Legends of Fire Island Beach and the South Side

Fire Island Beach is a barrier of sand, stretching for twenty miles along the south coast of Long Island, and separating the Great South Bay from the Atlantic ocean.

To reach it, you must make a sail of from three to seven miles, and once upon it, you find it a wild, desolate, solitary spot, wind-searched and surf-pounded.

Its inner shore is covered with a growth of tide-wet sedge, with here and there a spot where dry meadow comes down to make a landing-place.

The outline of this inner shore is most irregular, curving and bending in and out and back upon itself, making coves and points and creeks and channels, and often pushing out in flats with not water enough on them at low tide to wet your ankles.

A third of the distance across the Beach, the meadow ends and sand begins. This slopes gradually up for another third of the distance, to the foot of the sand hills, which seem tumbled into their places by some mighty power, sometimes three tiers of them deep, sometimes two, and sometimes only one.

These sand hills are the most striking features of the Beach. The biggest of them are not more than sixty feet high, yet so hard a feat is it to climb to the top, and so extended is the view below you--on one side the wide Bay, on the other, the ocean stretching its restless surface to the horizon--that you feel yourself upon an elevation tenfold as high.

Through these hills the wind makes a great galloping, whirling out deep bowl-shape hollows among them, and piling the shifting sand upon their summits. Now and then you will notice a hill with its shoulder knocked off by the wind, and a ton of sand gone no one can tell where. In every storm their contour changes, and yet their general formation is so similar at all times that the change is seldom thought of. A coarse spear-like grass finds a sparse growth upon them, and does what it can to hold the sand in place; but it has a hard time of it, as its blades buried to their tips or its naked roots often testify.

But there is one part of this Beach that is ever much the same. It is a broad, shelving strip of sand between the hills and the sea, where the tide rises and falls, pounding and grinding, year in and year out--the play-ground and the battle-ground of the surf.

On a summer's day, I have seen this surf so low and quiet that one could launch a sharpie upon it, single-handed, and come ashore again without shipping a quart of water. At other times it is a terror to look at--a steady break of waves upon the outer bar, with row after row coming in, rearing and plunging as they strike the shore. In such a sea there is no launching yawl or surf-boat, and no coming ashore.

When the tide is on the right moon and the wind has blown a gale from the southeast, the strand is entirely submerged, and people upon the main shore three miles away can see the surf breaking over the Beach hills.

Such a riot of sea and wind strews the whole extent of beach with whatever has been lost or thrown overboard, or torn out of sunken ships. Many a man has made a good week's work in a single day by what he has found while walking along the Beach when the surf was down.

"The Captain" knew all this and had patrolled that Beach scores of times.

Ten years had passed since the first time which laid the habit of wandering along the surf-shore apparently in search of whatever the sea had cast up. Sometimes a spar, sometimes sheets of copper torn from a wreck and carried by a high surf far along the strand, sometimes a vessel's gilded name, at other times only scattered drift-wood were the rewards of these lonely walks.

People about the neighborhood where the Captain lived, knew that at one time or another he brought these relics from the Beach; yet no one supposed that the finding of them was related to his life in any other way than mere happen so. Anyone who went upon the Bay at all was likely to land at the Beach. Once there, it was a natural impulse to go across and walk along the ocean side; for, at that time, early in the thirties, it was widely believed that the sea had wealth, and often threw it up upon the shore. Never, however, was it in the least surmised by the Captain's neighbors that these solitary excursions had woven themselves in as a part of the texture of his life.

Had, though, these good neighbors been quick to perceive they would have noticed one characteristic of the Captain, sufficiently manifest at times--that he was always in the best of spirits when a storm was raging. At such times he had been heard to remark, "This is a wild day, my friend, but just such days is needed."

And it was not till years afterward that neighbor Rob'son actually understood the import of a strange remark made to him by the Captain one stormy night, when the wind blew fiercely from the south-east, and drove aslant the thin rain which the low scudding black clouds let down.

Mr. Rob'son had been belated and was hurrying to get home. The Captain, meeting him, called out in the most cheerful of tones, "Hello, is that you, neighbor Rob'son?" and giving him time for merely a bare "Yes," he continued, "This is a monstrous night. Do you hear the ocean pound over on the Beach? There'll be tons of sand shifted to-night--tons of it; more'n all the men out on a gen'ral trainin' day could shovel in a year. You're in a hurry, I see, neighbor. I ain't. I'm in no haste to get in-doors. A great night like this fits me. Somehow it puts new spirit into me."

