Facing a burgeoning American population and its demand for sprawl-malls, what’s the future of east-end potato fields? The best ally of open land could prove to be the grape. Nothing to me was more surprising on my return than to discover acres of vineyards occupying plots I’d last seen growing potatoes. On the western stretch of State Route 25, the “Main Road” of the North Fork, I noticed a small sign: WELCOME TO LONG ISLAND WINE COUNTRY, and some thirty miles east in Greenport, I came upon another, this one hand-painted: LAST WINERY BEFORE FRANCE.
Between the signs is Cutchogue, an agreeable village with the cut of its jib clearly suggesting Connecticut to which it once belonged. It has a genuine trolley-style diner and a house built in 1649 along with homes, only somewhat newer, shaded by big sugar maples. It’s also the epicenter of Long Island wineries. Recalling a pair of recommendations from a day earlier given by a South Fork sommelier and a wine merchant, I went out to Pellegrini Vineyards. A rather new tasting room beside a courtyard lay at the edge of thirty acres of grapes, both red and white, just then beginning to come into color above a slope not long ago given to tubers. It’s such changes that have led to a Long Island winery or two being dismissed as Château Potato.
Perhaps because I’ve blown out my taste buds with too many New Mexican chiles (as a friend wishes to believe), I like deep and robust flavors—India pale ale, espresso, and, yes, green chiles—and I consider white and pale red wines beverages for palates more delicately inclined. Remembering remarkably undistinguished wines of yesteryear from Upstate New York, I ordered a glass of Pellegrini “table wine,” and what I got was a deeply red robusto that would match up with more pretentious offerings from California. For me, the jokes about Appellation Spud vanished. It was clear that Pellegrini, along with several of the other thirty-five wineries on the east end, had found a splendid combination: glaciated ground with well-drained, sandy soil ideal for vinifera grapes. The best winemakers, realizing the limitations of space on a narrow peninsula, have consequently chosen to work for vintage over gallonage.
Ben Couts, a serious, crew-cut young employee at the winery and a native of nearby Southold, came out to sit with me. Too modestly he said, “Our notion is that if you have a good year in a good vineyard, your wine’s made for you.” He spoke about climatic differences between the North and South forks where, in a strange reversal, the upper side is milder and retains warmth longer than the southern only a few miles across the small bay. Although the North Fork wineries are but a couple of decades old, they have quickly earned respect, and the federal government early recognized Long Island as an American Viticultural Area, a special designation similar to the French appellation.
It’s a pleasant moment to drink a good wine and know with each sip one is helping to establish a promising tradition that can preserve open space. I mentioned a nearby sign:
SAVE THE FARMLAND
LET’S WORK TOGETHER
Couts said, “A lot of locals are thankful this is a vineyard and not a mall.” So there I was that afternoon, a breeze off the Sound bringing in a scent of ripeness from the vineyard, doing my part with each lift of the glass.
Someday hence, if future historians go looking for an emblem of the eastern half of Long Island, they might find it in the Atlantic white cedar that once flourished here but is now rare. Or they could see it in the old Montauk Lighthouse, formerly three-hundred feet from the waves but today less than seventy and still standing only because of much human intervention. The emblem might even be the golden nematode that turned potato fields on western Long Island—in an area once called Island Trees—into dusty, dead patches that after the Second World War became the seventeen-thousand stamped-out-box-house development called Levittown. Maybe, however, a better emblem has emerged: a cluster of ripened grapes.
In another time, New England cleric and educator Timothy Dwight made a journey down the Eastern Seaboard and kept a rich account of his trip. While visiting the western end of Long Island, he commented:
The oyster beds at this place were not long since supposed to be inexhaustible; and supplied, not only the inhabitants of Long-Island, but the inhabitants of New-York, the county of Westchester, and the south shore of New-England, with immense quantities of this valuable fish. Now they have become lean, watery, and sickly, and have declined still more in their numbers than in their quality. Formerly they were large and well flavored, now they are scarcely eatable; and, what is worse, there is reason to fear, that they will soon become extinct.
