Charity Robey

Off the fork: Have a heart

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTOS The cake that says, ‘be mine.’

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on Feb. 8, 2017

It’s all too easy to say, “I love you.” Making cake is harder.

On Valentine’s Day, when it’s especially important to let the one you love know it, one way to express affection is to make a heart-shaped, homemade butter cake, topped with pink whipped cream frosting. To make a cake like that requires not just love, but devotion.

Valentine’s Day is an ancient holiday, dating back at least to Roman times, but the creation of heart-shaped sweets for Valentine’s Day got started in the age of Queen Victoria. By the early 20th century, the Cadbury chocolate company was making heart-shaped boxes full of candy, and the mid-February issues of American newspapers and magazines were stuffed with recipes for heart-shaped cakes and cookies.

This homemade, old-fashioned way to express affection is even more effective today, when a more diffident lover could just order something heart-shaped online.

Since nothing takes the edge off romance like having to go out and buy special equipment, I’m happy to say that this cake can be created by anyone in possession of two 8-inch cake pans; one square and one round.

You form the heart by aligning the square cake and the two halves of the round cake, and applying a nice thick layer of the not-too-sweet pink raspberry frosting over the whole thing.

Smooth the frosting with the back of a spoon and decorate with raspberries to complete the message of love.

A Heart-shaped Cake
16 servings
The Cake
This basic yellow cake recipe is adapted from “The King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion,” the go-to baking reference.
1 and ½ sticks (6 ounces) of butter
4 eggs and 2 yolks
1 ¾ cups (12¼ ounces) sugar
¾ teaspoon salt
2½ teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 ¾ cups (11½ ounces) all-purpose flour
1 cup plain yogurt
½ cup milk

Take the butter and eggs out of the refrigerator and allow them to come to room temperature.

Position the racks near the middle of the oven and preheat to 350 degrees.

Prepare two 8-inch cake pans, one round and one square. Butter and flour the bottom and sides of each pan, or butter each pan and put a precut piece of parchment on the bottom, with a very thin coat of butter on top of the parchment.

Using an electric mixer, cream butter, sugar, salt, baking powder and vanilla until it is fluffy and almost white in color. This will take at least five minutes.

Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each one.

Whisk together the yogurt and milk.

The addition of the flour and the yogurt mixture to the creamed butter/sugar mixture is a gentle process, accomplished by hand and without athletic exertion. Fold one third of the flour into the butter/sugar mixture. Gently fold in half of the yogurt mixture. Fold in the second third of the flour, the rest of the yogurt mixture and finally the rest of the flour.

Spread the batter into the two prepared pans to the same depth. They should be no more than ¾ full.

Using the back of a wooden spoon, spread the batter slightly higher at the edges than in the center of the pans. This makes it more likely that the cakes will rise to the same height.
Bake for 20 to 25 minutes until the cakes pull away from the sides of the pans, and a toothpick inserted

into the center of the cakes comes out clean.

Cool for 10 minutes, and then take the cakes out of the pans to cool completely on a rack.

Split the 8-inch round cake in half and place the halves along two flat sides of the 8-inch square to form a heart.

Raspberry Frosting
Adapted from the “Big Pink Cake” in Tom Hudgens’ book of American home-cooking, “The Commonsense Kitchen: 500 Recipes + Lessons for a Hand-Crafted Life.”
8 ounces mashed fresh raspberries and another 4 ounces of whole berries to decorate the cake.
¼ cup sugar
3 cups heavy cream
¼ teaspoon lemon extract
¼ teaspoon vanilla extract

Mash the raspberries with the sugar and heat the mixture over a low heat or in a microwave for a minute or so — just until the sugar dissolves.

Strain the raspberry mixture, and capture the juice in a bowl, pressing down on the solids with the back of a spoon to remove the seeds.

Cool the raspberry juice and add the heavy cream, lemon and vanilla extracts.

Whip the raspberry cream mixture just until it holds its shape and is spreadable.

Coat the cake by mounding the frosting on top and spreading it to the edges and down the sides of the cake. Smooth the frosting and decorate with the rest of the berries.

