Dan's Papers - August 29, 2008

I was talking to a friend of mine who owns the Memory Motel in Montauk about how the fireworks went in that town on the Fourth of July. The answer was that they didn't have them.

"Last year, they had the Fourth of July fireworks on a Saturday in the middle of October," he said.

"Why did they do that?"

"You should ask the Montauk Chamber of Commerce that question. Every year we've had them over at Umbrella Beach on the ocean on the Fourth of July, but then last year, after all the tourists had gone home, they fired them all off on October 6, I think it was.

"Scared the hell out of everybody. I was here in the motel. All of a sudden outside, there's all these explosions - I figured some propane tanks had exploded. I ran outside. The guys at the gas station across the way ran outside, and so did the folks who own the diner here. It was dusk. Sure scared the hell out of everybody."

I did talk to the Chamber of Commerce about this, and they said they decided there are really too many people in town to hold the fireworks on the Fourth of July. So they saved them for Montauk's Fall Festival, which comes every fall to try to lure people out from the city even though it's after Labor Day. They're going to do it this year, too. And they told me the date, which I forgot to write down, but it's either Saturday, September 13, or Saturday, September 20.

Saturday night September 13 is better, and I will tell you why. On the 20th, the only thing that happened that was important in American history was the big Paoli Massacre of 1777. The revolution had begun. A contingent of about 200 American soldiers were sleeping in a camp outside of Paoli, Pennsylvania when an entire army of British Redcoats, 5,000 in all, snuck into the camp and bayoneted them all while they slept.

It's not a particularly celebratory event if you ask me. But if it has to be then, I'd pick September 13, because it was that night in 1814 that the British attacked Fort McHenry in Baltimore, bombarding it and trying to get around it so they could set fire to that town. They fought for it all night, and in a hotel in Baltimore not far away, Francis Scott Key watched it all out a window and in the morning when our flag was still there, he wrote the famous poem that later got turned into our National Anthem. That would be a good thing to fire off fireworks about.

On the other hand, there's October 11. I have just learned that Montauk's Fall Festival is not in September at all this year. It is once again being held in October - to be specific, October 11 - and so that is when the fireworks are going off. On that date in 1776, Brigadier General Benedict Arnold fought a naval battle against the British on Lake Champlain. He lost. This was before was convicted of being a traitor. Hooray for Benedict Arnold.

Meanwhile, in East Hampton, they've also set a date for this year's Fourth of July fireworks, which they did not set off on the Fourth of July because they didn't want to scare some endangered birds that were nesting on Main Beach in that town on Independence Day.

So the new date for the Fourth of July fireworks in East Hampton is August 30, which is the date in 1776 that the American Army under George Washington, after being defeated on the plains of Brooklyn the day before, retreated in a fog across the East River to Manhattan to get away without being captured by the Redcoats.

Or, if you don't like that, you could consider 1781, when a French fleet of 24 ships headed up by Admiral Comte de Grasse defeated the British Navy of Admiral Graves in the Chesapeake. Take your pick.

This will be the third year in a row that the Fourth of July fireworks will take place on Saturday of Labor Day weekend. And each time it's because of these damn birds, the same birds each time, which are called piping plovers.

And the future looks grim (for the fireworks, not the piping plovers). As each year passes and the little piping plovers are protected and coddled on Main Beach, there get to be more and more of them. They make their nests in April, lay their eggs in May and raise their young until mid-August when they all fly away. Thus Labor Day becomes the new Fourth of July for East Hampton.

I don't want to give the Village of East Hampton some bad news, but the truth is that although there are endangered piping plovers nesting on the beaches from May to August, there are a whole lot of other endangered creatures out on the beaches in September that would be absolutely terrified by the sound of fireworks over Labor Day weekend. These include the tiger salamander, the offshore left-handed crabs and, in the ocean, the rare spotted Arctic seals that have been rendered homeless by the melting of the polar ice cap during the summer, and are just so happy to be finding land here in the Hamptons upon which they can rest themselves before getting back up in the late fall when the ice cap gets itself together again. And then WHAM! It scares the daylights out of them and they all have heart attacks and die.