Dan's Papers - October 31, 2008

Last week, there was news once again that there are algae blooms in Mill Pond in Water Mill. It looks disgusting. It kills the fish. You certainly cannot swim in the pond.

Experts say that these algae blooms are most likely caused by the large amounts of landscaping chemicals that flow into the pond on rainy days from the lawns of people living around the pond.

This puts me in mind of a remarkable change that has largely gone unnoticed in this community during the last half century.

While in the rest of the world, in the Amazon, in the logging country of the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere, there are now fewer and fewer trees still standing because of the bulldozers and buzz saws doing their work, exactly the opposite has gone on here.

The Hamptons is in full, magnificent bloom. People come here and say wow, just look at all the flowers and clipped lawns and hedges and gardens. Even on traffic circles where roads come together, there are entire gardens planted. It is a great and dazzling display of the abundance of nature, as brought to the Hamptons by millions, and even billions, of dollars worth of professional landscaping. You see the workmen out with their mowers and trimmers every day.

You should know that the Hamptons was not always this way. Fifty years ago, the astonishment that visitors experienced here was due to the long vistas and rolling dunes and farmland of this community. With our many bays and harbors and ponds and lakes and then with the drama of the surf on the ocean visible from practically everywhere, the Hamptons was a remarkable place in a whole other way.

People who have been here long enough, without exception, have witnessed this transformation. It's been slow in happening in human terms. In world terms, it has happened in an instant.

Look at the paintings done by all the classic artists of the late 19th century in Shinnecock. All show the rolling hills as far as the eye can see off to the horizon. Windmills can be seen in the mists near the sea. Above, low clouds drift by. In the foreground, women in grand summer dresses carry umbrellas or try their hand at painting with brushes and easels. The sun beats down.

Look at the famous photographs taken of Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders in Montauk in 1898. Again, you see all the way to the horizon everywhere. In the foreground, there are thousands of white tents, all in neat little rows to house the 32,000 military men who were here that year in the month of August.

Both those places are today tree-filled woods.

When I first got to the Hamptons 50 years ago as a teenager, my dad drove us along the up-and-down road through Hither Hills overlooking the ocean in Montauk. There were many people living there, but there was very little foliage. As you drove east, you could look down the cliffs to see the ocean pound against the boulders below. Today, there are evergreen trees on both sides of the road, blocking all views. The road still goes up and down. You get the idea. But you do not see the ocean.

Napeague 50 years ago was just rolling sand dunes and as you drove along, you could see the ocean on one side and Napeague Harbor on the other. Today, you can't see anything, again because of the heavy growth of evergreens. Interestingly, Napeague today is almost as devoid of human habitation as it was 50 years ago.

When I first saw all of this happening, I just presumed it was a natural phenomenon. Where the place had a very windswept feel in the early days - much like Nantucket or Scotland - now it was blooming. It could happen. I thought, perhaps, it was just something coming back that had been there before. I thought perhaps that the Hurricane of '38, that world class natural disaster, had roared through and had uprooted almost everything in its path. And what it didn't uproot, it covered in salt from the sea, which caused what survived to die anyway. There had been another hurricane of that magnitude in the 1880s, before we had instruments to measure it.

Here it was 22 years after the 1938 hurricane - in 1960 - and almost all of the landscape was barren, rolling hills. It was not only in Montauk, it was also in Sagaponack and Bridgehampton, in Water Mill and Westhampton. Both the National Golf Links and the Shinnecock Links, golf courses built around 1900, were reminiscent of the golf course links in Scotland they called Downs. The Montauk Golf Club, built in 1928, was called the Montauk Downs for that reason. The rest was potato farms.

In contrast to the rolling hills of this community back then, there were a few sections that were all forested. They abutted the open land. These woods were in northern Water Mill, northern Bridgehampton, Sag Harbor, Northwest and North Haven. In Montauk, the woods we called Hither Woods was up to the north of Hither Hills. I thought that perhaps the fact that they were so thick was how they might have survived a hurricane.

All these woods still stand today. But now they do not have a clear beginning or end. Hither Hills, which was barren 50 years ago, is now as wooded as Hither Woods.

My Hurricane of 1938 theory stayed with me for a long time. But something that did not fit into this theory, and which I had not considered back then, was the estate sections of the Hamptons. They occupied parts of the Hamptons south of the Montauk Highway, down by the ocean. And they were hedge rowed and landscaped. They were about privacy, not views. And it was all a wonderland of flowers and sculptured hedges and magnificent trees brought in from far away places. I never did ask myself why the Estate Section had seemed to survive the layer of salt that had killed everything else. As it was neither rolling land nor forest, it seemed to be outside of the equation.

The reason was, of course, that the hurricane did kill it all. It was just that they had the money to replant everything.

What I now think is that the vast development of professional landscaping that has come in has turned the Hamptons bright green with touches of flowers, and now, because of pollination, has spread to every nook and cranny of the formerly windswept Hamptons. The dunes, downs and moors have succumbed to tremendous amounts of pollen, exotic and otherwise.

The Hamptons, now entirely magnificent, gentle, sheltered and green, looks like Palm Beach. Hedges Lane in Sagaponack, named for the Hedges family that owned the big farm that went for miles all the way down to the beach, is now bordered with hedges. You can't see a thing.

And while we have beautified the Hamptons, we have washed huge amounts of fertilizer and garden chemicals - stuff which goes by the name of LawnGro, for example - down the slopes of the landscape and into the pond.

This has been our choice. It is, perhaps, a strong blow for global warming since the foliage inhales carbon dioxide and exhales oxygen.

But it sure has been bad for the fish. And for those like me, who remember and miss what once was.