Dan's Papers - August 17, 2007 - Waiting For Mammoth Tusks At 3 Mile Harbor

I live on the side of a hill overlooking Three Mile Harbor. It is the same view you get from the restaurant at East Hampton Point. Every evening, the sun sets over the boats and the wind springs up and the lines clang against the aluminum masts of the sailboats in their slips. On nights such as this one, when there are particularly beautiful sunsets sinking over the far shore. I fire off a little salute cannon I have on the deck as the last bit of sun disappears. That will happen later tonight.

Though this whole situation is an absolutely peaceful one (until I fire the cannon) I can't help but worry about whether or not the water is getting higher in the harbor because of the melting of the glaciers at the South and North Poles. I guess it's things like this that come to mind when you just sit outside on a deck and supposedly have nothing to worry about. I tinkle the ice in my drink. And I note that the level of liquid in my drink is rising as the ice melts.

I shade my eyes with my hand and squint at a particular spit of undeveloped land that sticks out into the harbor next door to Gardiner's Marina. It's several hundred yards long and perhaps fifty yards wide and consists of sea grass, a few evergreen trees and a beach along the shoreline. At high tide, this shoreline is gone and much of the beach grass at the edge of the peninsula is underwater.

Is it my imagination, or is the edge of the water around this peninsula at high tide higher on the beach grass than it used to be? I've been living on this spot for 38 years. I haven't been to the North or South Pole, but I've seen on television what has happened there. I think it IS higher here. How could it not be? It doesn't take THAT long for water to go from one part of the globe to another.

The other day, I read that in the land of polar bears, seals and penguins, with the glaciers melting and crumbling, the level of the Earth's seas has risen two inches in the last twenty years.

Well, the glacier water has got to be here in Three Mile Harbor. And with the glacier, there has to be stuff, maybe scary stuff, that had been frozen in the ice and set free and bobbing into my view.

I'm thinking some beastie from millions of years ago. Perhaps part of a beastie from a million years ago. A mammoth tusk, for example. Or a dinosaur skeleton. Or maybe something more recent, such as a can of peas that Admiral Peary's staff buried in the ice back in 1891, when they and their sled dogs went off on their ill-fated expedition to find the North Pole. Maybe a frozen sled dog.

Yes, I am fully aware that most of the regular stuff that has been buried under the ice will get eaten by fish as it comes bobbing down our way from the pole. But cans of peas and mammoth tusks will survive. So too will expedition sleds and dinosaur skulls. Keep in mind that all this will break free from the ice very suddenly. One day, it will be frozen solid where it's been for ten thousand years and then, quite quickly, it will bob free and along with the cold water, come down as that extra two inches.

I'll believe global warming is for real when the rusty remains of a World War II bomber or the remains of a pterodactyl or a heavy caveman club come bobbing down into Three Mile Harbor.

We'll head for the hills.

Another startling bit of news in the papers the other day involved how the great glaciers came down from the North Pole millions of years ago to form Long Island. Now, it seems, there were not only two glaciers and two Ice Ages and two Forks, there were three.

Up until now, it has been believed that Long Island was formed two thousand years ago when the temperature of the Earth plummeted, the polar glacier expanded and an ice age began sending the glacier slowly southward until the temperature warmed enough so that it could move southward no more. Later, when the Earth began to warm, the glacier melted and retreated. And all the crap and the rocks, which had been pushed south by the growing glacier as it rumbled southward down the side of the planet, was thus left behind. And that was what formed Long Island. Later, a second glacier came and left crap in a different place, which attached itself to a place on to eastern Long Island near to the first glacier, to create the two fishtails -- the North and South Fork.

I do know that with real estate on the two forks selling for as much as $5 million an acre today, you don't want to hear that this land was formed from the crap left behind by two different ice ages. But there it is.

But now consider the third fork, from a lesser and little known glacier melt that scientists have only recently discovered. It is more bad news.

Apparently this third glacier came rumbling down about nineteen-thousand years before the first two did. It escaped our notice until now because it was a lot neater when it slid down the side of the planet and when it began to recede, it left behind a much lower and lesser amount of crap, which, today, is just a long line of stuff underwater leading along the sea floor to the west from its root at Speonk to a tip, an underwater tip, that is just off Amagansett.

Someday, I believe, divers are going to go down there and come upon the remains of early human beings who made their homes on this peninsula, which, because of its location, would have upstaged the other two. Our present South Fork would be the middle Fork. And the North Fork would have remained as the North Fork. But here, on this third and oceanfront Fork, there would be caves where these very fortunate oceanfront people lived. There would be smaller ones for the landscapers, pool people and maids, larger ones for the rich. And the larger caves -- I'm imagining them twenty and thirty rooms for a wealthy couple of cave people, with various servants, cooks and security people (with clubs). Later, though, because it was more low-lying, these caves would sink under the water, where we would find them today.

Anybody have an idea what an acre of land on this third Fork would be worth if we could get some landfill out there and raise it back up?

Well, the ice cubes have melted in my drink. And the sun is beginning to set. I think I'll go into the den for a minute and come back out with one of my ten gauge shotgun shells, and the earplugs. It's salute to sunset time.