New sights and smells at a Long Island beach
Crowds at Overlook Beach on May 7, in Babylon Town. Credit: Debbie Egan-Chin
You live on Long Island, you have your beach.
Depending on the beach, you have your parking field. You might even have your spot on the beach, where friends and family know they can find you. And you have your rituals that you follow religiously, or maybe that you deviate a little from, or maybe you just wing it each time you visit your sandy slice of heaven.
Our beach, as of late, has been Overlook Beach. It’s a small but lovely Babylon Town beach out on the barrier island, just east of Cedar and Gilgo, and we’ve been bringing our grandson there every year for the past decade or so.
We were there again, for the first time this year, a few days ago. We veered to the right as we usually do, found a spot near the slope down to the water as we usually do, weighted down our blanket with sandals and bags as we usually do, applied the final sunscreen as we usually do, then looked out at the ocean and took a deep breath expecting the salty air to fill our nostrils and lungs and inhaled that lovely whiff of . . .
Marijuana.
The breeze was blowing across the beach and we had unwittingly plunked ourselves next to and downwind of a woman who, as it turned out, was intent on smoking pretty much all day. In defiance of the law and, most aggravatingly, the rules of etiquette. The fact that she was wearing an NYPD cap only added to our frustration.
Understand, I’m no cannabis complainer, no harridan of hemp. I was OK with its recreational legalization in New York two years ago. But smelling a joint at a Dead concert is one thing. Smelling it on the beach is quite another.
Lately, there seem to be a whole lot of us having to deal with this quite-another-thing a lot more often and in a lot more places than we should.
More alarming than the pot-pourri was the beach itself. It’s been shrinking, and narrowed again this past offseason.
Once upon a not-so-long-ago time, the water’s edge was more than three football fields from the concession stand. Now, it feels like even my lame right arm could throw a baseball from the picnic tables to the main lifeguard stand as long as the wind is not blowing in.
A series of overhead photos collected in a video posted on YouTube documents the withering of Overlook.
The labels on the photos put the beach’s width at 1,090 feet in 1994. That seems about right. There was ebb and flow over the ensuing years from storms taking and dredges giving and oceans rising, but in 2011 the beach was 730 feet wide. In 2016, the video puts it at 490 feet. By 2021, it was 300.
It seems shorter now.
As we made our way onto Overlook Beach this past week, my grandson, now 12, said, “Whoa!” He wasn’t smiling.
You read the stories about what’s coming and see footage of damage somewhere else, then it’s right in front of you and not so subtly.
And that’s life, isn’t it? We live it and we build our memories and we cherish them for what they say about us and our time. And they seem all the more precious when the circumstances that created them drift away, whether it’s a smoke-free outing or an expanse of sand. Best to treasure what we have when we have it.
My grandson and I build at the beach. We construct increasingly elaborate tunnels and channels and walls to see how far we can make the water flow. We know the next tide, the next storm, will leave no trace. But we’ll remember what we did. And we’ll come back and do it again. Smoke or no smoke, sand or less sand.
It’s what we all do. We build memories, then hang on.
n COLUMNIST MICHAEL DOBIE’S opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a retired member of the Newsday editorial board.
