Escapades on Fire Island

By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

IT'S a barefoot society, car-free and carefree, but as long as anyone can remember, Fire Island, the skinny sandspit stretched along the underside of Long Island, has had its distinctive hierarchy. At the top are the natives, flinty souls who live year round on the 32-mile-long barrier island between the end of Robert Moses State Park and Moriches Inlet, where the Hamptons begin. The natives, it is said, look down on the homeowners and other summer folk who seasonally throng the roughly two dozen communities. The homeowners turn up their noses at the renters. The renters disdain the groupers who chip in for housing shares. And all feel superior to the day-trippers who sail in on the morning ferries and sail out again in the evening.

Which left us somewhere near the bottom -- hotel guests on Fire Island. Yes, there are hotels on Fire Island. No, you wouldn't generally pick them over a house. But between a hotel and nothing, the choice was clear. For five days, my wife and I and our two girls sampled the many delights of New York's quasi Key West with its own rich social and cultural history. We breathed the same fresh salt air and patronized the same restaurants and shops as any third-generation islander. We splashed in the same roiling surf, hunted for the same horseshoe crabs and shells on long stretches of deserted beach, strolled and bicycled the same few blocks between the bay and beach and took the same water taxis to the same outlying communities. And we felt entirely welcome. Indeed, there is probably only one restrictive community, Point O'Woods, where outsiders, whether natives or off-islanders, may get the cold shoulder; but even here we carried out a beach-based incursion without incident.

Yet a word of caution. To book a hotel on Fire Island on a summer weekend is to cast one's fate not to the winds but the singles. A commune of wildly celebrating youth in a Fire Island group house can be noisy, but when the party is compressed into a thin-walled hotel room, the disruption can be truly hellish, as we found out on our last night in Ocean Bay Park. Still, some hotel managements are laxer than others. And Friday and Saturday nights are definitely wilder; weekdays can be positively idyllic.

The first thing many new visitors want to know is where the name Fire Island comes from. The truth is, nobody knows. Some have linked it to the signal fires of whalers or wreckers who tried to lure ships ashore for plunder, or to the onetime fiery stands of poison ivy. Others say it grew out of a misreading on early Dutch maps of vier, or four, islands. Either way, the name, accurately enough, evokes blissful summer vistas of burning sands and blazing sun as well as the constant peril of fire.

Resort development began in the 1890's with the establishment of a Chautauqua Assembly, a movement for Christian betterment through learning and the arts, in what became Point O'Woods. In the early 1900's, just to the west, developers bought up tracts and began selling vacation lots to Brooklynites and other confined city folk for what became the village of Ocean Beach, Fire Island's de facto capital. Served by growing ferry links across Great South Bay, birds of a feather flocked to like-minded communities: boat owners to Saltaire, fishery workers to Seaview, casino-lovers to Ocean Bay Park, families to Kismet. Homosexuals driven from other communities found a welcome in Cherry Grove, creating one of the earliest centers of gay life in the nation.

(A thumbnail history is provided in the paperback ''Fire Island: 1650's-1980's'' by Madeleine C. Johnson, published by Shoreland Press of Mountainside, N.J., and available for $13.95 at the Ocean Beach Historical Society on Bayview Walk.)

Stars and Salons

Stars of the Broadway stage, stalwarts of the Algonquin Round Table, artists, bohemians and assorted hangers-on soon found their way to the quirky seasonal salons of Fire Island, where the politics were often decidedly leftist, and a Marxist group house might well blackball an applicant rumored to be a Trotskyite. Irving Berlin, Fanny Brice, Clifford Odets, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Jimmy Durante, Woody Allen, Lee Strasberg and Marilyn Monroe all made their way there, as did Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, who honed their ''2,000-Year-Old Man'' routine on dinner audiences. And everyone mobilized in the early 1960's to thwart Robert Moses's plan to build an access road through Fire Island.

OUR TOWNS; On Fire Island, Sometimes the Share Goes Out of Sharing

By Evelyn Nieves

KENNY FUNK'S last three summers passed in a whir of beach days and kamikaze nights. There were Grateful Dead marathons and parties with 200 happy-houred guests stuffed onto decks made for 20. "The best times," he said.

He blames himself for this year. Instead of renting space in a beach share as usual, he and two friends decided to run a share house. This is like going from happy camper to camp counselor, or Eagle Scout to den mother. It's sobering, anyway. "The most overwhelming experience of my life," Mr. Funk said.

It was supposed to be fun. In shares, 20 or so adults -- 10 or so per weekend -- return to the ways of college life. It's share and share alike -- rooms, food bills, chores. Somebody or somebodies, namely the leaseholders, set the ground rules and make sure everything runs smoothly. In principle, this is fairly simple.

"Like the Fourth of July is the biggest beach weekend of the season," Mr. Funk said. "So the rule is everyone in the house could come, but no guests." A nice rule -- while it lasted.

"We've made exceptions," he said, after introducing two holiday guests lounging on his deck.

Fact is, juggling the hundred wants and needs of two dozen people is like trying to run across a floor full of marbles. You can make it, but watch out. Exceptions have ruled since he and his buddies laid out $20,000 to rent "Seaclusion," a five-bedroom bungalow camouflaged by pine trees and shrubs. They figured on renting 20 shares in this prime Fire Island community in no time. They would schedule the weekends, arrange maid service, set minimal rules. For the trouble, they would get free shares. But they were stymied from Step One.