The Reverend Dwight wrote that passage in 1804, a hundred twenty-five years after Jasper Danckaerts sampled oysters the size of platters.
Sitting with a glass of good red in hand at the edge of a vineyard younger than, say, just about any rock star you can name, it was good to think about a coelacanth-shaped place and to consider how it had continued an harmonious existence three-hundred-million years before the first human walked Long Island. Coelacanths, according to one ichthyologist, are “machines for reading the past backward,” but it seems to me they might also serve to read in the opposite direction. If we discover their secrets, then maybe we can try practicing a few of their ways of continuance.
A DUST BALL UNDER THE BED
On occasion, staying within a mile or two of my writing desk, I go out into my home territory and try to travel it as if a stranger so that I can see familiarities in a different light and from a new angle, commonplaces viewed freshly and examined closely. The point is as much discovery as rediscovery. Surprise can be an intellectually and spiritually salubrious event useful as a monthly or seasonal regimen for helping keep oneself awake to the wonderments lying all about us in familiar if unspied places: that mystery shrub down the lane, a house spider in the corner, a dust ball under the bed, a neighbor’s turn of phrase. Anything that might lead to new awareness. “I have traveled a good deal in Concord,” wrote Thoreau and thereby daily made himself into who he was.
Of Time and a River
ON THE STONE SEA. When I first moved to an old tobacco farm in the hills of southwest Boone County, Missouri, I sowed grasses into the tilled field, planted seedling trees, and cleaned out trash pits, all the while working to the frequent, distant train whistles and rumbles from the tracks of two railways, one on each side of the Missouri River. The Missouri Pacific Railroad (or MoPac, as it was then) lay on the far south bank, and on the north was the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas line (the Katy), this closer track about a mile from the house I was building. A carpenter working on a second-floor deck paused one morning to listen to the Katy pass, and he said, “I know why you want this here porch. It’s so’s you can hear them trains.” Eighteen years later, another carpenter lifted his head to take in the sound of what had become a single and reorganized line, the Union Pacific, and in nearly the same words he too registered the lure of the mellowed voice from distant trains.
From my place I can’t see the engines working their way between St. Louis and Kansas City, between East and West. Their presence is purely aural because the route here lies under steep and wooded bluffs the Missouri has cut through the limestone hills to create a landscape with the subdued beauty common to the lower Middle West, but their whistles are a call to quit work and wander off.
So, when the weather and seasons get themselves up into something pleasant or interesting, I like to leave my writing desk where I’m fogged in by words, and take a walking stick as my third leg, climb the old fescue-riddled hill pasture, its margins lined with sweet williams in the spring, slip under the barbed wire, cross the schoolhouse road, go on through Mister Poe’s gate, on farther, past his tobacco patch, all the way heading west toward the Missouri River, 175 water miles above its junction with the Mississippi north of St. Louis.
The field narrows, a deer snorts and hoists its flag and disappears like a phantom of the old life. Just where the woods edge in are twin earthen Indian mounds, matched but smallish like young breasts. In years past, pot hunters dug into both only to find what turns to dust, something th
ey couldn’t pocket off, yet their craters remain. Beyond is a third mound, larger and also vandalized, and there the woods close: oak, hickory, ash, but mostly sugar maples. For the past half-century the maples have had their sap to themselves, but not far north, a big and rusting iron kettle sits tilted among the trees, a kind of forgotten tombstone to the old sugarmen.
Then a fourth mound, its contours perfect and unviolated. Whatever the Woodland people placed in it a thousand years ago lies, if not quite as they left it, at least undesecrated: perhaps a skeleton facing west and wearing a shell necklace; maybe a platform pipe alongside a broken pot, and charred elk-bones from a funeral feast there too. Only steps farther, the land gives way abruptly to air and drops a hundred feet down a limestone bluff to resume as the overgrown floodplain of the Missouri. In the days of the first white travelers here, the river lay directly below this precipice, so close that someone, mind or spirit gone, could have leaped into the mad currents. When President Jefferson’s Corps of Discovery, on the fifth of June, 1804, poled their keelboat past this point, an Osage woman might have tossed a bouquet of sweet williams down onto William Clark’s head.
