[Journal entry for October 4, 2019] I left Stony Brook New York at 9AM and drove east to Montauk. I had given a presentation at the university the day before and decided to take a side trip before driving home. The traffic along Sunrise Highway (Route 27), as it traverses Long Island’s south fork, was surprisingly bad for mid-morning on a weekday, and I crept through the towns of Southhampton, Water Mill, East Hampton and Amagansett. I stopped briefly at what claimed to be an overlook along the highway in Hither Hills State Park, in western Montauk, but the Scrub Oak forest must have grown considerably since it was built, so I found no views. Driving further east, I paid eight dollars to park in a lot built on the high ground near the lighthouse in Montauk Point State Park.

My family used to vacation every year in Montauk when I was a kid, and I knew the area well back then, but I had not been back for many years. The parking lot has been expanded, the bathroom building modernized, and a small museum has been built near the lighthouse, but otherwise the area looked much the same I as remembered it. Back in the Nineteen Sixties, the front page of the local newspaper featured a cartoon predicting the lighthouse’s falling into the sea in 1999. The prediction was wrong, the lighthouse still stands. I could see why as I followed a winding path from the road, through waist-high Scrub Oak bushes, down to the beach. The readily-erodible glacial sediment of the bluff on which the lighthouse was built has now been reinforced with a veneer of stout rocks, each six to eight feet across, that form a skirt that protects the bluff from being eroded away. Very conveniently, the top edge of the skirt has been carefully leveled, creating a pedestrian path that is level but with sizeable gaps between adjacent stones.

I walked this path westward, past several people surf-fishing. Surf-casting was my father’s favorite vacation activity. He spent many days each year standing at the water’s edge, periodically being doused by waves, while flinging a fishing lure out into the sea by means of a long, springy rod in quest of the elusive Striped Bass. He caught perhaps two or three per season. Today’s anglers were carrying on his tradition without advancing its efficiency; none caught any fish during the two hours I was walking the beach.

After crossing the rock skirt, I climbed up onto the bluff to the edge of the chain link fence that encloses the lighthouse, so that I could get a good view of it. It hasn’t changed much: the octagonal tower is still painted red a white and World War Two vintage submarine lookout tower next to it is still pained white. A concrete pillbox lies stranded in the surf below the skirt, tilted over onto its side. I think that when I was a kid it was still at the top of the bluff, but its walls were beginning to overhang.

I then walked the beach westward for a mile or so. While it has a few stretches of beach stand, much of it is covered with stones that are a foot or more in diameter that are weathering out of the yellow-brown glacial sediments that make up the hills of Long Island and that are exposed in the bluffs above the beach. Walking is fairly tedious, except for a narrow strip right at the base of the bluff, where sand and clay washed down by the rain has still not been washed away. A little Goldenrod, now in bloom, is growing at the base of the bluff and even sometimes on it, especially where springs have moistened the sediment.

The bluff varies in height from less than ten feet to more than fifty. Some of the taller sections have been sculpted into towers with ridges that look like buttresses.

The surf crashes up onto the rocky beach. Once I ventured too close and an unanticipated wave washed over my feet, wetting my shoes and pant legs. I hiked westward to the third cove, one with large building (mansion?) atop a high section of bluff. There I found a fishing lure – my father would have called it a plug – that had been lost by some surfcaster and washed up onto the beach. I picked it up, carried it back with me, and gave it to the first angler that I passed. My find caused me to smile, for one of the first time I accompanied my father on one of his surf-fishing trips, I also found such a lure.

I found a track that led up a gulley to a hiking trail in the scrubland atop the bluff. I followed it back east, past several viewpoints that offered terrific views of the bluff, beach and sea, and when I approached its end, of the lighthouse. The sky, which has started out clear and breezy, was now mostly clouded over, and the wind was bringing a chill. The sea was extremely choppy, especially in the direction of Block Island, the bluffs of which I could see in the distance.

I stopped for lunch at Nonna Mia Pizza, in a strip mall off of Montauk Highway in Shirley New York. The nearby Sunrise Highway / William Floyd Parkway interchange has been rebuilt since my last visit and is now unbelievably complicated!

About two hours of hiking.