Charity Robey

Island Profile: Mike Scheibel, life in the great outdoors

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO | Mike Scheibel has 800 birds on his life list, and binoculars handy at all times.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on October 22, 2015

When Mike Scheibel, Natural Resources Manager at the Mashomack Preserve, speaks of the destruction of a sliver of barrier island beach in Bellport Bay, a place of profound emotional significance to him, he takes the long view.

“It’s the best thing that ever happened,” he said. “It will eventually fill in on its own. It may take years. I’m all in favor of letting that natural process continue.”

Mike was a kid growing up on Long Island in the 1950s when his parents moved the family every summer to a large canvas army tent on a remote beach called Old Inlet. Mike and his brothers fished, crabbed and beach combed while their father commuted to work across the bay in a small boat.

“Sand was in everything,” Mike said. “I don’t remember ever having a sandwich there that didn’t have sand. I don’t know how my mother lived through it.”

Growing up in Brookhaven, Suffolk County was so rural that Mike could trap muskrats across the street from his home, a house built by his father ”with his hands,” Mike said. “He’s the guy who nailed the 2 by 4s.”

Mike continued to go to Old Inlet for five decades with his wife Lynne, their children Sara and Bryce and grandchildren Julia and Marin. In the 1970s he clammed in those waters and knew every inch of the bay bottom. He scattered the ashes of his parents at Old Inlet.

But in 2012, Sandy tore a breach in the barrier island, an event that Mike, a man who had made protecting nature his life’s work, not only accepts, but embraces. “Old Inlet doesn’t exist anymore,” he said.

Mike has been at Mashomack, the 2000-acre Nature Conservancy property that makes up almost a third of Shelter Island, for two decades. Prior to coming to Mashomack, he worked for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) for 20 years, spending time documenting the endangered osprey population on Long Island.

His decades of work monitoring the comeback of these beloved fish hawks resulted in a recently published, coauthored article in “The Journal of Raptor Research.”

When Mike was 13 he first laid eyes on Mashomack, which in those days was a shooting preserve, stocked with pheasant and chukar partridge.

Mike’s science education at Bellport High School was excellent. His biology teacher, Art Cooley, was also an activist, whose efforts helped end the use of DDT in Suffolk County, and who later went on to help found the Environmental Defense Fund. Like Cooley, Mike went to Cornell, where courses in forestry, botany and a brand new discipline known as ecology, deepened his interest in the natural world. He graduated in 1971.

When Mike got to Cornell and realized he needed work, he discovered an arrangement where he could live in the local firehouse in exchange for fighting fires, called the bunker system. The Ithaca firehouse had a pool table, a kitchen and a pole to slide down from the dormitory-style quarters when it was time to respond to an emergency.

“If you were in the building when the alarm came, you went, but if you had one foot outside the building, you had no obligation,” he said. “I kind of got into it.”

He later joined the Ithaca Fire Department as a volunteer and is a life member of the Brookhaven Volunteer Fire Department.

After Cornell, Mike sought a career in natural resources, but for six years after graduating, he worked as a bayman, clamming, which he describes as “a good and bad way to make a living.” The good part was being outdoors on the water every day. But Mike and Lynne had married in 1973, and their daughter Sara was born the next year. “It takes a special kind of person to do that work and raise a family.” He decided he was not special in that way.

In 1977 Mike went to work at the DEC on Long Island as a seasonal wildlife technician. By the mid-1980s he was a senior wildlife biologist in charge of the regional endangered species program. It was during this period that he began to study and document the Long Island osprey population, a bird that was prominent on the endangered species list as a result of heavy use of DDT.

Although DDT was no longer used, the osprey population was still in danger; his first count of active nests showed 76 nesting osprey pairs from New York City to Fishers Island. Mike undertook a count of nesting pairs every year, decreasing the size of the territory he covered as the population increased. By the time of his latest count in 2015 there were 46 nesting pairs on Shelter Island alone.

From 1986 to 1996 Mike was the New York State representative on the Northeast Roseate Tern Recovery team, one of a group of researchers, including Ian Nisbet, a leading authority on roseate terns, charged with monitoring a federal plan to restore the dwindling population of a rare and lovely shorebird that in our area nests only on Gull Island.

In 1980 the Nature Conservancy bought the Mashomack property and three years later Director Mike Laspia asked Mike to be on the Board of Trustees. He served until 1994 when he took a job with the Nature Conservancy and a year later came to work at Mashomack.

When Mike weighed the decision to leave the DEC to work at Mashomack he knew he would take on a long commute from Brookhaven to work for a nonprofit that did not pay particularly well compared to his permanent state job. He had two college-age children. “I had a long heart-to-heart conversation with my wife,” said Mike, “Regardless, I took the job.”

“This place has a magical allure to it, hard to define, but it’s certainly there,” Mike said. “It’s really a dream job, a fantastic place to work.”

His marriage did not survive the transition, but eight years after their divorce, Mike and Lynne remarried.

“After years we both realized how much our family and our relationship really did mean to us,” Mike said. “I’ve married that woman twice now, on the same day, August 19, 1973 and 2006.”

In charge of all living things at Mashomack, Mike said the issue that has dominated the agenda over the years is the overpopulation of white-tailed deer, which is wiping out hardwood tree regeneration and causing tick-borne diseases. He points out that the deer didn’t start it.

“If we were willing to get rid of all the houses, the deer population would go back to a respectable number,” he said. “I’m not blaming the deer, I’m blaming the people.”

Mike established the Deer & Tick Committee over 10 years ago. He’s currently the chairman and sees the development of a solution to deer overpopulation as one of his primary goals.

Mike’s affection for birds is life long, but in recent years it’s grown into a passion and even a personal competition. If he’s outdoors, binoculars hang around his neck, ready to deploy. He quotes the well-known American ornithologist David Sibley to describe the intensity of his interest, “‘I don’t go birding, I am birding.’”