Through the middle of the state, the Missouri River has cut a grand avenue two miles wide between calcareous cliffs that are, in truth, an old seabed solidified, a fossilated ocean of stone guiding newer waters. In our time, the channel, a quarter-mile broad, now lies across the valley and mostly obscured by willow, cottonwood, and sycamore. Were John James Audubon once again to pass here aboard the steamboat Omega in quest of beasts for his Quadrupeds of North America or were superb watercolorist Karl Bodmer to reappear aboard the Yellow Stone in search of Plains Indians, they’d find the shores more populated by bobcats than natives; but one day, when the Corps of Engineers and its infernal channelings and dammings have vanished—as they will—the river will return periodically to this east side, for the natural action of the Missouri is like a spouting firehose let loose in a street to thrash from curb to curb.
These upraised, rock seas can give a sense of standing on the edge of a beyond: Here is a jumping-off place, a depot for departures, a spot where a traveler can enter another realm, and that, I suspect, is one reason these headlands hold so many Indian burial mounds. When I sit here alone and put down my binoculars, I see no certain evidence—except my own skin and shoes—that white settlement ever arrived, and I can idle on this petrified sea, before me the river that proved, in the end, to be not much of a route to Cathay and the Indies. In this corridor to other times, it seems I’m carried atop the flow coming down from the western mountains, slipping silently and steadily toward elsewheres. It’s as if the place, powered by gravity, moves, and I sit and travel on no vessel other than the Earth itself.
AN AMERICAN FLOWING. Two hikers, one walking from near Atlantic City to San Diego, the other from Seattle to Savannah, would cross paths at about where I’m standing now along the lower Missouri River, 2,300 miles from its source, half that distance from its conclusion via the Mississippi in the Gulf of Mexico. These waters are carrying away in apparent effortlessness the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains and a few outliers like the Big Snowy Mountains and the Crazy Mountains in Montana—bit by quartzy bit—at an easy, early autumn speed of three miles an hour.
Tomorrow, if the afternoon is warm, when the bluff tops have set themselves up in the colors of the lower end of the spectrum—yellows, oranges, carmines—I’ll take my canoe and sleeping bag and paddle down Perche Creek (the old residents say “Purr-chee Crick”) and onto the river and upstream to Plow Boy Bend, named for a sternwheeler that sank there; abandoned by the river that took it, Plow Boy likely rests broken under a bottomland cornfield. I’ll pull up to a broad and level sandbar swept free of vegetation, its highest point a mere fourteen inches above the autumnal river. I don’t fish the Missouri. I go there just to watch things and be reminded that, after the rock bluffs born of the ancient inland sea this place once was, the river is the oldest thing around; to sit beside its currents and eddies and boils is to rest in a seeming perpetual moment and rub up against the primeval.
Soon after dusk I’ll doze off just beyond the reach of the dark current on sand once mountains now intermixed with eroded plains and prairies once Jurassic gulfs and saurian coastal swamps roamed by brontosaurs, tyrannosaurs, stegosaurs. Those crumbled mountains and dissolved-stone seabeds, and granulated reptiles shaped into something different by the river, so hold the afternoon warmth that sandbars make a fine place to drowse, to snooze atop the outfall of eons, time itself, to wake when a night barge rumbles by and plays its beam-from-hell on me till I rise and wave I’m not a corpse yet.
