The Secret Service and some shifty business
Some of Georgica Pond is missing! When you consider the extraordinary prices people will pay to live on this pond, losing or misplacing even a small part is pretty serious business.
I first noticed the loss on the Tuesday evening before President Clinton’s visit, when I went over to Michael and Lisa Schultz’s house for dinner. The Schultzes live in the Georgica Association, on Eel Cove, and when I walked to the back of their property I saw that the pond waters were down quite a bit. The shoreline was five or six feet out from where it had been the day before, and the sandy banks were exposed. The draining of the pond was a big puzzle to all of us at dinner that night.
Eel Cove is where Association members moor their beetle cats, those sturdy little sailboats from Cape Cod, about twelve feet long with a single main sail and a keel suitable for the shallow waters of Georgica Pond. On Tuesday morning, when Michael saw the pond draining, he and neighbor Mary Petrie undertook a rescue effort to move the boats. With a rowboat, they towed each beetle cat out of Eel Cove into the deeper waters of the open pond, thus saving them from being beached in the mud.
Draining Georgica Pond may sound like a major engineering achievement—but it’s not. Anyone with some energy and a shovel can do it—and rowdy teenagers as well as homeowners with soggy lawns and wet basements have been known to try, and sometimes succeed.
The ocean breaks through the beach periodically, introducing salt into the fresh water, and bringing migrating fish into the pond for breeding. The action enables an ecosystem that produces vast quantities of finfish that eventually swim out to sea. If nature doesn’t do it, the Town Trustees open the pond on occasion by channeling a gut across the beach. Since the pond is several feet above sea level, pond water drains out to the ocean. When it happens in September or October, you can see literally millions of small fish on their journey to the oceans of the world. But the pond is not normally let out in mid-summer.
I made some calls the next day to find out what was going on. It seems that on Monday night someone had breached a small sand dike that the trustees had constructed in June and that was enriched lately by southwest winds. Neither Village Hall nor the Town Trustees knew who did it, but the Secret Service was a prime suspect. It clearly improved security at the Spielberg house on Georgica Cove, where the President was staying. No one could launch a boat from the public landings or navigate to the head of the cove, where the house is located, for innocent sightseeing or more sinister reasons. But could—and would—the Secret Service do it without coordinating with local authorities?
Jim McCaffrey, a trustee, told me that the Feds probably had no idea that the trustees even exist, much less exercise rights going back to a patent from James II in 1686. Lars Svanberg, who rents canoes and kayaks from Main Beach Surf Shop for use on the pond, is convinced it was the Secret Service that upset the pond’s ecosystem and ruined his rental business for next couple of weeks. And a lot of the people I spoke to in town think it is too coincidental with the Presidential visit. We might never know the truth. After all, they are the Secret Service, aren’t they? They’re not going to chat about it at cocktail parties with the rest of us.
The results:
1. Probably the end of an excellent blue-claw crabbing season in the pond.
2. Loss of some, but no means all, of the young fish growing up in the pond.
3. Severe but temporary difficulty in launching boats from the Montauk Highway access or from private homes on the coves, and a setback for catboat races.
4. About two more weeks of not so pretty mud and sand where there was sparking blue water last week.
5. A $1,000 reward from the East Hampton Town Trustees for information on the culprit.
6. A sincere hope locally that the powers in Washington will stay in Washington.