Mike has identified 800 bird species so far and is hopeful to have 1,000 on his life list. “My goal is to get to 5,000 bird species in my lifetime,” he said with a smile, “but I just picked that number out of the air.”

Katherine Garrison: North toward home

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Katherine Garrison at home on Shelter Island.

 

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on October 8, 2015

Katherine Garrison considers herself a southerner, even though many of the most important milestones of her life have taken place far north of the Mason-Dixon line.

This mother of five has seen all of her kids either already graduated from the Shelter Island School, or will be in short order. She’s been on the school board and now works at the Shelter Island Library.

But Katherine was born in Dothan, Alabama, about 12 miles from the Florida line, was raised and schooled in the South, and lived there happily until she moved to Shelter Island 11 years ago with her husband, Alan, and their children.

The move wasn’t her idea. In fact, her initial response to Alan’s suggestion that they uproot their young family and relocate to an island between the North and South forks of Long Island, accessible by boat for only 18 out of 24 hours a day, was, “You are freaking ridiculous. We are not moving.”

But Alan was disenchanted with his job and a friend from college, Terry Harwood, owner of Vine Street Café, told him what a great place the Island is to raise a family.

Around this time, Alan related a strange dream to Katherine, a dream in which he was an assistant tetherball coach. For years he had been working for Northwestern Mutual, an insurance company, and it was starting to get old. He wondered if the dream meant anything. ”Who even has an assistant tetherball coach?” Katherine said. “It means you think you are a big, old loser.”

“He made the decision,” Katherine added. “He knew. He saw the big picture.”

In the end, Katherine stayed behind with the kids for a few months before joining Alan, who went ahead to make sure it was right.

Alan worked at Vine Street for a couple of years before becoming the manager of the Shelter Island Yacht Club, where he’s worked for the last nine years.

Katherine’s own family situation was unusual for a child of the 1970s growing up in the Deep South.

She was an only child of divorced parents. “Nobody else’s parents were divorced,” she said, “so it was really awkward and weird.”

Katherine lost touch with her father for years, only reconnecting when she became a mother. Since then he has been a part of her life.

Her confusing childhood has informed her own style of motherhood. “I wanted to be the kind of mother, my mother couldn’t be,” she said. “I really wanted that for my children.”

After starting at Huntingdon College, (Harper Lee is an alumna) and briefly attending Birmingham–Southern College, Katherine graduated from the University of Tennessee. In her final year, she took a required English class that was, in retrospect, a life-changer.

The students were asked to write a paper describing their aspirations for the future, but when it came time for Katherine to discuss it with the professor, he told her that her plan to be a flight attendant and live in France was ridiculous. After hysterics and a phone call by the teacher to Katherine’s mother, she decided he was right.

“Dreams are wonderful, but they must be tempered with a dose of reality,” she said. “If you want something you have to be very committed.”

It was in the same English class that Katherine met Alan, and they married in June of 1989.

She came to realize that a career and graduate school were not for her. “I just wanted to be a mother,” she said. “So I was very lucky that my husband encouraged me to want to be a mom.”

Their first child, Kirby, graduated from Stony Brook University and recently started his own business, a craft brewery in Dayton, Tennessee. Drew and Olivia were both valedictorians at Shelter Island High School and are now in college; Drew is a sophomore at the University of Buffalo, and Olivia a freshman at Iowa State University. Will is a junior and Lily is a freshman at Shelter Island High School.

When Kirby was born, Katherine had no idea what to expect, “I had no siblings” she said, “and I didn’t babysit.” She described the experience with wonder. “We went to Lamaze, we giggled, we laughed.

And then I was in labor, and Alan got home and we were speeding through the streets of Chattanooga. I was 21-years-old-crazy”

For Katherine, part of being the best-possible mother was home-schooling. For the 14 years before the family moved to Shelter Island she was head teacher of her own school, with a five-to-one student/teacher ratio. “I didn’t want them to come home and have me ask, ‘What did you do today?’” she said.

Kirby went to school in Chattanooga through second grade before she decided to make the change. “I was clearing out his desk and the teacher said to me, ‘You are making a big mistake,’” she said. “That was her opinion, but I wanted to be part of his education.”

The kitchen of the Garrison home became a schoolroom, with a bench in the corner stuffed with textbooks and other materials. Katherine found that her own education deepened as she learned more about the subjects she was teaching to her children. She came to appreciate the different learning styles of each of her children through the teaching experience. “I could not have learned that if I hadn’t been in that situation,” she said. “I had no clue.”

Concerned that it would send the wrong message in their new community when the family moved to Shelter Island, Alan told Katherine the time had come to stop home-schooling, which made the transition that much harder for her.

“It was just like being dropped on another planet,” she said. “We were not just moving from the South and from our family, but we were putting the children in school. Everything known and comfortable had been shaken and dumped out.”

In the years since the family was uprooted, Katherine has seen her children put down new, strong roots and thrive, embracing school sports, the school’s drama program and achieving academically. Kirby’s interest in pursuing a culinary business is a direct result of the expansion of his palate and interest in new foods and tastes from the move North over a decade ago.

“Shelter Island is like a tapestry,” Katherine said. “Where we came from there wasn’t much diversity.

Here there is a lot of diversity. It’s a remarkable, special place.”

With Kirby, Drew and Olivia launched into the world and Will and Lily in high school, Katherine sees that she’s running out of children. However, she has acquired three Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, Ty, BeeDoodles and Pippa.

“I told my husband for every child we lose I need another dog,” she said.

“It’s a blessing every day,” Katherine noted. “I have five healthy children and an embarrassment of riches.”

She’s proud of her grown-up children making their way in the world, adjusting to new lives outside Shelter Island. Of all her kids, she said, Kirby still remembers the most about being Southern.

