Global warming or just another day at the beach?

January 7, 8 & 9’s temperatures this year were practically tropical and I had some friends in town from Connecticut and we thought, what better way to spend time in the noonday sun but at the beach?

Plumb Beach is the closest beach to my place in Brooklyn, a 15 minute drive at the most, and we were soon strolling the sand and, since the tide was at its lowest ebb, the mud, of this strange and exotic spot so close to the big city. It is a strip of beach less than a mile long with dunes and a tidal lagoon with a marsh at its eastern end. I had never actually been there, not only because I had heard about its pollution problems but its parking lot is tiny and, frankly, even from the Belt Parkway it looks unacceptably trashy.

On January 8, however, the parking lot was almost empty, as was the beach/dunes, so it was nicely private and merited the removal of various items of clothing. It was a great afternoon and, yes, I took off my shirt and let the warm breeze caress my bulging and/or sagging (choose one) muscles. In fact it was such a great day that I’m a little sorry that I’ve subsequently done some research on Plumb and its recent history (thank you Google). I am so sad to read that it’s pretty much an ecological nightmare right now.

Prior to the 1960’s Plumb Beach was a popular and relatively clean destination for beachgoers, pretty much serving the denizens of South Brooklyn, but it fell on hard times when development and pollutants started changing its seascape as a result of some pretty toxic street run-off. In the early 1990’s a series of nor’easters battered the beach, causing an erosion problem dangerously close to the Belt Parkway, which is a major traffic artery serving JFK airport and with connections to several highways that make a dash out to eastern Long Island. Consequently, something had to be done and an attempt to “reclaim” the beach was started by dumping thousands of tons of sand on it to create an artificial dune system. The problem is that along this stretch the Belt is only about 40 feet from the water side of the dunes and, thus, these dunes are a very important barrier between the marauding seas and the highway so the Belt is obviously threatened by any storm (at high tide), not just the major ones.

Anyway, what happened next was predictable, that is, over time the sand proceeded to drift eastward and covered over a good third of the natural marsh, lagoon and sanctuary, totally disrupting the habitat(s) of a large variety of creatures, both avian (some exotic) and more mundane, like the horseshoe crab. The horseshoe is that large, ugly-as-sin, helmet-shaped denizen of the deep, whose remains you see on a lot of beaches. Plumb, at one time, was an annual mating area for this crab but it has now pretty much been squeezed out. The really bad news is that, although this little peninsula has made a comeback over the last five or six years, the erosion continues where the original sand was dumped and to save the highway another procedure will probably have to be instigated to again restore the barrier dunes. And the whole screwed up process will repeat itself.

Despite all of this bad news, I’m still glad I was at Plumb Beach on January 8, 2008 with my shirt off…it made me feel good. And that’s what counts these days.

One side note: here and there on the beach and in the dunes there are remnants of past disasters. That is, there are some old boat hulls and various bits and piece of vessels that had been creamed sometime in the past by the wrath of Poseidon. This is not unusual except that some graffiti artist, which to me is usually an oxymoron, is using these derelicts as mural space for his/her spray cans. I must say they are most startling rising out of the reeds and dunes. As much as I want to sneer at this desecration of the natural order of things, they are cool and I like them a lot.