In those moments of half-sleep, I can imagine among the bankside willows and cottonwoods the Missouria tribe—now gone elsewhere, mostly into the near oblivion of genetic absorptions—and I’ll listen for those who preceded them, the ones who a thousand years ago stacked the bluff tops with small mounds and who painted cliff faces fronting the river with ocher figures and geometric designs. Nearly a century ago, the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad blasted away most of the pictographs, and now its tracks too are gone. But above a large spring that pours almost directly into the Missouri, a few images the color of rust remain. One of them is of an upturned crescent moon holding a small, elliptical disk like an upside-down fermata symbol . It’s a configuration that appears in special locations around the world, and it may represent, as if a picture postcard sent from another millennium, an exploding supernova that appeared in A.D. 1054. Standing under the star-and-moon is a stickman, now nearly vanished, who has watched travelers on river and rails pass, all of them also vanished, leaving him to oversee an engineered and largely unpopulated river bearing a perpetual charge of earthen lees and dregs from a time when human predecessors were tiny rodents dodging massive reptilian footsteps.
The pictograph above the Missouri River in Boone County, Missouri
Under the iron-oxide totem depicting a crescent moon and dying star passed people faceless and some famous: Lewis and Clark and crew searching a newly bought quarter-of-a-nation for a water road to the Orient that they would find does indeed exist—if a boat is no larger than a bucket. Prince Maximilian and Karl Bodmer out to make the finest record ever of the vanishing ways of the Plains tribes; and George Catlin, if less skillfully, also painting the end of an era. Mark Twain bound for the Far West, which he would describe in Roughing It; Francis Parkman on his way to the Oregon Trail, and Stephen Long and John Charles Frémont exploring the western lands in order to seize them and open them like ripe melons.
I’ve found two-dozen written accounts that only hint at the thousands of river travelers who left no record but who went past this very place to change the land and make it for better and worse into America, a country—no matter how you see it—impossible for the people who drew the rusty moon-cradled sun when the language of this sentence didn’t yet exist.
At night, the sandbar becomes another vessel to travel not the river itself but the times of a river full of passages up and down its long American flowing of rock and mud, flotsam and men, shadows and murmurs, all through the night coming and leaving.
WALKING THE KATY LINE. One afternoon, wearied of planting trees, I followed a whistle down to the Katy tracks, passing the ghost village of Providence where all that remained were a couple of fishing shacks, a few rock walls, and the yet-standing stone chimney of the old steamboaters’ hotel. The place was once the river landing for Columbia twelve miles north. I headed up the tracks toward Rocheport, another early nineteenth-century village, this one larger than Providence and still clinging to an existence. The nineteenth-century brick homes and worn shop fronts had been declining ever since the Missouri shifted its course about a century earlier and left the village a mile or so from the river. Some time later, when passenger service ceased and the Katy trains quit stopping at the little depot, Rocheport, like a dozen other former steamboat or railroad villages nearby, had the scarcest of reasons to continue.
; For a couple of thousand years or more, passage up and down the nearly three-hundred-mile-long Missouri River channel between St. Louis and Kansas City had been by a vessel of some sort until the railroads appeared and provided stumble-inducing tracks with their maddening spacing that I tried to match to my strides before dodging a locomotive suddenly coming around a blind bend. A hike over those sleepers was full of easy thrills, and in former days occasionally fatal to a weary or intoxicated hobo. To take the alternate route across and up and down the wooded and poison ivy–laced bluffs, while not impossible—in theory anyway—would be intolerably irksome and done in total trespass. Both rail routes, MoPac and the Katy, lay so close to the bluffs in many places a passenger in an open-windowed dining car could toss a peach pit right into the swirling river, and ripping thunderstorms brought down rocks like hail onto passing boxcars and cabooses.
One month after my first track-hike, news came that the Katy was soon to cease its river route across Missouri and was about to sell the line: rails, ties, bridges, the track bed itself. No more Katy Flyer. Even before the company began pulling up the steel and wood, a struggle for the vacated right-of-way broke out. Abutting landowners, the most vehement of them a neighbor of mine, took guidance from a so-called property-rights group and erected barriers across the narrow rail bed, and extremists among them promised to shoot any “trespassers” hiking “their” land.