“I don’t want them to lose that piece of themselves.”

Remembering Harbor Inn Part 2

COURTESY PHOTO |Stu Nicoll, Billy Banks and Larry Lechmanski. 

 

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on October 8, 2015

 

Shortly after the writers Nik Cohn and Michaela Muntean bought Harbor Inn from Jack and Beverly Cahill in 1985, they began renovations that were part home improvement and part archeology.

“Like a museum of the history of glue,” Ms. Muntean said about layers of linoleum stuck together with a white adhesive, used during the Depression and made with cow’s milk. The insulation was made of horsehair and newspapers. “The place had great vibes,” she said. “If it was full of ghosts, it was ghosts of a really good time.”

Harbor Inn stood in a quiet part of a remote Island. As a location for a business, it defied the real estate maxim of “location, location, location” every time the crowd got to be four-deep at the bar. Charlie Beckwith, who tended that bar for 12 years, said, “It was off the beaten track. You had to know it was there.”

Ms. Muntean noticed it, too. “It wasn’t in the Heights, which made it distinctive,” she said. “An odd and out-of-the-way place.”

People made their way to Harbor Inn in many conveyances. A pair of regulars used to land their airplane at Klenawicus Airstrip, taxi down to the corner of Cartwright and Burns, and walk across the street to the bar. More than one patron remembers Jim Burke (aka “Stony Burke) of Cartwright Road riding his lawnmower when he was no longer able to drive.

Boaters with moorings at Skip Tuttle’s fish station near South Ferry made it there, and sailors in Coecles Harbor left their dinghies at the end of Burns Road and walked up.

Harbor Inn was a place much loved by “the men who worked on the water,” said Town Councilman Ed Brown, who bent the elbow there more than a few times. He recalled listening to the tales the baymen would weave. The last day of any season was a good tme to be at the bar, he remebered, when the baymen would give predictions of what the new season would bring.

For years, it was the magnetic center of Island life, drawing people through its back door as if a force field emanated from the pool table. “For two years after we moved in, people walked in looking for the bar,” Ms. Muntean said. “Boat people would walk up from Coecles Harbor. They hadn’t heard.”

Piano, Washtub and Guitar
Music was an important part of the experience at Harbor Inn during the years Jack and Beverly Cahill owned the place. The jukebox was stocked with country and rock and roll, and a player piano stood by. On weekends musicians were sometimes booked; other times it was completely impromptu.

A man known only as Gus, from Coecles Harbor Marina, came in to socialize and often ended up playing guitar. Islander Fred Ogar played a washtub bass, and others joined in with kazoos.

Jack often hired a local guy, Paul Nichols, (aka “Native Dancer”) to play guitar and sing, occasionally accompanied by a drummer. Paul played rock and roll and “country music” on Saturday nights in the late 1960s.

According to Charlie even the piano got some use. “An old guy would come in,” he said, “with a group of friends and play the piano in the late 1970s.”

The Island After-Party
From the first “Open House” shortly after he began operating, to the final New Year’s Eve farewell party, Jack made Harbor Inn the site of the best parties on the Island.

His St. Patrick’s Day events were remarkable. A green arch announced, “Erin go Bragh” across a doorway. Wearing a vest festooned with shamrocks and a large green top hat, Jack presided over the merriment. A slab of plywood and a plastic tablecloth on the pool table transformed it into a buffet table featuring corned beef and cabbage.

There were always festivities at Christmas. Councilman Peter Reich said, “I remember trimming the Christmas tree. And the fact everyone’s head who was sitting at the bar automatically turned when the door opened to see who was arriving.”

Ed Brown remembered how Jack and Beverly would put hay bales on a truck and ride around the Island with a crowd, singing carols at Christmas for the home-bound.

They always gave back, in large ways and small, to their community, Ed said. When a fire over the course of one night reduced a house to ashes, “Jack and Bev led the charge,” he said,“to get people to chip in” and get the family who had been burned out back on their feet.

After any major Island event, whether joyous or somber, Harbor Inn was the place people gathered. A gathering of mourners, still in their Sunday best out of respect for the departed, often followed wakes and funerals.

Writer and Reporter columnist Joanne Sherman took her kids to Harbor Inn for hot dogs after the Independence Day fireworks in the early 1980s. “Jack was behind the bar,” she said. “He cocked his head back toward the kitchen and told us to go cook them ourselves. While we were in the back, the bar filled with people and for a nearly an hour Jack called back hot dog, hamburger and French fry orders and we filled them.”

Skip Tuttle said at the end of the Shelter Island Fire Department Chicken Barbecue one year, the crowd at Harbor Inn was thick, with such a line out the door for the bathroom, that Jack yelled, “My cesspool is going to overflow!”

The Island’s Den
On ordinary days, Harbor Inn was the Island’s den — a wood-paneled room outfitted with a dart board and tabletop shuffleboard for relaxing with friends and relatives. Carpenters, painters, fire and rescue workers came in after work and drank Rheingold or Schaefer. Once in a while someone ordered a Screwdriver.

Jack kept a big jar of pickled pigs feet and another of pickled eggs on hand. When a farmer brought in an enormous cauliflower, he made a dip and served it. “It was a great place of camaraderie,” said town Building Inspector Bill Banks. “Sitting around talking about the day’s events. People had their disagreements, but they worked them out, usually.”

On weekends the place was often packed. Kids shot pool while their parents were at the bar in the next room. “I heard some of the funniest things I would ever hear in my life at that place,” said Councilman Paul Shepherd. “It was where relationships began and ended, sometimes, but also where they were nurtured.”

The 30 years that Mr. Cohn and Ms. Muntean spent at 45 Burns Road proved to be creative and productive ones. Ms. Muntean wrote award-winning children’s books, including “Stay” and “Do Not Open This Book,” and Mr. Cohn conceived and wrote most of five books, including the forthcoming, “Dirty Pictures.”