"IT was really hard to rent the shares," said Mr. Funk, a 34-year-old graphic artist who lives in Manhattan. They began looking in March for compatible people with an ad in the Village Voice.

"At first, it was, like, really fun," he said. "We'd meet these three or four people at a bar on a Sunday and spend three hours drinking with them. We would tell them our interests -- Grateful Dead and whatnot. If we were lucky, they would call back and say for some reason or other they were going to another house."

This happened, he added, "about 20 times."

Mr. Funk's girlfriend, Nancy Goodman, said he began taking the whole share thing too seriously.

"It was beginning to affect our relationship," she said. "He couldn't stop talking about Fire Island. Whenever we got on the phone, the first thing he mentioned was the house. I told him I was really sick of this."

Until two weeks before the season started on Memorial Day, they still hadn't sold half the shares. "We thought we were going to have to shell out $3,000 each," Mr. Funk said. Luckily, people who I was in a house with before would wind up going into the house." With 24 people renting shares (most have quarter shares, or five weekends), 13 are people he knew.

"We ended up with full shares for $1,000," Mr. Funk said.

"But we really didn't want full shares," said Dave Barnett, one of his fellow leaseholders. "I don't really want to spend every weekend here."

They made big mistakes, Mr. Barnett added. "If people said they wanted blocks of time, we'd agree. We ended up giving weekends away."

THEY think the worst is over now. The house is working out pretty well. On Sunday afternoon, house members were lifting dumbbells off the deck, lounging on the deck, watching the sports channel in the living room, mixing drinks in the kitchen, listening to music in their bedrooms, waiting for a happy-hour party to start. The mix is 11 women, 13 men, ages 26 to 46.

"In our house," Mr. Funk said, "everybody gets along very well. It's a good mix. Everybody's a little nutty."

In a way, running a house has been a hassle because he doesn't like to make rules. There are shares with strict rules about who can visit when and what time you eat. "We really want to be loose," he said, ready for a happy-hour party in his "Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" T-shirt and cutoffs. "We're not like camp counselors or mothers."

But he takes the big rules very seriously. "One of the cardinal sins of a summer share is that people in a house aren't supposed to date," he said. "The rule is A.L.D. -- After Labor Day." He admits he has committed the offense in the past. This year, he wouldn't let his girlfriend take a share in his house, even when he was desperate for renters.

"If you fight," he said, "it can ruin the house."

He worries. About how much fun people are having, whether the house is locked properly, how much toilet paper is left. On Saturday, he schlepped $100 worth of steaks and chops from Manhattan for a house barbecue "because food on Fire Island is so expensive." When a housemate complained that the ice maker was broken, he laughed. Then he frowned. "Does that mean I'm supposed to call someone about it?"

Birdwatching in Fire Island

The Eastern Towhee is one of the summer resident birds that breeds on Fire Island. Fire Island's barrier island habitats and location on the Atlantic Flyway make this a good home for both resident and migratory birds. The tidal marsh on the Great South Bay, especially at Watch Hill, is a good place to look for waterfowl, herons and egrets, and red-winged blackbirds. The Sunken Forest, a mature maritime forest at Sailors Haven, provides dense cover for migrating warblers. Other birds, such as the towhee, can be heard rustling the leaves on the forest floor. Near the Fire Island Lighthouse, the fall migration of hawks is monitored by the Fire Island Raptor Enumerators (FIRE) from September through mid-November. Varied habitats of the William Floyd Estate include woods and fields, creeks and salt marsh, providing additional opportunities for bird watching. While the Double-crested Cormorant is seen on the Great South Bay from spring through fall, the Great Black-backed Gull is abundant all year long. Local Audubon Society groups participate in "citizen science" by conducting annual Christmas Bird Count censuses and the Summer Breeding Bird Census in parts of the park. The National Audubon Society and Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology sponsor an annual Great Backyard Bird Count in February. Participants can log on and get the easy-to-follow instructions and checklists needed to submit a report from their own backyard or local park or refuge. If Fire Island National Seashore is a part of your "backyard," join the count and provide your observations. Great Backyard Bird Count www.birdsource.org/gbbc For the rare bird alert recording for New York City and Long Island Region (New York State Ornithological Association's Kingbird Region 10), phone: 212-979-3070 Occasionally uncommon birds like the whimbrel are sighted in the park. For More Information Learn more about Fire Island National Seashore's birdlife. Join a guided bird walk. Several programs are scheduled during the spring and fall at the Fire Island Lighthouse and at the William Floyd Estate. Great Backyard Bird Walk at the William Floyd Estate Saturday, February 14, 2009 International Migratory Bird Day Event: Birdwatching in the Fields and Woods of the William Floyd Estate Saturday, May 9 & 17, 2009 9:00 a.m. - Noon 631-399-2030 A World of Birds: Migration to Central America Saturday, August 15, 7 pm program at the Fire Island Lighthouse by International Volunteer with National Park Service Park Flight Program Autumn Bird Walk at the William Floyd Estate Sunday, November 22, 2009 9:00 a.m. 631-399-2030