Island chefs get a love letter from James Beard

COURTESY 18 BAY RESTAURANT

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on February 22, 2018

Elizabeth Ronzetti and Adam Kopels, chefs at 18 Bay Restaurant, were nominated for a James Beard award in the very competitive “Best Chef-Northeast” category last Thursday.

They say when you score a touchdown, you should act like you’ve been there before. But Ms. Ronzetti and Mr. Kopels have not been there before, and neither has any other chef currently working on Shelter Island.

“It is thrilling and stunning to be included on such a prestigious list,” Ms. Ronzetti said. “Really extraordinary."

The awards are a very big deal in the world of food. James Beard was a cook, educator and author who became a champion of American cuisine in the 20th century.

After his death in 1985, the James Beard Foundation was established in his honor.

In 2018, there were 23,000 entries for the James Beard Restaurant and Chef awards, and 20 semifinalists were chosen for each of 10 geographical regions.

Finalists will be chosen by a vote of about 600 people, about half of whom are previous winners. Semifinalists will be announced on March 14 and the winners at a May awards ceremony that has been called the Oscars of food.

Ms. Ronzetti and Mr. Kopels are partners in work and life, joined, he said, “at the hip.” But when a friend called to tell them they had been nominated, Ms. Ronzetti had just left their Southold house to visit her mother and was driving through a wireless reception-deficient zone around Wading River.

“I saw that Adam called me five times, and I thought this can’t be good. When I reached him he just said, ‘So, we were nominated.’ And I said, ‘Yeah. Right.’ Then I went in the house and told my mother, and she said, ‘A James Beard award, what’s that?’”

A James Beard nomination for a restaurant or chef this far east of New York City is exceedingly rare. A search of past nominees turned up only one, Gerry Hayden, the late, revered chef at North Fork Table and Inn in Southold who was both a nominee and semifinalist.

Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl, a successful food writer with several James Beard awards for journalism, is the older sister of Mr. Kopels’ childhood friend Alex, and Mr. Kopels said she was a big influence on him growing up. He beamed as he described hearing how happy Dara was to learn about the nomination. “All of a sudden I was 14-years-old again, trying to live up to Dara.”

They didn’t have long to revel in the nomination before turning to preparations for a night of diners. “We are so hands-on,” said Ms. Ronzetti, a pastry tube in one hand, about halfway through a batch of love letters ­— homemade pasta squares stuffed with a dab of caramelized parsnip that tasted like butterscotch.

Mr. Kopels dashed by looking for something, “Can’t talk, I’ve got a reduction going.” His wife asked him to describe how he cooked the parsnips. “Yes, well we are basically overcooking them. Very hot oven, the tips get burnt and when we remove the tips and process it, the result looks like caramel.”

When Ms. Ronzetti and Mr. Kopels moved their Bayville restaurant to Shelter Island in 2011, they created an Italian-inspired, four course chef’s menu that changes every week, and shows off the animals, fruits and vegetables that only the North Fork can produce.

The chefs are not afraid to push against tradition and customary restaurant practices, in favor of showcasing the best of what the land and sea produces here and now.

Ms. Ronzetti remembered the reaction when they began to use celtuce, a green vegetable that looks like a mash-up of asparagus spear and celery stalk. “We did a bluefish crudo with celtuce and everybody said, ‘What is celtuce?’ They were growing it at Sylvester Manor, and no one had heard of it.”

Terry Farm, Southold Fish Market, The Farm Beyond and Lathams are just a few of the local farms and fish-sellers who provide the inspiration for the couple’s ever-changing menus.

People who watch the James Beard nominees closely say this year’s nominees skew to small and rural places more so than in years past. One of the nominees is Erin French, chef/owner of The Lost Kitchen in Freedom, Maine, a celebrated restaurant in a place that makes Shelter Island look urban.

Mr. Kopels said the attention is especially important to a restaurant that can feel isolated for much of the year. “It reminds me that this isn’t all for naught, and we’re not just going on mindlessly year after year.”

The James Beard nomination is an indication that Ms. Ronzetti and Mr. Kopels are up to something exceptional at 18 Bay.