Was it the storm that made the Captain's heart so buoyant and his mind so cheerful? or was it because such days and nights made more certain the realization of that secret hope which had possessed him for years?

So secret was this hope that even his wife surmised nothing of it; for, happily, she was not one of those unfortunate women who are endowed with satanic intuition, and whose lives thereby are made miserable until they have followed up and chased into clear daylight all the dusky suspicions that flit, perchance, into their minds.

But although a matter-of-fact wife, she had, it must be confessed, noticed more closely than her neighbors the effect a storm had upon her husband; and she had learned to put off until such a time those various little requests about the house, which appear in a man's eyes so great a matter to get about, and which he usually puts off and shirks with an unaccountable dread. Every little change, therefore, she needed, of driving a nail here, putting a shelf there, or the mending perhaps of a churn-dasher, he cheerfully made at those times; and she would often remark to him, "It's astonishin' how much you'll get done on a stormy day, and the harder the storm the more you'll manage to get through with."

If, however, these odds and ends were not finished during the storm, they were suffered to go over, as the Captain was certain to leave home early the next morning; and to any neighbor who chanced to inquire for him, the reply was made that he had gone upon the Bay.

"Gone upon the Bay." That expression was in those days a most convenient one for a bay-man. The persistent following of the Bay for a livelihood at the present time causes each man to hold closely to one kind of work. But then, there was no telling when a man set out from home how his day would be spent--he might go oystering or gunning, he might cast his nets or waste his time sailing in search of what he deemed better luck. Varying conditions of wind and weather and tide offered, one day, one thing, and the next day, something else; and what use a bay man would make of his day grew out of these conditions and his own ambition.

The Captain, however, on the morning after a storm, paid no attention to what these conditions offered till he had visited the Beach and sought again the realization of his hope. He never failed to be on there early on such mornings, to see what the wind and the sea had done.

And so it turned out upon this very day. There had been a sudden and violent storm the previous night, and the Captain had crossed the Bay and was making one of his solitary patrols of the Beach.

Across his shoulder was thrown his gun, as this he always carried with him. And although he took no silver with him, as certain gunners were known to do, to substitute for lead should there occur any emergency bearing the suggestion of witchery about it, yet he felt, in some way which he did not care to examine, more comfortable with his gun in his hand. He knew well all those stories of witchcraft and mystery about the Beach which superstition and imagination had set afloat in various localities along the "South Side." How the witches would come at night and rattle the latch upon old Uncle Payne's gunning house, and how the owner fastened the latch with a shilling piece, crept in the window, and invariably loaded his gun with a silver sixpence to blaze away at these midnight revellers, should he hear the slightest indications of their freaks. And how gunners, taking the surest aim at the wild duck that flew to their decoys, had oftentimes been baffled in hitting them, finding, in such instances, the shot roll out of the barrel as the gun was lowered. And how many a gunner carried a lucky-bone in his pocket as an amulet against such sinister misfortune.

He had heard, too, of that sheltered spot on the north-west side of Watch Hill, inclosed by a clump of old bayberry bushes and low cedars, where searchers for money had occasionally gone with a mineral rod; and who, whenever they began to probe for treasure, were always frightened away by a huge black snake that wriggled itself up the stem of a bush, and stretched out at full length along the top of the foliage, darting its tongue and hissing as if guardian of the enchanted spot. And more marvelous still, the tradition of a stone, circular and flat, bearing upon its surface the image of a man's face, that had at times been run upon, near the Point of Woods, but which never could be found when deliberate search was made for it.

While the Captain thought he put no real credence in these stories, yet he felt more or less apprehensive when upon the Beach. A sense of mystic awe, which he could not explain always possessed him there, and notwithstanding his disbelief in witchcraft, he would sooner have abandoned his quests than forego the companionship of his gun.

All the morning long, that idea which had come to him with strange force ten years ago, and which had engendered the secretly cherished hope, was uppermost in his mind. So strongly did it dominate his thoughts when he was alone by the ocean that it had forced itself into words. Over and over again he stated it as he talked to himself, adding this time one tradition, the next time another. No one was near to hear it. The very utterance cheered him and fed his hope.

Becoming somewhat tired in his patrol, for he had already walked fully seven miles, he ascended one of the sand dunes to reconnoitre the Bay, and assure himself whether any boat was making towards this part of the Beach. He saw only two or three sails abreast of Patchogue, and these were bound westward. Feeling, therefore, that he could take the time, he threw himself down to rest.