Carl Safina

My dog Kenzie, a 50-pound black wolf—more-or-less—goes loping along the shore as is her custom, energetically invested in the obvious truth that all adventure lies at the tip of one’s nose. The familiar is always the exotic, and if you can detect the scent and follow it, it’ll take you far. And soon, as always, she’s way ahead.

Today we woke to glass-calm water. The Sound is stretched taut to the far points of land. Out across the open water, the sea melds with haze and blends skyward without horizon. On a morning this placid and beautiful, dying and going to heaven wouldn’t be worth it.

A few years ago, I became “owner” of a beach cottage that had fallen into such disrepair I could afford it. One can own an apartment or a condo or a suburban home, but when a place is already old, and if it sits amid dune grass and wild beach-plums, and a box turtle comes confidently seeking the blackberries it has known about for decades, you feel—at least I feel—like the property has many owners and I’m just the newest tenant.

As much as I admire Henry Beston’s classic The Outermost House, this is not a story about getting a little place out past the edge of the world and finding one’s self in the solitude and the peace. This story is, though, partly about going home, about immersing in rhythms that come naturally. As a kid I’d stalk shallow waters with a net in my hand, captivated by shadows of tiny sand-colored fishes fanning away from me. Despite added detail and time, I’m still the minnow-chasing boy.

But this story’s also partly about a kind of heartbreak for a world that remains so vitally unaware of how imperiled it is. The more I sense the miracle, the more intense appears the tragedy. The only way to feel better, then, is to appreciate less, which would of course feel worse. So, let’s put a positive spin on it and say that for now the miracle is winning.

Because no one is threatened by what’s right and what’s working, the beauty usually goes overlooked. Like songbirds mobbing an owl, we focus on what’s worrying us. The daily miraculous seldom makes the news. Anyway, we are too cynical, disenchanted, insecure and—mainly—too blind to see the exquisite vitality. We are not stationed in the right places, not oriented. Seeing it means trying, while aware of what’s breaking, to keep an eye on what’s working. So this story is also about the tension between how those things mistakenly called “the real world”—though they are entirely artificial—intrude continually on the real real world. In a real place, the mysteries of ages pile thick with enduring truths and complex beauties.

And that’s why I was looking for a house. I’d hoped to find a home in a certain fishing village. Well, the fishing village was turning into a resort, with prices to match. The next town was long-since unaffordable, too. So one day I ended up down a road through a marsh popular with mosquitoes, looking at a dilapidated summer cottage with no windows and a square hole in the roof with no skylight. It was bright—and certainly airy—but humidity posed a problem. Some of the inner walls had been torn from the studs, freeing a bloom of insulation and leaving exposed wires in a puddle under the skylight hole. Better houses have been demolished. I wisely dismissed that house as a wreck, out-of-the-question.

I walked across the street, over the dune, and got a glimpse of the water. A five-minute beach-walk took me to where a broad, shallow bay communicates with the Sound through a deep, fast-flowing channel about as wide as I might be able to cast a heavy lure. Even in the late winter when I first laid eyes on it, I could see that this cut would be fishy in springtime. The house said I’d be crazy. The place said I was home.

It’s called Lazy Point. I’ve been told the name derives from ne’er-do-well baymen who’d come to squat on worthless land. Whether or not that’s true, I don’t much care; I like the name.

In summer the place is idyllic; it can make anyone lazy. But in winter it takes effort to get comfortable with the gales. I once read that the incessant howl of wind on the prairie could drive settlers mad. I couldn’t really understand how—until my first winter alone at Lazy Point.

The cottages sit on a flat peninsula of scrubby pines between the Sound and bay. That fishy channel I mentioned; I call it “the Cut.” Along the bay’s south shore runs the railroad, then the main road—two lanes—then high dunes, then the sandy ocean beach that runs for miles. In winter it’s deserted and I have it to myself. We call the ocean beach “the south side.” And beyond the ocean: more ocean, to the blue horizon, beyond to the edge of the continental shelf, 75 miles away under 600 feet of water, and then the deep sea, the Gulf Stream, and the rest of the world. You can feel it.

The harbor town is about five miles east; another six miles get you to the Point, a defiantly reared-up, jutting jaw of land—exposed to the open ocean on the south, and exposed on the north to the full-face force of all nor’easters. Forming the break between New England and the Mid-Atlantic, it’s the southernmost rocky beach on the entire East Coast.

None other than Walt Whitman enjoyed the exact same spot: “The eastern end of Long Island, and the Peconic bay region, I knew quite well—sail’d more than once around Shelter Island, and down to Montauk—spent many an hour on Turtle hill by the old light-house, on the extreme point, looking out over the ceaseless roll of the Atlantic. I used to like to go down there and fraternize with the blue-fishers, or the annual squads of sea-bass takers.” Well, a century-plus later, “the fishers” includes me.

The point itself, with its headland, lighthouse, bluffs, buffeting breezes, surging tides, and crashing waves, is a place of real power. All this energy draws and holds great numbers of seabirds and other ocean life. The place is a great cauldron of vitality. In the circle of a year you may see around here everything ranging from arctic seals whose summer home is Canadian pack ice, to tropical reef fishes that have ridden up from the Caribbean in flickering tongues of warm water. Some, like the terns that often lead me to dinner, breed here. Others, like harlequin-costumed Ruddy Turnstones migrate right through here. Sometimes, thousands of miles from home, I run into migrants I’d last seen here at Lazy Point. They all remind me that the world is both much bigger than Lazy Point and yet surprisingly small. “I have traveled a great deal in Concord,” reported Henry David Thoreau. And how much greater might he have thought his travels if he’d lived at Lazy Point instead. The coast and its migrants bring to Lazy Point a much bigger picture than any map of the place suggests. I sometimes tell friends it’s possible to see the whole world in the view from Lazy Point.