“One of the things we have always wanted to do was to build something a little bit bigger than us; something of value,” he said. “We have a mantra in the kitchen, ‘There is an easier way to make dinner, we just don’t do it.’”

Waiting, watching and thinking-hunting on Shelter Island

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Animal Control Officer Beau Payne on the hunt recently, getting into position an hour before sundown, a time when deer are most active.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on February 1, 2018

On a frigid afternoon in January, harnessed to a tree stand 14 feet above a thick nest of bittersweet, and well into my second hour of deer-hunting, the parts of me in contact with the steel seat were very cold.

I was armed with nothing more lethal than a camera, but the hunter in the tree stand a few feet away had arrows, and he knew how to use them.

Beau Payne, Shelter Island’s animal control officer, had warned me that hunting with him was likely to be uncomfortable and boring.

“I have no ritual, and I don’t worry about scent,” he said. “I put camo on and get in a tree.”

Although about 200 men and a handful of women hunt on the Island, the responses to a recent town-sponsored survey of residents showed that for many people, deer-hunting is a mystery. Some respondents didn’t seem to be aware that hunting is legal here from October through the end of January.

Since I’m one of the uninitiated, I decided to try and learn what it’s like to hunt deer on the Island.

The first misconception I had to overcome was the idea that it involved a lot of shooting. A hunter can wait silently for hours watching and waiting for a chance to take a shot. It is a winter activity, and snowy conditions are ideal for seeing deer, if not for the comfort of the hunter.

The hunter may sit, lie or climb into a tree erected on the property of a landowner who has given permission, then wait and observe.

It helps not to move too much.

“It’s not particularly exciting,” Mr. Payne said. “The exciting part is seeing game and even possibly harvesting game.”

I’d heard that falling out of a tree stand is a real hazard, so I decided to remove my mittens long enough to make sure I had done a thorough job of closing the carabiner on the safety clip. An hour later, my fingers still aching from exposure to the wind, I understood how a fall could happen.

When the wind shifted the tree against my back, I realized I’d been in that slack-jawed state of consciousness that precedes a nap. If the creaking and shifting of the tree hadn’t jolted me back to awareness, hanging in a harness from the safety strap would have done the trick.

Deer are most active around the first and last lights of day and hunting is permitted from the published sunrise until sunset. Hunters like to be in place well beforehand. That’s why, although we spent the afternoon watching, we didn’t see deer close enough to shoot at until shortly before the time when hunting was prohibited.

With a half hour to go before sundown, four deer appeared, moving in a wide circle around the dense patch of bittersweet in which we watched. They came up around us circling through the brush and appeared suddenly in a grassy clearing directly below us.

The arrow hit the lead doe in the back, and she took off like a rocket.

Mr. Payne was not happy. Later, he said, “It was not a good shot, akin to being shot across the fleshy part of your behind, a very close shave. It might have been more appropriate for me to delay or pass given the turn of events.”

We spent the next hour tracking the doe, starting with a tuft of hair shaved off by the arrow, to the arrow itself, lying near the place where she had bounded into the woods. Mr. Payne was able to judge from the condition of the arrow, her movement as she fled, and the amount of blood, that the wound would not be fatal. But he continued to search.

“I’m probably going to regret doing this,” he said, hunched over, as he entered a briar-ridden thicket of vines so dense it could have been home to a herd.

He extricated himself from the thicket and followed a sign of blood looking like black seeds on the dry leaves — invisible to me — continuing to search until it was too dark to see.

It was a teachable moment on the distinction between hunting deer and culling deer. “If this was culling, the deer would have come to the bait at the exact time and place that I determined, but baiting is not legal for recreational hunting,” he said. “The unpredictability of hunting is what creates the challenge.”

“She was the lead doe in that pack, very intelligent, and this experience will make her extremely intelligent,” he added.

Mr. Payne saw her again a couple of days later, but was not able to take a shot.

The doe was not the only one educated by the events of that day. I saw first-hand the challenges and difficulties of harvesting deer, and the trade-offs between safety and humane treatment of humans and deer on our densely populated Island.

