Montauk’s Light Defense
By Russell Drumm

 In “the coves,” where I am, shadows from towering bluffs swallow surfers already blind from taking off left into the sun. Mixed schools of striped bass, bluefish, and false albacore move past with the tide. Gannets fold their wings and dive on herring freaked toward the surface by the bigger fish stacked like proverbial cord wood in wave faces colored green in the lineup, tan on the inside. The brown is backwash from wave-licked, earthen bluffs, blood evidence that Montauk’s headlands—bones of quartz and granite, flesh of rolling hills and glacial sags—are being inexorably consumed.

A lot of chewing goes on around here. Big, migrating predators—sharks, swordfish, and tuna—travel north in early summer. They’re able to penetrate the cold northern water via Gulf Stream eddies that carry them within striking distance of giant schools of squid, herring, mackerel, and whiting. Many of us are fishermen.  

            My job this day between sets is to find words to describe the smell of leftover Gulf Stream water, perfume of seaweed and feeding fish, with bayberry and grape carried on an offshore breeze untainted by industry any heavier than deer, fox, raccoon, and wild turkey preparing for winter.  Sixty percent of Montauk is park land and it’s on fire with fall colors today.

            The light is finer when you’re backlit in the shadows as the sun sets, something the left coast has over the right. This light is our defense. Montauk lies just beyond the farthest reach of New York City’s urban shadow, purer for the narrow escape. For three days after the 9/11 attacks, a strong west wind carried the acrid smell of  the crumbled smoldering towers along the 125 miles of Long Island’s south shore to Montauk. On the day of the attack, the surf was green, head high, and glassy.

             A bond trader playing hooky from his job on the 82^nd floor left the surf at Ditch Plains after an early morning session near where Teddy had enjoyed his 111 years earlier. The trader wondered why people were huddled in a room at the East Deck Motel. He peered over their shoulders, saw what was on the television, and fell to the floor.

            Montauk means high fortified place in Algonquian. Its hills and bluffs are among the highest on an otherwise long, flat island. The Montauketts built forts here to fend off the war-like Pequots of Connecticut. From where I’m sitting in the line-up, I can see the top of the last Norad radar, a shield against the ICBMs of the Cold War. It rises higher than the Montauk Lighthouse just to the east. Before they turned it off, we got so we didn’t hear the signature buzz of the radar on our TVs and radios, a single zzzz every revolution. Like I said, we’re defensive.  

The wave I’m surfing is called Air Base, the former Camp Hero, where on shore, in among the beech and holly trees, hide thick concrete gun emplacements, home to three batteries of 16-inch naval cannons during World War Two. At strategic points along Montauk’s coast to the west of here, and stripped long ago of their cottage-facade camouflage, similar bunkers maintain a blind watch for U-boats.  The entrance plumes of diving gannets are a U-boat strafed.

            “Alamo” is one such bunker. It lies on its side at the foot of the Montauk Lighthouse where it fell when the ocean took a final bite of its dirt and clay promontory. The rock reef in front of Alamo produces one of the finest peaks on the East Coast, a left when the swell direction is right, but “right” means big and easterly which is also when the sea satisfies its appetite for terra firma—takes its biggest bites.

            I believe this tour can best be conducted from above, an osprey’s-eye view, or we could look down from an old Soviet missile as it passes slowly over Montauk en route to the Big Apple. There’s a nice glassy swell down there like on September 11. That’s me paddling for an outside set. The missile view is possible because the Air Base was home to the Montauk Project, a government experiment in time travel conducted deep down in the Air Base’s concrete catacombs. It’s said that street-urchin subjects were snatched from the streets of Manhattan and sent into the past and future never to be seen again. Google it if you don’t believe me. They were right of course. An easily accessed parallel universe is the best camouflage. Out here, ‘round about now, you can sense the worm hole they left behind. Laugh if you want, but I remember the day the state police dug for Nazi gold in the woods. Air Base is primarily a left. 

In the ‘50s, it was not uncommon for charter boat captains to hear anti-aircraft practice rounds, fired from the base, pass overhead. One narrowly missed Cricket II, Capt. Frank Mundus’s boat. The ornery shark fisherman was Peter Benchley’s model for captain Quint in “Jaws.” On the night Cricket dragged a 3,500-pound white shark back to Montauk Harbor, her speakers wailed bagpipe music, Frank’s favorite.  In among the rocks here, you can still find 50-caliber machine gun brass.

            As the missile heads west, we see a series of crescent-shaped coves with a rock reef points on each end. The points are best as lefts, but can break either way depending on the swell. The next one is The Ranch, a big right-hander with a surprise left in the middle of the cove on the inside. Peter Beard’s house is on the bluff above. A few of the world’s most beautiful women have visited there. I’ve seen them. Peter used to keep snakes in a pit.