| Issue #32, November 3, 2006 |
High Drama
The Latest News from the Cut at Sagaponack Main Beach
By Dan Rattiner
I often go out on Sagg Main Beach in my Land Rover in the off-season to write a story for this newspaper on this laptop. I sit outside the car on a folding chair if it’s warm enough. I keep one eye on what I am doing and one eye on what is going on.
Sunset is a beautiful time at Sagg Main Beach. East of the sand road leading out to it, there is this most beautiful scene on God’s earth. At a certain point as you go east, the dunes at the back of the beach blocking the sunset give way to Sagg Pond, a calm and magnificent body of water about three miles long and a mile wide that opens out to the sea. On the beach at the eastern side of the pond, the sun sets across it over the far shore, and, for a period of about a half hour, the entire world is bathed in this pink and orange light which then fades to black.
On Monday, October 9, I was out there just before sunset. It was a beautiful evening and I set up outside the car. Behind me, not far from the entrance to the beach, was a surfcaster in front of his pickup truck out in the sea in his waders. To the left, the surf crashed on the sand. Overhead, the birds circled excitedly, cawing madly, and once again rediscovering for the first time that the sun actually sets. Directly in front of me was the pond and the sun over the far shore.
After a while, a ragtop open jeep drove slowly past me on the beach and parked about fifty yards in front, between me and the pond. It annoyed me slightly at first — it was as if they were taking a seat to partially block my view, but the beach is a free country and the jeep is a sort of rough looking vehicle — with the back window zippered down — and it seemed appropriate that its driver would take it out to enjoy the show.
After a while, while typing away, I suddenly heard a woman’s voice, very angry, saying something.
IF I WANT TO GO OUT TO … it said, and then, as it continued on at an even higher decibel, it was drowned out by the sound of the waves crashing in. It was coming from the jeep.
From where I was sitting, I could only see the silhouettes of the back of the heads of two people in that car. The driver was the taller person, with short hair. The passenger was the shorter person. And it was she who was doing the talking. The angry speech, in a midlevel soprano, went on and on. She gestured, she banged on the dashboard. The jeep shook. The sun slowly lowered.
I tried to eavesdrop, but that one phrase, IF I WANT TO GO OUT TO, coming in bright and clear on a gust of wind, was all I ever got. Sometimes, the woman gestured and looked straight ahead and sometimes she stared menacingly in the direction of the driver. But the driver just sat there, eyes front, quite still. Once, he reached up and scratched a little itch above his ear.
This went on for a good seven or eight minutes and it was bothering my view. And it was also bothering me. I hadn’t come down to hear this. What the hell had he done, anyway? It went on and on and I couldn’t hear any of it.
Above, the birds swooped and cawed faster. And they sent out an alarm.
Danger. Danger.
Finally, there was the sound of the jeep engine starting up and, as the shouting continued, a moving into reverse of the transmission, a grinding of gears and a making of a K turn and then a moving forward, and then they were gone. And she was still yelling.
This sunset was not working, is what I believe he was thinking as he drove by me, a sorry looking fellow indeed.
* * *
A short time later, with the sun setting further down but still not all the way down, another vehicle came slowly by me in the sand. It was a beach vehicle I had never seen down here before. A tiny Honda Element about half the size of my Land Rover. I didn’t know they could go on the beach. And I’d never even seen anything that small on the beach before.
In any case, it stopped, facing the sunset almost exactly where the jeep had been — I wondered if the spot was still warm — and the driver’s door opened and a little tiny dog, maybe twelve pounds, jumped joyfully down and began to run around in the sand in little circles.
Behind him, also now coming out the driver’s door, was a large, brawny man wearing a sweater and jeans. He planted his feet on the ground, put his hands on his hips and looked out at the sea.
Then the passenger door opened, and out stepped a very small and very slender young woman. I could only see all three of them in silhouette at this point in the sunset, so I cannot tell you what any of them really looked like, but from my perspective, I was looking at a big brawny man and his three small beloved things. His Element, his dog and his girl.
And so it was. The girl walked happily around the car, almost skipping, and he threw a big paw around her shoulders and pulled her to him, and then the two of them walked slowly down toward the water’s edge with the little dog circling around them as if the three were out of some sort of fairy tale.
The girl skipped on ahead for a minute, and she gathered seaweed into a sort of bouquet and brought it to the man, and he swept her up off her feet for a moment or two.
This went on for a while, and I watched with some curiosity and a bit of envy since my own personal beloved was not with me at this particular time, and then they got back into the Element and bounced across the ruts in the sand and headed off in the direction from which they had come.
Now it was dark. My laptop screen glowed. You never know what the hell you are going to see down at the beach.
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