REPORTER FILE PHOTO

A brief history of deer hunting on Shelter Island
In spite of the local legend that Shelter Island’s deer are descended from a pair brought here in 1892 by Francis Marion Smith, a business magnate, the indigenous whitetailed deer of Eastern Long Island were likely here already, but in much smaller numbers than today’s herd.

Mr. Smith is said to have brought in a non-native species of European red deer or possibly mule deer to stock his deer park, at the site of today’s Deer Park Lane.

Before the turn of the 20th century, Shelter Island wasn’t a good place for deer to thrive because of a limited food supply. But when people began to establish farms and build homes and barns, the deer population exploded as every border between woods and field or house and farm provided perfect places for browsing, which is the term used for herbivores, such as deer, that mainly feed on ground vegetation.

By 1916, the Island’s deer herd was so large and voracious that local farmers called on the state to help eliminate the herd humanely. Over six days in late April 1916, the state answered the call, attempting to relocate all the deer on Shelter Island (estimated at 75 to 200) to Pennsylvania and upstate New York. The project was an abject failure.

After a week of fencing, herding, capturing and shipping, most of the deer were injured, drowned or otherwise killed. About 30 remained at large and only six deer made it out alive and in good enough shape to be transferred to Utica, New York.

Deer in North America had been hunted almost into extinction and public concern led to the formation of a State Conservation Department — the precursor of the Department of Environmental Conservation — established to bring back game species. The conservation efforts worked and by 1969, Suffolk County opened up a limited season to encourage hunting as a way to manage the growing herd.

By the middle of the 20th century it was legal to shoot deer on Shelter Island, but there was not a season. By the 1960s, hunting was such a normal part of Shelter Island life that at least one hunter remembers going for pheasant in the morning before school and then taking his gun to school and leaving it in his locker.

In the 1960s and 1970s, a private hunt club operated on the land that is now the Mashomack Preserve comprising almost a third of the acreage of the Island. Islanders still hunt there as they have for 50 years.

Today, the Shelter Island deer herd is estimated in the thousands, and recreational deer hunting at Mashomack, Sylvester Manor and on a few private properties accounted last year for an annual harvest of about 450 deer.

Island Profile Craig Wood, from constructions to real estate valuations

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Craig Wood at the Islander taking a break from a busy day.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on December 14, 2017

One of Craig Wood’s first jobs stands out among his childhood memories, and not in a good way.

“I did not like manure day,” he said, referring to the task of cleaning out the barn on his family’s upstate farm. The fact that manure day was a particular day — meaning they only shoveled when the pile reached a tipping-point — made the task even more memorable.

Craig’s work history is eclectic and unlikely, from farming, fishing and landscaping with enormous rocks, to writing computer code and starting and running a successful high-tech company. His diverse experience turns out to be a great preparation for his latest job as a Shelter Island Town Assessor, a position to which he was appointed and then elected this past November.

When Craig was 15, his family, including his older sister and younger brother, moved to Hong Kong from their farm near the Finger Lakes when Craig’s father, who worked at I.B.M., was transferred. Craig recalls being stunned for the first six months, as he struggled to adjust to life in a megacity with completely new languages, foods and culture.

“I couldn’t adapt quickly,” he said, “but it opened my mind to the shocking realization that we are not alone. I saw that there was a whole world out there.”

Craig lived in Hong Kong in the late 1980s, until he graduated from high school and moved back to the United States for college. He still sees that three-year experience as one that shaped his worldview.

At Cornell University, Craig met Carrie Hopler, a fellow student in the landscape architecture program. At the homecoming football game, the pair never made it out of the parking lot, opting to sit out the game on a tailgate and talk. Cornell was defeated, but it was a good game for Craig and Carrie.

Carrie told Craig about her parents, Ray and Lorraine Hopler, and their home on Shelter Island, where her family had summered since 1958, and beginning in 1987, lived year-round.

Craig visited the Island for the first time when he and Carrie came for her parent’s 40th wedding anniversary celebration at St. Gabriel’s. Craig and Carrie were married at St. Gabriel’s in 1993.