The story of Harbor Inn is more than the history of a building or a property. The story belongs to the people who laughed, socialized, drank and found inspiration and camaraderie there.

“It was like something from a fairy tale,” Bill Banks said. “I wouldn’t wish time away, but I’m glad I am old enough to have experienced it.”

Safe harbor through decades of Shelter Island history

COURTESY PHOTO A warm and welcoming harbor, no matter the weather.

 

 

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on October 1, 2105, the first of a two-part report

 

The teaser in the Reporter classified ads early last month was: “Much more than a yard sale!” And the address, 45 Burns Road, should have been the tip off.

For three decades, ending in 1985, 45 Burns Road was Harbor Inn. Owned by Jack and Beverly Cahill for much of that time, the tavern remains embedded in the collective memory of Shelter Islanders over the age of 40. If you lived here prior to 1985, you not only remember Harbor Inn, you probably have a story or two to tell about it.

In the fall of 1984, Nik Cohn, a London-based author of the classic “Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock” and the magazine article that inspired the movie, “Saturday Night Fever,” and Michaela Muntean, an author of children’s books, were visiting Shelter Island looking for a home. Mr. Cohn had been living an edgy New York life, and as much as the couple wanted a comfortable place to live, they wanted somewhere quiet to work.

They found their way to Harbor Inn. Sitting at the smooth, curving mahogany bar, they got to talking to owner Jack Cahill and mentioned they were looking to settle down on the Island.

“Why don’t you buy this place?” Jack said.

The next day the couple came by to take a look in the daylight. They found a farmhouse built at the turn of the 20th century and converted to an inn around 1947. Two cottages, one built in the 1950s and one rolled onto the property from across the street a few years later, stood on land at the corner of Cartwright and Burns, a scallop-shell throw from Coecles Harbor, cater-corner from the grassy strip of Klenawicus Airfield.

Joseph and Josephine Margiotta bought the house in 1947 and ran it as a restaurant, calling it Harbor Inn. In 1961, Eddie and Vicki Pertile began to manage the restaurant, changed the name to Coecles Harbor Inn and offered lodging. The Cahills bought it in 1965 and changed the name back to Harbor Inn.

And what an inn it was. Charlie Beckwith, who tended bar there for 12 years, called it “the best neighborhood tavern in the history of Shelter Island.”

By January of 1985, Jack had agreed to sell the place to Mr. Cohn and Ms. Muntean with the stipulation that he could host one more party for old times’ sake. New Year’s Eve was the last hurrah and Harbor Inn was no more.

‘The perfect guy to have it’
Jack originally came from off-Island but had friends here and married a local girl, Beverly Price. The couple settled in New Jersey and had two children, Susan and Scott. Several generations of Beverly’s family lived on Shelter Island in those days and the couple visited frequently.

“Jack liked it out here,” said Beverly. “He was a policeman in New Jersey, it was the 60s, and there were a lot of problems at that time.”

In 1965, the Cahills decided to buy Coecles Harbor Inn and move their young family to Shelter Island. The family quarters were on the second floor with the kitchen downstairs behind the bar. Beverly worked as a nurse three nights a week while

Jack was bartending and the kids were upstairs. “So it worked out,” she said.

Although Jack was running a drinking establishment, he quickly made a reputation for himself as a family man, closing the bar early on Christmas Eve and staying closed on other holidays. People should be home with their families, he believed, and that included his staff and himself.

By all accounts, Jack created an atmosphere at Harbor Inn that was friendly and surprisingly wholesome.

Town Councilman Paul Shepherd remembered that “Jack Cahill ran a good, clean establishment, with no small effort on his part to keep the language fit for mixed company.” He was known to shoo stragglers at closing time, with the time-honored bartender’s farewell: “I don’t care if you don’t go home, but you can’t stay here.”

The best qualities of Harbor Inn sprang from the personality of the owner. Town Building Inspector Bill Banks said Jack, by his own admission, wasn’t a particularly gifted storyteller, and his joke delivery wasn’t the best. Charlie said Jack “got up to tell jokes on St. Patrick’s Day, but it was loud so you couldn’t really hear them.”

What came through loud and clear was his heart. “My husband was Irish,” said Beverly. “I would say he was a draw.”

Jack Cahill with microphone and Gus on guitar.

Picking and choosing bartenders

Charlie was barely of legal drinking age — 18 at the time — when Jack started running Harbor Inn. He worked there for more than a decade. “Jack Cahill would pick and choose the staff,” he said. “He wanted us to be friendly, trustworthy and to banter with the customers.”

Known for his preemptive bartending, Charlie could keep one eye on the parking lot so by the time a regular customer had stepped through the door their beverage of choice was waiting on the bar.

Chrissy Gross, who tended bar on weekends at Harbor Inn, is a central part of many people’s memories of the place. Then as now, she was warm, funny, plain talking and discreet. What happened at Harbor Inn, as far as she’s concerned, will stay at Harbor Inn. She agreed to be quoted on one subject: the Cahills.

“I loved them to pieces,” she said. ”They were great people to work for and it was a great establishment.”

Beverly said the bar was busy year-round, but Jack still took time off for family vacations, leaving the business in the hands of the regular bartenders.

Anders Langendal described himself as “an immigrant from Sweden” in 1965 when he attended an open house at Harbor Inn. He ended up living in one of the cottages for $7 a week.

“Drafty,” he said. “I was there for six or seven years, but had to move out in the summers so Jack could rent it out.”

Anders, known as “Andy the Swede,” tended bar and undertook building and woodwork improvements, including recovering the slate pool table — twice. Anders later established a respected wooden boat-building business in Greenport, but in those days his artistic skills were directed to a rebuild of the beautiful mahogany bar.

