| Issue #41, January 19, 2007 |
Saturday
Crowds Flock to Welcome the Visitors from Another Species
By Dan Rattiner
One of East Hampton’s best-kept secrets is Old Northwest Road in East Hampton. Hardly anybody uses it. It’s a two lane road that goes off into the woods to the north from the intersection of Cedar Street and Steven Hand’s Path, bent on bringing you to the now abandoned port town of Northwest. At Swamp Road there is a turnoff to where the old schoolhouse and mill used to be. There are only a few remains of the foundation there. Then the road proceeds onward for about a quarter mile to the little known and little used Northwest Harbor where it dead ends.
For a number of years in the 1600s, this was the main port of entry for ships bringing cargo to the East End of Long Island. But then came Long Wharf in Sag Harbor, and everyone left. Northwest Harbor is too shallow.
This past weekend, however, everybody was heading for the dirt road where Northwest Harbor comes to an end at the old wharf there. The traffic was so bad that the police had to put up red traffic cones to keep the crowds of people from parking their cars on the lawns of the few people who still make their homes up there. The dolphins are swimming around in the harbor. Been there three days. Ate up all the herring and bunker fish in the harbor on the first day. Seem to be hanging around waiting for more. You ought to go up there and see them for yourself. It’s something you may never get to see again in your lifetime.
We got up there around noon on Saturday. The scene on the wharf and on the gravel road put me in mind of a country fair. Maybe a thousand people were there, probably more than had been on that wharf at any one time in three hundred years. And they had brought cameras and binoculars and telescopes and cell phone cameras.
The dolphins were RIGHT THERE, as people kept shouting. The children stared. The adults pointed. There were about twenty of them or so it seemed, you really couldn’t count them because they swam around in groups just below the surface and then, occasionally, they’d breach the surface and take a breath, then roll forward, their black fins gliding through the water and then their tails and then gently and gracefully disappear down into the deep.
Occasionally, one or more would come over to the wharf and look up at the children standing in front of their parents there, holding on tight, and they would chatter and bark and you could see their sharp teeth and eyes and eyelashes sparkling. They were altogether a remarkable sight. And they seemed as interested in us as we were in them.
It was a cold day on Saturday, a bit nippy, and people would come out of this gravel road and park, and they’d stay for about half an hour and then they’d decide they’d seen enough and pack back up into their cars and drive off. At any one time, there were about 300 cars out there that afternoon, parking all the way up the street toward Swamp Road and so there was a lot of coming and going.
As for the dolphins, any sensible reading of how they felt about this could only conclude that whatever all this excitement was, it was okay with them. They went about their business. There was nothing at all frantic about it. They glided this way and that very slowly, sometimes in pairs, sometimes as a threesome, and they were a beautiful thing to see with their fins all lined up together. It seemed to be a kind of after dinner swim around in the harbor they were taking, just kind of working things off after a big meal.
I’d estimate the adults to be about seven feet long, whiskers to tail, and maybe eight hundred pounds. The adolescents that were there were maybe half that size. They’d make clicking sounds occasionally. Or they’d blow the water out of their lungs. Looked pretty happy to me.
Across the way, on the other shore of the harbor, there were some other people, a few of them anyway, who had apparently hiked in from some path heading up from Sag Harbor. They stood around. In the harbor between us, besides the dolphins, there were some buoys on the water, where some boats, now long hauled for the winter, had been tied up. At one buoy there floated a red, white and blue beach ball, the sort of thing you’d see on a dolphin’s nose at a water park. I did not think this was funny. As for the dolphins, here in the wild, they ignored it.
“Take a good look, honey. You’ll never forget this.”
“I’ve seen enough, Victor. We have to get along to Betty’s.”
There was a line of people waiting for something out by the end of the wharf and at first I could not figure it out. But when I looked closely at the head of the line, I could see a set of big black earphones with a wire dragging across the wharf and into the water. People were listening for a minute or two on the earphones. Then it was the next person’s turn. They were listening to the underwater sounds of the dolphins, being picked up by a microphone that had been lowered down into the water. We decided to wait on line to have a listen.
