Although I technically live on an island, this island is not the typical one most people imagine. There are no palm trees here for instance, and its certainly not deserted. It is about 120 miles long and about 20 miles wide at its widest point. It is big, but not big enough to hold all the folks who want to live on it (in my opinion). After all, three million people live in the two geographically largest counties of Nassau and Suffolk which doesn’t even count the folks who live in Queens and Brooklyn, boroughs of NYC which are also on Long Island but for some reason are not usually counted as living here! If you count these five million, I am just one of 8 million people who want to share the natural resources, roads and parks of this island. Luckily, I live far enough East that I don’t have to deal with alot of the congestion (unless I want to leave in which case I must battle for road space to cross one of the many bridges into the city proper, or for a spot on the massively overpriced ferry to Connecticut), There’s talk about building a tunnel to Connecticut which would run underwater the 15 miles of Long Island Sound, but I have mixed feelings about that. The thinking is that Suffolk County, the least congested county on the Island (and where I live) would become a vacation spot for rich folks from Connecticut who want to play on the ocean beaches creating the same kind on traffic woes the rest of the Island is already burdened with here too.

Living inland about 5 miles, I don’t get the daily dose of sea breeze that a lot of the wealthier inhabitants do. In fact, since the kids came along, I think I’ve been to the beach proper (Fire Island - the barrier beach) maybe twice. I used to go after work all the time. If I wasn’t at an ocean beach, we were having a campfire on the north shore with good doses of inland parks in between. An email about the beach from a friend spurred me on to pile the kids into the car and catch some bay breeze after work on Friday. We grabbed some sandwiches and headed down in Bellport to a small park we saw marked on the map at the end of a residential road. The parking lot for the park might have held 7 cars, but the entrance had long ago been chained off with uninviting rusty gates which seemed to have been run into several times over. There was space only for about two cars at the end of the road, but the place was marked as a town park, and we have a town sticker, so we were undeterred. It was a small park, with old rusty swing sets and a merry-go-round and picnic benches. A nice wooden dock and about 200 feet of bay front to walk along stuffed in between the heavily fenced and gated bay front homes. Each home with its own mixture of sailboat, powerboat or catamaran tied up in the "yard", which for them was a sandy beach with loads of brown, drying seagrass with bits of broken horseshoe crab mixed in. We could see a couple large sail boats and a power boat crisscross in the bay against the hazy outline of fire island in the distance. The breeze carried the salt scent of of the sea. A man and his son bicycled into the park with their fishing poles and took up positions on the dock. We ate our lunches and Emily and I played on the swings, walked the beach, and looked for horseshoe crabs in the seagrass. We eventually walked out on the dock too, though I held her hand pretty tightly and had a constant fear she would break away to lean out over the edge too far. The sun was going down and the mosquitoes were coming out when we decided to pack it in and go home, but we had been the only people besides the fishermen to enjoy that bit of sea breeze, at least that bit which crossed the 200 feet of sea front someone so kindly decided to leave access to.