Jack asked Anders to build an extension of the bar to keep customers from blocking the path to the kitchen. Anders arrived a little before closing time one night “with a handsaw and cut the end off the bar,” he said. “Jack gave me quite a look when I walked in with that big saw.”

Anders then matched it up with a piece of Honduran mahogany he had found and made a handrail for the new extension.

The Harbor Inn 'Over the Hill Gang' played the 'Dory Degenerates,' September1977. Left to right: Jack Cahill,Ben Jones, Len Bliss,Dick Edwards, and George Walsh.

The “Over the Hill” Gang
Before sports bars were invented, there was one TV in Harbor Inn. It got two channels. In the fall, a Giants game was on every Sunday afternoon and the Yankees, Mets and Red Sox dominated the summer. Red Sox legend, Carl Yastrzemski grew up in Bridgehampton and more than one patron of Harbor Inn played against him when Bridgehampton met Shelter Island in high school baseball and had stories to tell around the bar about Yaz back when.

The Lions Club supported the local Little League team, but when Jack heard the team needed more support, he put together a baseball team dubbed, the “Over the Hill Gang.” He pitted them against a team organized by the Dory. Starting in the 1970s, on the third weekend in September, the annual Dory vs. Harbor Inn baseball game raised money for the Little League. The “Over the Hill Gang” was coached by Charlie Beckwith and the Dory team by Ben Jones.

Bob Dunne, editor of the Reporter in those days, once reported on the game from an outhouse dragged to the field to serve as a press box. Bob was famous for taking pictures with no film in the camera, but in 1977, the Reporter managed to produce a photo montage of the event anyway. Another year, Sherman Payne was said to have pitched a giant grapefruit and Frank Klenawicus played catcher in a red dress and wig, with a bushel-basket for a glove.

Hundreds of spectators showed up every year, passing the hat to support the Little League.

This  year the “Over the Hill Gang” softball game and benefit, a descendant of the Harbor Inn vs. Dory matches, will be played on Sunday, October 4. Rain date: Sunday, October 11.

Next week, Harbor Inn is sold, along with the ghosts of the Island landmark.

You'll Never Regret a Swim in Shelter Island Waters

Shelter Island beaches range from rocky to coarse sand with pebbles. Unless you can arrange to parachute in, plan to wear water shoes. (Credit: Charity Robey)

The thrill-seeking pleasures of boogie boarding and wave-riding generally aren’t associated with Shelter Island, a place where the unofficial motto is “Live Slow.” But for recreational swimmers, the island’s bay beaches, protected from direct wave action, couldn’t be better.

A character in one of Mary Gordon’s stories said you never regret the birth of a child, or a swim in the ocean. The beaches and landings described here offer a rich array of possibilities — beautiful stretches of water where a strong swimmer can exercise without lifeguards, lane ropes, or regrets.

Open-water swimming on Shelter Island is not for the timid. Sometimes the water is cold and swimmers have to be alert for warnings about unsafe conditions and water quality. Jellyfish are common, especially in late summer, and it’s always a good idea to swim with a buddy.

Parking a car at most Shelter Island beaches — namely Crescent, Wades, Hay, Shell, and Fresh Pond — requires a town parking permit or visitor parking permit from Memorial Day through Labor Day. Getting one of these requires a trip to the town clerk’s office during business hours (Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Saturdays, mid-June through August, from 9 a.m. to noon.) Up to 10 day permits are available daily for Wades and Shell beaches for $20 each.

Happauge native, Jessica Sheehan breaststrokes to shore after swimming the length of Crescent Beach.

Sunset, Crescent, or Louis’ Beach

When people refer to Sunset, Crescent, or Louis’ Beach, they are talking about the same place, the best-known stretch of sand on the island. A half-mile long, it spreads out like Ipanema along Rocky Shore Road with lifeguards, bathrooms and places to buy food and drink. What you call it says more about you than the beach. If you are old enough to have met the legendary Jack Wroble, who taught at least three generations of island children to swim here, you call it Louis’ Beach. Younger islanders call it Crescent.

On a Sunday in July, Jessica Sheehan was slicing through the clear water with such vitality it appeared possible that she had just swum in from near her home in Hauppauge, although she said her companion, watching her from shore, was an even better swimmer. She proclaimed the beach to be “beautiful!” but also planned to check out Hay Beach during her visit.

Hay Beach

Hay Beach, which many consider the most beautiful beach on Shelter Island, lies at the end of Menhaden Lane, a spot that for much of the island’s history was an industrial fish-processing area. Where the bracing smell of small, oily fish cooking once dominated there is now the sweet tang of sea air.

On a day in late July, Shelter Island swimmer Carol Tiernan emerged from the gentle tide of Hay Beach wearing a pretty multicolored rash guard and “Fivefingers” water shoes to protect her from the pebbly bottom. She noted that in 2015, like last year, local waters have been remarkably free of jellyfish, the nemesis of ocean swimmers. Ms. Tiernan said she prefers to swim parallel to the beach, and not too far out, to avoid the worst predations of the jellies.

“Louis’ Beach is the warmest, Hay Beach is the coldest,” said Ms. Tiernan, bearing out measurements made with a digital meat thermometer showing that on a day when the water at Hay Beach was 76 degrees, it was 78 degrees at Louis’.

Ms. Tiernan pointed out that parking at Hay Beach is not easy, especially since several parking spots were recently eliminated.

The Hiberry Lane Town Landing

About a mile north of Hay Beach, at the end of Hiberry Lane, is a town landing with a split rail fence framing a small tidal creek that feeds a marshy area that was once the hay field that gave Hay Beach its name. You can tell by the direction of the stream whether the tide is going in or out, good information to have in order to swim with the current. Swim left and you’re swimming toward Greenport Harbor, swim right and you’re swimming toward Orient Harbor, Gardiners Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean. As lovely as the beach is, it’s usually not busy. The water was 78 degrees on a recent July day. There was some seaweed, no jellyfish and a half-sandy, half-pebbly bottom.