At first, he had a business in Ithaca, New York building walls from locally-quarried stone. The work was physically taxing, and he realized he needed to change direction when his landlord told him, “If I had my life to do over, I’d use my brain and not my body.”

Building on an interest in the emerging field of computer programming, Craig began to create custom websites for individuals and small businesses, and went on to write large scale programs for companies needing specialized applications.

Finding satisfaction in this work was hit or miss. “After finishing an application, I asked when my program would go live and they said, ‘Oh we decided to scrap the entire project,’” he recalled. “I spent all this effort and time. I got paid, but my work was never used.”

After 10 years of working in pay-per-click advertising management for a business that did search engine-based marketing, Craig started his own company in 2007. Called Crowd Fusion, it was a content management system geared to large scale media outlets at the very time when social media was blowing up.

The company looked promising, got the attention of investors, and in 2012 Craig sold his interest and stepped off the corporate treadmill.

“I was missing my kids,” he said.

Craig and Carrie bought their own home on Shelter Island in 2001, and after renting it for many summers, decided to go full-time. Their daughter, Audrey, is now a 10th grader at the Shelter Island School and 11-year old Owen is in 6th grade at the Hayground School. “The most important thing in my life is taking this seven years I have while the kids are in my house,” said Craig. “I’m going to look back and say I want that moment.”

Soon after he was on the Island full-time, he was back at work, but now he’s devoting his talents to improving his new home. “I started going to Town Board meetings. I was outspoken about short-term rentals,” he said. He also didn’t like walking through the forest and seeing no undergrowth, and has been a voice in favor of culling the local deer herd.

He’s not satisfied with the retail environment on Shelter Island, finding it much too hard for a small business to make a go of it here. “I’m missing Fedi’s,” he said. “The site plan review we passed makes it even more difficult to start something new.”

Craig was attending a Town Board meeting when he learned that the town would have to find a new assessor. “Maps, math, computers, all the boxes checked as something I would be interested in,” he said.

He was appointed, and subsequently elected to fill out the remaining two-year term in the November voting.

Over the years, Carrie’s parents, Ray and Lorraine, had introduced Craig to all of their friends, including Toots Clark who, in his early 90s, took it upon himself to teach Craig the fine points of clamming and scalloping.

“After Ray passed away, Toots didn’t have any one to go fishing with,” Craig said.” I figured he called me because there was no one else to go out with him.”

Toot’s fishing lessons were hands-on and specific. “He’d edge the boat up to a rock and say, ‘When you feel the boat bump, cast on the other side of the rock.’ I love being on the water,”

Craig said. “But now that I’m assessor, it’s kind of eating into my scalloping.”

Lightning Round

What do you always have with you?  My wedding band. I’ll never forget my wedding at St. Gabriel’s.

Favorite place on Shelter Island?  My garden.

Favorite place not on Shelter Island?  The Thousand Islands.

Last time you were elated?  Yesterday. Seeing my kids do something right makes me so happy.

What exasperates you?  Working with someone who denies a fact or a proven truth.

Last time you were afraid?  I was afraid on Friday that I would hold up the mailing of tax bills when the computer was not working.

Best day of the year on Shelter Island?  The winter solstice — after that the days start getting longer.

Favorite movie?  “The Princess Bride.”

Favorite food?  Pork.

Most respected elected official?  Tom Wheeler, former chairman of the FCC. He decided to go after the cable companies to enforce net neutrality even though he was an insider before he was appointed.

Once an orphan, now in the Shelter Island Family

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Harald Olson preparing for his one-man show.

When Harald Olson was a boy in Huntington, West Virginia, he lived in a large home with an altar and stained-glass window in his bedroom. His mother, a devout Catholic, had it built as a place for her only child to pray.

Harald has long since left West Virginia for Shelter Island, where he’s lived and worked as a caretaker, health care assistant and artist, but that stained-glass window has followed him around, if only in his imagination, an image from a former life that emerges in his work.

Ten of Harald’s paintings, some as luminous and jewel-colored as sacred windows, will be on display in his one-man show on December 9 and 10 at the David Rankin Studio, 126 South Midway Road.

