long Island, more than 3,000, that Suffolk County will hold its first sanctioned turkey hunting season in November.

 

THE East End dazzle always coexists with the natural world, but given how woozy things were for the bipeds, there was something bracing in the reminder of the power of biological persistence, of the real world around our often illusory one.

 

As for the humans, the best that could be said is that the world did not end. "Last fall, all I saw was a black hole," said Roger D. Blaugh, a real estate broker in Southampton. "Now I don't think it has as deep as black a color. And given the fact that the 401(k)s that became 201(k)s are now back to 301(k)s, there's got to be a fraction of light in there."

 

In fact, he says, sales are beginning to pick up, partly because so much is on the market. The East End for-sale inventory has risen from under 6,800 in January to 7,555 now. Usually, it's around 4,400, Mr. Blaugh said.

 

And a striking number of those sales are for distinctly non-Hamptons prices.

 

Since the beginning of the year, in the broader area including less pricey precincts west of the Shinnecock Canal, more properties sold for under $600,000 - a price range once thought to be as endangered as the leatherbacks - than in all other price ranges combined. Even in the Hamptons proper, most sales were for under a million.

 

Still, if business was down for almost everyone, and you could easily find motel vacancy signs during prime August weather last week, it is not as if the spending stopped.

 

"There's still lots of money out there, and people don't want to give up things they've had in the past," said John DeMaio, who runs the 37-foot fishing boat Vivienne, where fishing trips go for $600 a half day. "I've had customers hurt by Madoff, but it doesn't mean they ran out of money. And then you have the civil service people who still have plenty of money. It's like czarist Russia."

 

Still, given the economic tides, it felt as if the place to be wasn't the still-pricey precincts of the Hamptons but Montauk, long the happily glitz-deprived corner of the East End. It is the province of old crackerbox seaside motels and the Puff 'n' Putt miniature golf course, shaggy surfers and a smattering of the Manhattan club set who have gravitated out where the T-shirts say something crude about Montauk and advise: "For your comfort and safety, stay in the Hamptons." Even the folks at the chic-crowd hangout, the Surf Lodge, are quick to tout their lack of exclusivity.

 

In truth, the global currents, including warming oceans, are not getting any friendlier for the critters. The economic bad news might not be over. The big blow that's missed Long Island since the hurricane of 1938 is out there somewhere. But for creatures large and small, there are worse things than a quiet summer, and few pleasures greater than an August day, light wind, bright sky: the world, for a moment, more or less what we once knew.