Wades Beach

Wades Beach is located on a bend at 110 South Midway Road, on the far side of one of the island’s largest parking lots. An official town beach, it has two uncommon and useful features: a bathroom and a lifeguard. A large roped-off area of water with a sandy bottom turns the bay into a giant saltwater pool, a great place for swimmers to get some open-water experience. The water there earlier this summer was 79 degrees.

Shell Beach

At the end of Oak Tree Lane in Silver Beach, a spectacular spit of sand extends for almost a mile into Shelter Island Sound. It’s called Shell Beach but is actually two very different beaches in the same place. To the north is West Neck Harbor, where the water is calm and the boats and sunbathers are plentiful. The south side is more exposed and the water is a little rougher, but the swimming is great. The water temperature was 79 degrees earlier this summer and the bottom was very pebbly. Shell Beach is a town landing and not an official “bathing beach,” meaning it has no facilities.

Be sure to stay clear of whatever the piping plovers drop near their beachfront nesting areas — for their sake and yours.

The waters of Fresh Pond are the warmest on the Island, and the bottom is soft and sandy.

Fresh Pond

Fresh Pond is a small, natural freshwater lake in the center of the island that can be accessed by a town landing at the end of Fresh Pond Road. Lovely to look at, its history as a swimming hole is as old as the local debate about whether the water is clean. When the jellyfish are plentiful in the bays, Fresh Pond is a welcome jellyfish-free zone. And at 85 degrees in late July, it was the warmest water by far of any other Shelter Island swimming spot. The sandy bottom means you can wade right in without shoes.

This story originally appeared in the 2015 edition of northforker Wellness

Island Profile: Christine Matthäi | A ‘travel bird’ wings home

Christine Matthäi with two of her works on display at the Alex Ferrone Gallery in Cutchogue.CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO

 

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on September 17, 2015

To the busy and the practical, Shelter Island ferries are utilitarian crafts of steel. Artist and Shelter Island resident Christine Matthäi sees the ferry as her passage to a refuge, a place where she can do work that expresses her hard-won calmness and understanding.

“When you come rushed and you want to go on the ferry, sometimes there is no ferry. You have to sit there, take a deep breath, and wait for the cradle to come,” she said. “And then it cradles you back home.”

Christine grew up in a small town in communist East Germany during the Cold War. Her mother died when she was eight, leaving her father to raise her and her two sisters in an oppressive climate. Since they were not members of the Communist Party, Christine’s family was denied educational and professional privileges available to party members.

She remembers from a young age feeling uncomfortable with the secrecy and ever-present informants. “It started early when our teachers asked us to report on what our parents would talk about. Even as a young girl, I thought, ‘My God there’s something wrong.’”

At 17 she went to Berlin to study at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and although a career in fashion was not her choice, in hindsight she saw it as “a connecting point” to her unimagined future as an artist.

But first, she had to get out from behind the Iron Curtain. A relative in West Germany provided the money to pay for passage, money that had to be paid back. “There were certain organizations that made money getting people across,” Christine said. “There are so many stories and mine is just one of them.”

Christine’s escape in the mid- 1970s resulted in retaliations against her family; her father lost his job, and her sisters’ education was affected. “But it was my life, and I would do it again,” she said. After she got to the West, she said she helped 12 people get out of East Germany. “I have my own little Schindler’s List,” she said.

Christine worked hard to pay her debt and then left Germany to work in Greece for a Berlin fashion company. There she befriended a photographer on assignment and accepted his invitation to travel to New York City in 1982.

She stayed in New York and became part of the art scene, taking courses and working. She met an artist, they fell in love, married and moved to a loft in Tribeca. Christine worked as a foreign correspondent and in 1992, the couple bought a house on Shelter Island as a second home. In 2004, they separated.

For two years, including winters, Christine lived on Shelter Island by herself. “It was really a milestone in my life,” she said. “I threw myself into what I really wanted to do.” Lonely and isolated, “I also created some good work that was sold to Ralph Lauren by a gallery.”

She began to travel, finding inspiration in Antigua, the Bahamas, Italy and Dubai. She even returned to East Germany after the Wall came down: “The only healing thing I could do.”

Although she had helped her little sister escape East Germany, that sister died. Christine still goes to Germany every year to see her surviving sister. “She stayed the whole time,” Christine said. “She’s like an oak.”

“We are the sum of our experiences,” she said. “It all contributes to where we arrive.”

The crises of Christine’s life are expressed in her work: losing her mother as a child, the death of her younger sister and the end of her marriage. “I went through a real turbulent time for quite a while. It took me a long time to find my calmness again.”

Christine’s first solo show was in Munich in 2010, followed by two shows in Italy in 2011 and one in Dubai in 2012. “It went really rapidly,” she said. “If you really follow your bliss, things happen.”
Christine’s art is abstract and her process begins with photography.

She employs time-lapse, long exposure and a computer to manipulate and add layers of complexity and depth, resulting in images that don’t reproduce a scene, but rather suggest it. One of her pieces, currently on exhibit at the Alex Ferrone Gallery in Cutchogue, is called “Moonrise,” and although it evokes the light and feeling of a rising moon, no moon is depicted. “My work is not just what you see, but also what you feel,” she said.

In a series of images created last year, Christine combined body shapes with layers of water. She described these images as a metaphor for an inner sea. “Incorporating forms in my work contributed to a surge in my own sensuality,” she said. “Which I thought was not there for quite a while.”

Christine is working on a new series, influenced by literature, including poetry by Keats and Baudelaire. She continues to travel the world, and when the cold sets in, she will leave, to return in spring.