Harald’s father was the golf pro at the Spring Valley Country Club in Huntington and golf coach at Marshall University after serving in the Air Force in the 1940s. Harald said,

“The upbringing I had from Dad mainly stuck with me.”

And by that he meant good manners and being polite. When Harald was 8, his father died, and three years later, so did his mother.

After a tumultuous period living with relatives, he entered Fork Union Military Academy near Charlottesville, Virginia. “We had to study for two and a half hours every night. You couldn’t move away from your desk,” Harald said. “It was discipline, and I needed it.”

In 1975, Harald turned 21, and was back in Huntington. Whatever wealth his parents had left him was gone, and he struggled to take care of the house and support himself without a family to help. “You can’t dwell on the past,” he said. “I don’t blame anyone.”

Seeing a television program about abstract art, he was seized with the urge to go beyond the drawings he had been doing all his life. “I got some bedsheets and tacked them to plywood I found in the house, and I found some paint in the garage,” he remembered.

Taking his first painting upstairs, a friend saw it, and Harald had sold his first work.
Still trying to support himself, he spent two years working in a logging camp in the Tongass National Rainforest in Alaska, where it rained every day summer and winter, and the work was dangerous.

But logging was not the worst job Harald ever had. That distinction is reserved for driving a cab, which he did upon returning to Huntington. “I could pick somebody up who looked perfectly fine, and then find out a minute down the road they were psycho,” he said. “I had three robbery attempts.”

During these years, Harald married and divorced, and continued to draw and to make abstract art. When he was back in West Virginia, he started to sell his work, even settling a loan with one of his paintings.

He began to develop a particular approach to his work, building up layers of paint and sometimes layers of canvas and newspaper to make very thick, textured works. “I paint the first layer very quickly,” he said. “Balance, color, it’s got to have something worth keeping or I paint over it. Maybe some of it is representational, but I don’t think about it.”

Harald resists giving his painting titles because he feels that it compromises the way people experience his work. “An abstract painting is a thought,” he said, “People see different things.”
It was through his ex-wife that he found his way to Shelter Island. He came here to work for one of her friends, who turned out not to need his help. But Harald met Lisa Perry on that trip and they became friends. “Lisa is like my little sister,” said Harald. “She’s got a heart of gold.”

In 2002, Harold left West Virginia for Shelter Island when Lisa offered him a place to live in exchange for helping her with her house. In the years since, he’s worked as a provider of home health care for a number of Islanders, while continuing to work as an artist.

After finding some canvases at the town Recycling Center, Harald began to paint larger works, and when the community of Shelter Island artists heard, people started giving him canvases to work on.

In 2007, with the help of Jean Lawless, he was in a group show at the Mosquito Hawk Gallery on Shelter Island, and then another group show, the Un-Hamptons Outsider Art Exhibition at Greenport Harbor Brewing Company Gallery in August 2011.

In January 2010, Harald had a solo show at Andre Zarre Gallery in New York City called “Pumps, Boxes and Glass Paintings,” based largely on work he’d done in a studio space that local builder Jim Olinkiewicz had given him.

In his 14 years on Shelter Island, Harald has befriended many people, and been the beneficiary of their love and care. Jim Olinkiewicz provided him with a place to paint and has been a staunch supporter of Harald’s art, “a good friend and a good man,” said Harald.

Artist David Rankin and his wife, writer Lily Brett, have also supported Harald, and his upcoming exhibit will be held in David’s studio, with the further support of Kenny McGuinness, the manager of the studio, and Allison Weibye, studio assistant.

And as far as Harald is concerned, he has a family; three cats named Jerry, Ziggy and Tinker, all 12 years old, who won’t put up with anyone but him.

“I bless my house when I get home. I bless my kitties,” Harald said. “And then I kneel down and say a prayer.”

Lightning round

What do you always have with you?  My rosary.

Favorite place on Shelter Island?  Where I live.

Favorite place not on Shelter Island?  I’ve never been there, but I think Arizona because it is warm and it gets no hurricanes.

What exasperates you?  All the nonsense news.