At that moment, three official looking white pickup trucks with lights on the roof came down the gravel road, the first stopping in the center of the road, then the next two spreading out on either side in a sort of defensive position. People in uniform got out. Looked around. They were parked in such a way as to make it impossible for the forty or so cars parked furthest onto the wharf to get in or out. These people, and some other uniformed officials, then began to assemble in a huddle on the farthest side of the wharf away from the dolphins. Other people in uniform now arrived and went over to join them.
I was still on line. I told my girlfriend to hold my place as I wanted to see what was happening with this, and I stepped out and walked over to this official group of people who were now standing in a big circle facing inward. One of them was talking.
As I approached, I could see by the uniforms where these people were from. They were from the U. S. Department of Environmental Protection, the New York State Aquatic something or other, the East Hampton Town Marine Patrol, and the Sea Rescue Service from the Riverhead Aquarium. Quite a group.
One man in a khaki uniform talked to another as I approached, and then turned out of the group and swaggered in my direction. He’d head me off. New York State Park Police.
“You have a reason to come over here? This is a private meeting,” he said.
“I’m with the press,” I said, which was perfectly true.
“This isn’t a press meeting.”
“No. It’s a public wharf,” I said.
Charles Bowman, who is with the Riverhead SeaLife Rescue Service, now stepped out of the meeting and came over.
“He’s all right,” he said to the officer. The officer went away.
Bowman did not escort me into the meeting though, but instead stood with me and explained all of what was going on. He’s the President of the Sea Rescue Service and from what I could see, it was another member of the service who was speaking in the huddle.
“Something wrong?” I asked.
“Maybe. We’re trying to find out who has what resources. Choppers, nets, wetsuits, stuff like that.”
“Why?”
“We’re not sure. But something’s not right. These are an endangered species. And one of them came up dead yesterday morning and two came up dead this morning. They haven’t eaten. They should be leaving. They’re not leaving.”
“What are you going to do?”
“We’ll decide that later tonight. But if we have to, we will try to herd them out of the harbor into open water. There’s a sixty-foot wide channel that gets you out of this harbor. But it’s only four feet deep at low tide and seven feet deep at high tide. Perhaps the dolphins are caught in here. In any case, helping them out has to be done very carefully. They can get very excitable if they think there is something wrong. That could put them in stress. And some of them might die. So we are trying to explain to the others how to do this effectively without panicking them and we are trying to find out what boats we’ve got and what equipment we’ve got for tomorrow and Monday.”
“How will you do it, if you do it?”
“With a line of row boats that have what are called pingers dropped down on ropes underwater, little cylinders that look like beer cans that periodically emit a pinging noise. We’ve had about an 80% success rate using these up in Cape Cod and other places.”
I thought — why don’t they just leave things alone? Let nature take her course. But the answer was, of course, that having dolphins out here this time of the year in such numbers is not natural. They’ve been seen off Montauk, off North Sea, they were reported seen in a great herd passing in front of the Shelter Island Ferry on Friday — never saw anything like it — the ferry pilot said, and one came up on the beach near the Fish Cove Inn in Southampton and it did not survive rescue.
So it’s global warming. The dolphins have seen no need to go south. Flowers are in bloom. Moths and bugs are out. It’s halfway through January. We have to help these dolphins.
Now it was my turn with the earphones. It sounded like Yankee Stadium under there. Clicks and shouts, flaps and chatters and squeals. Almost no noise at all above the surface of the water. A big friggin’ dolphin party down below. How about that?
That night at a dinner party, all the talk was about the dolphin sightings. I talked about how we had seen them and everybody was very quiet. They wanted a full report from the front line. Some people asked me the directions to get there. One man asked if he went out there in the morning, was there a way to find out if they were still there before he wasted his time? Perhaps they’d gone away. I didn’t know what to say to this guy.
One of these days we’ll be sitting in a dining room facing the water at night and an ice floe will drift onto the beach and a big white polar bear will step ashore, roll up his sleeves and say — now I’m gonna show these people what for.
I think that is what it’s going to take for people to get the message.
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