“I’m a travel bird but always in the back of my mind is little Shelter Island,” she said. “It’s the only place in the world where I feel grounded, the most beautiful place on earth, the good news.”

Works from Christine Matthäi’s Light and Sea Series is part of the show entitled, “Calm Before the Storm” at the Alex Ferrone Gallery in Cutchogue, through September 27.

The Greatest Weekend Guests Ever

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on September 24, 2015

On Tuesday after Labor Day a refreshing breeze swept across Shelter Island. It puffed in through the windows, lofting my living room curtains like the exhalation of 2500 tired and grateful people at the end of a long, profitable ordeal. Summer was over, school was in session, and no one was waitlisted for a weekend room in my house.

 My husband and I rarely have overnight guests who are not family because over the years we have scared off most of our friends. For our first twenty-five years on Shelter Island, we spent weekends and holidays in a two-bedroom house with one tiny bathroom, the perfect home for the two of us, even after two little sons joined us. In those days, even a pair of guests made the hallway outside our bathroom look like the concourse at Citifield between innings, with people waiting for a crack at the facilities.

 As I reflect on the friends we have hosted over the years, there are some standouts. I’m not thinking of the folks who brought a gift, or wrote a note, although they were very thoughtful. I’m thinking of a handful of extraordinary human beings whose performance in the role of weekend guest in some cases rose to the level of heroism.

 The Christmas Angels

It was the Christmas of ’89. Our first child, Sam was six months old, and we didn’t want to travel, so my sister and her new husband came from Virginia to celebrate Christmas with us on Shelter Island. My husband, baby, and I went to fetch them from the East Hampton airport and headed back for Shelter Island. We got as far as South Ferry.

 With our car stopped in the ferry line, I opened a passenger-side door, stuck out my head, and threw up in the bushes. This was the opening salvo of a bout of flu that left me in bed for the entire duration of their visit.

 I was unable to prepare the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding I had planned for the holiday dinner that year; I couldn’t even get to the table–or for that matter, take care of my baby. My sister and her husband stepped up, somehow cooking a complete Christmas dinner while my husband ensured that Sam and I were fed, changed, and hydrated.

 

Mr. Fix-It

In the 90s, we had a visit from our tall, handsome friend from the city with an irresistible Southern accent and lots of charm. He arrived for the weekend with his girlfriend and their Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. Why did I overlook this obvious violation of the code of weekend guests? (It’s Section 3.1 of the Code, “No pet is small enough or quiet enough to be permitted.) Because unlike me, or my husband, this friend knew how to fix things.

 For example, the first time he visited, he noticed as we stepped through the door to the deck that the screen was sagging and decrepit. In fact, it was a kind of Ellis Island for insect life, briefly detaining bugs, screening out the weak, and allowing only the fittest to enter the house. By the end of the weekend this delightful, (and handy) houseguest had repaired the screen door.

 He came out several times after that, and always found something to improve (straighten the garage doors, stop a leaking faucet) before going home. This record of Guest Excellence continued until it was overshadowed by a terrible event. The Cavalier King Charles Spaniel dug a hole in the sofa cushion so deep that the stuffing popped out.

 

At Bat

We were proud to call a nature-loving, Volvo-driving couple from Wisconsin our friends. These responsible citizens of Mother Earth came to the house a few days ahead of us with their toddler, to do some hiking. When we joined them on Friday night, we learned that on the first morning in our house they had spotted a large brown bat hanging in a bedroom window.

 With their child sleeping in the next room, and the prospect of a possibly rabid animal at large in the house, they decided to go after the hapless bat with a broom. After some flapping and diving, they were able to remove the creature humanely, saving us the trouble, and saving the life of an important pollinator.

 

Silence is Golden

Often, having weekend guests in the summer means nonstop activity from the first sounds of life in the morning, to the moment they say goodnight. This past summer we invited a vivacious couple in their early 30s for the weekend and were prepared for happenings. On Saturday, as soon as the lunch dishes were cleared away, these two went upstairs “to rest” and reappeared three hours later looking very bright-eyed. I have no idea what they were doing up there but I can say that it was silent, and consensual. I was grateful to have some downtime of my own.

 No bottle of wine or chocolate truffle could rival the gift of an afternoon nap on a summer weekend. To our Greatest-Ever Weekend Guests, Thank-you.

Shelter Island profile: Jonathan Russo, a life afloat | Shelter Island Reporter

 

Jonathan Russo at ‘Sleeping Foxes,’ the name of his and his wife Deborah Grayson’s home in the Heights. CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on September 10, 2015

In Genesis when new things were created, they got named. Jonathan Russo, advertising executive, talent developer, entrepreneur, sailor and long-time Shelter Island resident is really good at naming things.

For example, at the Shingle-style home in Shelter Island Heights he shares with his wife Deborah Grayson, Jonathan recounted, “I woke up one morning in January, and saw two sleeping foxes in the snow, spooning together. After that we named the house “Sleeping Foxes.”

Born in Brooklyn to Jack and Miriam Russo, Jonathan grew up in Roslyn with his brother, Seth, and sister, Emily. In 1957, his father brought five-year-old Jonathan to Shelter Island for a boys’ weekend at the Chequit that included a motorboat outing in Dering Harbor. It would take Jonathan a couple of decades to return, but when he did, it was boating that lured him.

In his 30s, with little sailing experience, Jonathan decided, “sailing would be my passion in life.” He bought a boat and christened it Wu wei for the Taoist principle that translates, “Go with the wind and go with the flow.” He is now on his fourth boat, Sachem.

Jonathan graduated from Roslyn High School, but just barely. From the age of six, he was plagued with what he termed “fairly severe learning disabilities,” including attention deficit disorder, for which he took medication. Numbers were not his forte, but words and reading books were his retreat.