Best day of the year on Shelter Island?  Any warm day.

Favorite movie or book?  I like atlases. I wonder what the map is going to look like in another age.

Favorite food?  Eggs.

Favorite person, living or dead, who is not a member of the family?  Father Peter DeSanctis. His devotion to his cause. He is for real.

On the halfshell- Smelling as sweet

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO When a wall of ice made Mabel’s usual route to the ferry impassible, she had to bushwhack.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on January 25, 2018

When I step out of the house with my three-year old hound for her afternoon constitutional, she makes a beeline for the North Ferry, a half-mile distant. What makes Mabel run?

Mabel’s impulse is the same as the one that creates a traffic jam at the arriving ferries in summer — to greet the other members of her pack.

She’s not crazy about strangers, but for those who arrive at the North Ferry slips she makes an exception.

Experience has shown her that ferries bring people with treats in their pockets and a willingness to scratch behind her ears. It never hurts to trot down there and see what the next boat might bring.

They used to call it “the daddy ferry,” the boat that arrived every summer Friday evening around eight, carrying the fathers who took the 5:40 from Penn Station to join their families for the weekend.

In summer, when the ferry brings boatloads of strangers, it’s easy to forget that on a cold January day you may be especially glad to see what comes off the boat. The first boat of the day brings the amazon.com truck, a modern-day Wells Fargo wagon with packages for people all over the Island.

Later boats bring the people who work at the library, the IGA, the post office, and wave after wave of construction workers, landscapers, plumbers, accountants and teachers.

The North Ferry is contemplating the purchase of another ferry for the fleet, and when that new boat joins The Islander, The Menantic and The Manhansett, it will need a name. The naming of a vital piece of civic infrastructure is an important event in any community.

Let’s not mess it up.

Naming things is tricky. For example, when my husband and I were just married, another young couple in our apartment building who had just had a baby posted a sheet of yellow lined paper and a pencil in the elevator, inviting anyone to suggest a name for their precious newborn.

This was before the days of crowdsourcing and drawing on “the hive,” but the outcome was just as full of flame and chaos as any internet outburst. The names scribbled on the elevator wall ranged from the silly — someone suggested “Baby” — to the profane. I think someone suggested “Fred,” but the child was female.

In 2016, an internet poll was conducted in the U.K. to select a name to christen a newly-built vessel for polar exploration, and the people spoke clearly and overwhelmingly that the new boat should be christened the RSS Boaty McBoatface. Also placing very high in the voting was, RSS It’s Bloody Cold Here.

Horrified by what they had unleashed, the British authorities could not bring themselves to name the vessel something so ridiculous, and instead named it the RSS Sir David Attenborough, saving Boaty McBoatface for a remote-controlled vessel carried by the larger ship.

In November, Sydney, Australia accepted the results of an internet poll, and named their new harbor vessel Ferry McFerryface when that name won the vote fair and square.

And last fall, when New York needed names for five new ferries, New York City public school second graders were polled, resulting in the good ships McShiny, Friendship Express, Sunset Crossing, Urban Journey, Waves of Wonder and Lunchbox.

Three years ago, when we had to pick a name for the ladylike black beagle-mix puppy who came to us from a shelter on the Tennessee/Arkansas border, we knew she needed a Southern-sounding name.

Mabel sounded old-fashioned and civilized. The association with the old song about table manners had me singing, “Mabel, Mabel, strong and able, keep your dewclaws off the table,” and hoping she would have better habits than our last dog. She has more than lived up to her moniker.

I’ve helped name two children, three dogs, four cars and one boat. I don’t minimize the difficulty involved. But I think it works better if the people doing the naming have a permanent connection to the thing being named. If we do get a new ferry, I hope it is christened with a name chosen by people who care for it, and who understand the vital part it will play in the life and history of Shelter Island.

Mabel doesn’t mind what name ends up painted on the pilot house of the new ferry. As long as it continues to bring her kennelmates across the water, she’ll trot down the hill to meet the boat with a heart full of doggish joy.

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO The indispensable North Ferry operates in all conditions, including the recent ice fog.