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Across the ocean seas, into Port Jefferson at last
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| Tankers from ports of call all around the globe thrilled romantic souls with picturesque dreams of adventure and far-flung voyages. |
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August 19, 2009 | 02:14 PM
Mid-afternoon at Port Jefferson's grand Harborside Park, beneath a steadily thickening layer of cloud, it was trying fitfully to rain. A little ways offshore, in the sheltered eastern portion of the harbor beneath the tall bluff of Belle Terre, a breeze was stirring up eddies of grey water.
From a comfortable bench whose plaque said it had been thoughtfully provided by "The Families of the Port Jefferson East Homeowners Association," I sat looking out on the broad sweep of the old harbor, watching the P.T. Barnum glide away from her pier, turn, and begin her stately progress across the Sound to Bridgeport — another day, another few dozen crossings, just as the ferry line has been doing for more than a century.
I never tire of watching the ferries. There is, I think, a kind of grandeur in their daily work, ordinary though the daily crossings may seem. At least the passage is over open water, sometimes even quite adventurous water, and long enough to provide a changing variety of sea conditions. This is no Shelter Island ferry, a mere hop, skip and jump across Dering Harbor.
Now from the west, out of the cloudy sky behind the National Grid power plant, appears a single engine Cessna seaplane, no doubt transporting early weekenders from the East River to the Hamptons. Compared to the obnoxious helicopters that bedevil summer's finest days, the seaplane passes with little disturbance, trailing a comforting "whoosh" set up by the drag of the floats.
I am sitting on a reclaimed waste site — 40 years ago, a Mobil Oil terminal that the company finally more or less abandoned as too troublesome and litigious, and before that a Sinclair Oil tank farm that one winter afternoon spectacularly caught fire.
It took the good citizens of Port Jefferson many years of haranguing before deciding that this ruined site was actually a priceless asset, and their last opportunity to acquire property on the waterfront for public use.
Oil is still big business in Port Jefferson Harbor, of course, with plenty of year-round work for the big red McAllister tugboats that shepherd gasoline and oil barges into the pumping station on the west side. A few months ago there was a story in the paper saying that ocean-going tankers may be returning to the harbor occasionally, but I haven't seen any of them yet. There was a time, though, in the 1960s and 1970s, when tankers from ports of call all around the globe delivered cargo in Port Jefferson, frightening half the residents with nightmares of ecological disasters while thrilling more romantic souls with picturesque dreams of adventure and far-flung voyages.
During those years when the big tankers called here, flying the exotic flags of Hong Kong, Barbados, Singapore and the like, I knew an Englishman called Ned Plummer who lived on Bleeker Street in a tiny house he had named, rather mysteriously, Ty-Neela. The house was perched precariously at the edge of the bluff above the harbor, supported by locust posts. It possessed the most spectacular view of the harbor and Long Island Sound.
On winter Sunday mornings he sometimes invited me for a cup of tea, and to watch some big tanker enter the harbor. He liked to keep abreast of the shipping schedules. Sweeping the vessel with his telescope, he'd exclaim, "What a sight! The romance of it! All the way across the sea from Singapore, and into little old Port Jefferson at last!"
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