While many of his high school friends went off to Ivy League schools, Jonathan enrolled at Suffolk University in Boston, driving a cab at night to help support himself. He also learned out of necessity to cook and feed himself, since his college had no dorms or dining hall, and credits this experience with initiating what would be a life-long fascination with meal preparation, wine and farmers markets.

“In 1969, the markets in Boston were frequented by Portuguese and Italian people, “who would not eat crappy processed food,” Jonathan said. “It was for immigrants, but I was down there every week buying food for me and my friends.”

After graduating in 1972, Jonathan came back to New York. “The call of business was very powerful,” he said. “My father was a businessman.”

From 1973 to 1978 Jonathan was in the thick of the New York advertising world just past the height of its power and licentiousness, but close enough for the 23-year-old to experience the three-martini lunch more than once. An account executive at Foote Cone and Belding, he moved to legendary BBDO and finally to the giant InterPublic firm. “I recognize Mad Men very closely,” he said.

Itching to get away from working conditions he saw as too corporate, Jonathan left advertising in 1978 to represent the brothers Albert and David Maysles, documentary filmmakers whose films, “Grey Gardens” and “Gimme Shelter” had brought them acclaim. Six months later, the business relationship ended in total failure.

“I had no prospects. I was backed into a corner,” he said. “I couldn’t believe that this was happening to me, but it was happening.”

Jonathan said the experience changed his approach to work and life. “I never assume I can’t have a setback,” he said. “I was taught the bitter lesson that sometimes things just don’t work out and you can be punished for that, and I was.”

He landed at William Morris, an agency he called, “the heartbeat of show business,” and where he worked until 1983, leaving to start Artists Agency, Inc. with a partner.

At Artists Agency, Jonathan said, they purposefully concentrated on soap operas and reality TV shows such as “Inside Edition,” “Current Affair,” “Hard Copy” and “Judge Judy” rather than scripted television, which was mainly produced in Los Angeles as a strategy for keeping the business in New York. As soap operas faded from television, the agency shifted to developing programming for the Food Network including Sandra Lee, Paula Deen and “The Chew” with Mario Batali.

“We are still at it,” Jonathan said, although “it’s not appropriate for me to sell television shows anymore because everybody buying them is 28. They say, ‘Grandpa is here to sell something?’”

Jonathan’s learning disabilities affected him in an obvious way when he was a kid in school. More subtle was the effect on the kind of work he chose to do as an adult. “I’m not in a fact-based industry,” he said. “I was able to use my intelligence and gift of people skills, insight into human nature and business acumen in a way that is entrepreneurial rather than structured because I couldn’t compete with people with real defined skill sets. I left the factual, brilliant part of the world to my wife.”

Deborah Grayson and Jonathan met in the early 1980s when Deborah was between jobs, working at a company Jonathan was doing business with.

“I couldn’t believe she was the new receptionist, she was only there for a week. We fell in lust,” he said. “Later it turned to love.” They have been married for 26 years.

Deborah is a hospice nutritionist for Visiting Nurse Service in New York and is an active supporter of East End Hospice through fundraising and writing about EEH services to raise awareness of the good work it does.

Jonathan and Deborah started to come to Shelter Island regularly around the time he was starting his business. “We were so poor, I had to drive to my parents’ house to sleep at night in Roslyn,” he remembered. “The next year I did a little better and we could afford to stay in Greenport for $29 a night at the Greenporter, and the next year we did a little better and stayed at the Ram’s Head.”

Next, they upgraded to a one-bedroom cottage on Fresh Pond, where they stayed five months of the year for 14 years, until they built the house in the Heights in 2000.

“I came here to go sailing, and I’m on the water every single minute that I can,” he said.

At Coecles Harbor for almost 20 years and the Shelter Island Yacht Club for the past 16, he credits Coecles Harbor and Steve Corkery with turning him into a sailor. “They taught me everything I know,” he said.
Jonathan calls Coecles Harbor “a fair trade marina.”

To him, that means fair pay for the skilled workers and craftsmen that build, repair and preserve the boats. He points out that the mechanics, carpenters and electricians all have pensions and healthcare.

We’ve all heard of community involvement, also known as giving back. The ad man in Jonathan shows itself when he labeled the give-and-take between him and Shelter Island, “The immediacy of the community.”

For example, Jonathan wrote a boating column called “The Float” for the Reporter for many years. When Amanda Clark became an Olympic champion, he asked to interview her and “the next thing I knew, I was interviewing her and working on her fundraiser.”

Immediacy of the community is also when, in the days before 1991’s Hurricane Bob, Jonathan and Deborah worked to protect their boat, as well as the boats of others, at the Coecles Harbor Marina, volunteering to help in any way they could. It was all hands on deck as the marina prepared for the storm and Deborah and Jonathan were with them, tying lines and getting supplies.

Jonathan described how he and Deborah, with four other families in 2002, helped to preserve Hampshire Farms as a rural horse farm by purchasing the property in a deal that was part of the Open Space initiative with Peconic Land Trust.

In March, Jonathan funded a new benefit called “Honoring the Hands” for Hudson River Healthcare, a network of healthcare service providers that works with the poor and uninsured — people who in Suffolk County are very likely to be farm workers, maids and child care workers. The very first event raised about $70,000 to support the health of these workers.

“I wasn’t particularly religious when I came here, but I am religious now. I’ve become an animist,” he said, referring to the belief that was characteristic of many Native American cultures, believing there are spirits in nature. “In October I watch the sunset while I’m swimming, or I sail around the Island and I feel like I’ve had an epiphany,” he said.

“I can’t believe how lucky I am that in my early 60s , I have a dozen friends I’ve made since I’ve lived here, adult friendships,” he said. “There are so many people here who are interesting and talented. I am so blessed.”