Fire Island, or, the place I think and talk about too much

The midnight musings that prevent me from sleeping often involve the recognition that places are fleeting and temporary, the place of Fire Island always at the forefront of this cycle of thoughts. Fire Island stands in great juxtaposition with the city, especially in the summertime. 
It is a place that seems from a different time period entirely, a frozen relic that somehow exists without infiltration from the outside world, where you arrive by ferry boat and where cars are prohibited; beyond walking, bicycles prevail as the sole form of transportation. There is not a single public road. 

Fire Island is a barrier Island that is 32 miles long, and no more than a 1⁄4 of a mile wide in its widest parts. 26 of those 32 miles are a protected National Seashore. The town that I live in is so narrow that when I was younger I used to try to ride my bike from the ocean to the bay holding my breath the entire way. It felt attainable, somehow. We would perch on the roof of my house with outstretched arms pretending we could simultaneously touch both the bay and the ocean if we tried hard enough.


The preservation efforts by the National Parks Service have maintained a reasonably unaltered ecosystem that, as a child, allowed me to escape to a natural world away from the cars and congestion and chaos of the city. 
There are thick forests accessible only from climbing up steep sand dunes, and beach grass grows wildly, and deer roam free, and it feels as though humans aren’t overly invasive.


It is not by any means untouched by human hands. Piping plovers once regularly roamed the beach when I was younger and now they are seldom seen. Wild blueberries previously densely scattered the island, but the increased deer population eradicated them. And yet, it feels oftentimes that humans are in the minority there.
 It is a tiny sliver of natural space seemingly unaltered by both time and largely industrialization.

Come hurricane Sandy a few years ago, this place that I associate with open access to this natural world, suddenly seemed entirely fleeting for the very reason I valued it so much. 
Though there are sand dunes, which prevented what could have been a far worse destruction, there is no constructed protection for the island and for the homes scattered along the shoreline.

Seeing pictures of the destruction, and going back myself once the weather had settled robbed me of words. In my previous post I spoke about the wonderful humbling feeling of the enormous insignificance that accompanies stargazing. In this moment I felt the sting of my own human smallness.

People predict that it won’t be long until the island is submerged underwater entirely. As much as that indescribably saddens me, I wouldn’t be able to see Fire Island as the same place if it had concrete barrier walls against the ocean, or any manmade construction against the changing climate. I can acknowledge in theory that places, like everything, are not permanent. But in practice, the thought of seeing this place fade away makes me lose sleep.