Issue #25, September 15, 2006

Trip to the NF

Goat Cheese, Swimming to Shelter Island and Driving in the Bay

By Dan Rattiner

We drove up to the North Fork last Saturday for the day just to look around. To get there from East Hampton, the best way, of course, is to drive to Sag Harbor, then up the North Haven peninsula to the ferry to Shelter Island, then across Shelter Island to the ferry at Shelter Island Heights to Greenport.

When you’re on these two ferries, your option is to either stay in your car or get out of your car and go to the railing to enjoy the salty sea air and the view. Neither ferry is a particularly long ride. Crossing on the South Ferry is about a quarter mile. Crossing to Greenport on the North Ferry is just shy of a mile.

We were loaded up but still at the dock on Shelter Island facing Greenport when I noticed in front of me that the metal gate, which acts as a barrier to cars possibly lurching forward and into the water, was being raised and then lowered by the deck hands. It would come down and not quite latch, and so they would use the hydraulic buttons to raise it up and then lower it again. There were three deck hands watching this process. So I got out of the car to watch, too.

“Doesn’t catch?” I asked, walking over.

“It’s fidgety,” the deckhand nearest me said. “Just takes a few tries. But we get it.”

“Somebody hit it?” I asked.

“No.”

At that moment, it caught. And moments later we were underway. But two of the guys, including me and the deckhand I was talking to, still were staring at the gate.

“Anybody just drive right through it?” I asked.

“There was one about a month ago. First one we’ve had in years. He was being chased by the cops. Did something seriously wrong, I never knew what. And he came barreling down the road here toward us and I don’t know what he was thinking, but he must have seen the ferry docked here and didn’t stop. He just roared out the dock onto the ferry at high speed, banged through the gates and took off over the water.”

“Trying to get to the other side? It’s a mile.”

“Who knows?”

“What happened?”

“Well, he died.”

“Local guy?”

“City.”

Later that day, I was reading the police blotter in one of the papers on the North Fork and saw an item about a man who abandoned his car at the ferry and tried to swim to Shelter Island. It happened August 4. He was missing after that for eight days. But then, accompanied by a lawyer, he turned himself in.

We had a nice time on the North Fork. We visited some of the wineries, drove out to Orient and hung out in the beachfront park, had an ice cream at the Orient General Store, went to Peconic and bought some of the award winning cheese at the Catapano Dairy Farm, had lunch at North Fork Food, and then came back the way we came.

In the afternoon, back home, I made some phone calls to learn more about what happened with this clearly Olympic level swimmer.

First I tried the Shelter Island Police, where an officer told me he’d heard about it but it hadn’t involved Shelter Island.

“I think it happened in North Haven,” he said. “You might try the Town of Southampton or the North Haven Village Hall or the Town of East Hampton. But I’m pretty sure it’s Southampton. Let me know what you find out.” He gave me his name. “Believe me if it happened here, we’d be happy to tell you what we know. That would be something, wouldn’t it?”

I agreed with him that if it had been on the North Haven side it would have had to have been the Southampton Police. But I was not looking forward to calling them. It’s one thing to deal with a small ten-man police force on a sleepy island like Shelter Island. They know everybody knows everything, so what difference does it make. But Southampton, like East Hampton, is a big town with a big professional police department and they go by the book, which is they won’t tell you much. They protect the rights of innocent civilians. They deal in perps. They write things in a blotter, but they won’t read anything to you. Though if you’re really interested, you can come in and have a look. And beyond the weekly blotter, there’s “records,” as in “we’ll transfer you to ‘records.”’ There, if you have a question, you can put it in writing and they will get back to you in a week or two.

So I called the Southampton Police. And indeed they had the story. Though I could only get pieces of it.

The police were called from a cell phone by somebody on the ferry heading from Shelter Island south to North Haven. There was a man in a car on it behaving erratically. Very loud. Seemed drunk. The ferry landed, the cars were offloaded one by one, and a police officer stopped this one car where he asked the driver, who was in it alone, to give him his license and registration. Which he did. Then he told him to get out of the car. And he did get out, but before the policeman could do anything, he was off, running down North Drive parallel to the beach and then across the beach and into the Bay where he commenced to swim off through the choppy surf.

Now I really don’t know why there was no particular pursuit in this case. But whatever happened, he was gone. Swimming off across the horizon or something. Well, certainly not the horizon. This was the South Ferry, after all.

Well, he was gone, but the officer had his car, license and registration. So he knew the man was Christopher W. Griffen, 37, of Manhattan. The charge would be aggravated unlicensed operation of an automobile. They mailed it to him.

I wondered why they let him swim off like that, and was told the arresting officer was Josh Stewart, a summer police officer, and someone whom I would have great trouble tracking down because he was probably heading back to college about now, wherever that was, and anyway, he wouldn’t be able to tell me much.

I did suspect the police were not being helpful to me for several reasons. They probably told the summer officers that if anybody asks you anything you have to refer them to the public relations officer. That would surely make sense. But now no longer on the police payroll, would he hold to that? Furthermore, and this is also conjecture, I think they must have sent young officer Stewart up to the ferry dock with what they thought would be an easy assignment, and here the perp goes running into the water. As to active pursuit into Peconic Bay, I’d guess Stewart thought why? He was not in a movie, and the cold water on a hot day would probably sober the perp up.

Sometimes I do wonder about the level of nonforthcomingness of the police, particularly toward the Press. There was a local paper that, for forty years, and I don’t know if they still do this because I haven’t looked lately, used to give absolutely complete information about the victims mentioned in the police blotter.

“Persons unknown apparently entered the Beach View Lane mansion of Charles and Brenda Knickenbocker at 7 Beach View Lane in our town and also at 46 East 73rd Street in Manhattan sometime between 3 and 4 p.m. on Saturday afternoon and stole all Mrs. Knickenbocker’s diamond jewelry which had been in the top drawer of her bedroom dresser, valued at $146,500, all the dining room silver, a painting by Rubens that had been hanging in the front foyer, and other valuables. The Knickenbockers had been at the beach and the front door had been unlocked.”

I recall that in this town the readers complained about this all the time — it was like giving crooks directions — but the editor wouldn’t change.

You might think that being a deckhand on one of our two Shelter Island ferries is a not particularly dangerous job to have, but I can tell you there is one moment on each crossing where they go on high alert. That is the moment between the time when the ferry has been unloaded and the cars going the other way have not yet been loaded and the gates are raised. Things can happen in that interval.

Probably the most likely, and this happens two or three times every summer, is this. The mate who is going to wave the cars on steps off the boat and looks at the lead car waiting in the line. Car engines are started up.

And then suddenly, over the hill, and coming around the line of cars at high speed is a white Mercedes convertible with the top down and music playing loud. It passes everybody, roars onto the ferry sending whoever’s in the way running for cover and then, with the driver suddenly realizing the immediacy of the situation, screeches noisily to a halt. And a beautiful young woman with blond hair under a kerchief and oversize sunglasses on turns to look at the deckhands shivering against the railing and says, “I think I’m lost. And I’m late. Am I on the way to Amagansett?”