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Sands sifting, winds shifting

BY MARYANN CALENDRILLE | Maryann Calendrille is co-owner of Canio's Books in Sag Harbor.

August 6, 2006

A view from dune top. (Photo by Kathryn Szoka)

Just past the place fishermen call Promised Land, where the island narrows to a slender sandbar - a tight-rope walk between Amagansett and Montauk - lies Napeague, low on the horizon, its name a see-saw of syllables that the old-timers pronounce one way, newcomers another. It's a tenuous stretch subject to currents of wind and water from harbor, sound and ocean. The sky opens, phone poles recede and scrub brush edges in.

To the northeast, the "walking dunes," stripped of trees centuries ago by enterprising colonists, shift and toss their weight around in grains of quartz, garnet, magnetite and feldspar. When winds whip, the pines disappear, as if on a giant Etch-A-Sketch that some greater hand erases then draws in elsewhere. Craggy trunks twist toward life. A lone gray birch stands wind-stripped, its roots exposed for all to see. Still it clings, but for how long on this eroding ridge?

Dune peaks rise like waves on a stormy ocean, then crash into troughs. Footing gives way easily as we climb a crest to view the heath, salt marsh and sea beyond, an immense horizon that leaves us small.

Over time, grass seeds catch in the grains of sand. Cinnamon fern and wrinkled rose claim a sheltered spot out of wind blast or sun stroke. Later still, pitch pine and scrub oak root where they can. Nature's restlessness settles, for a moment, held in place. In the bowls of the dunes, colors mingle in a weaver's paradise of bristly green pine tops laced with blond strands of rush. Tightly woven bearberry stitches a carpet of burnt-brick leaves, silvery branches thread through.

When it's tranquil, so still the sea and sky form a seamless orb, there seems no beginning, no end. Late afternoons, the sea is a bottomless-blue, the sky neon-electric. The pulse of the planet shimmers across this skin of earth stretched thin. Skeins of sand knit a fragile net to catch seeds and steady soil - and lend shelter for a time, until the winds shift.