This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Jess Rothschild: It is the heartbeat of the island. Talk about cruising. I have met someone in line at the grocery store and gotten fucked by them four minutes later. It's where everyone goes after they drop their bags off to get all of their snacks. It's where I instantly go, oh, I have to get these Tate's cookies. And for some of these boys, go get some deodorant. That's the first thing I say, hey, hey, hey, make sure some aluminum's in there. This man helped me carry home my groceries and then fucked me. I love that. He just goes, do you need help carrying that? I said, sure. And there's no replacing that. No sex off the internet is that good. There are these really cute moments. It's a throwback to rom-coms. It's a throwback to whatever your experience was in your small town when maybe you couldn't flirt with the cute guy at the grocery store because you were in Mississippi, you were in Alabama, you're in Ohio, but now you can.

[1:05] Jess Rothschild: This is Finding Fire Island, season two, episode five, Pantry Girls and Firefighters. I'm Jess Rothschild. At the heart of the Pines are two local institutions, the fire department and perhaps the most beloved business on all of Fire Island, the Pines Pantry. One keeps the island fed. The other keeps it from burning down. But together, they reveal something deeper. The Pines survives because of its people.

[1:37] Ben Rimalower: With the lifeline, and it's a constant in my 20 years now of going to the Pines, I've seen a lot change. I've seen three pavilions. I've seen the Twinks become daddies and the daddies become grandpas and just always new crops of people and fashions change and drugs change and relationships change, but the pantry has been there and has been the same the whole time. There's the feeling that it was that way before I started coming and that it'll still be that way long after I'm gone, God willing, unless the whole thing is underwater. I don't know. Even underwater, maybe you'll still be able to swim down to the pantry.

[2:20] Jess Rothschild: When you walk into the pantry, you're greeted by the unofficial mascots of the Pines, the pantry girls. For teenagers across the bay, landing that summer job is practically a rite of passage. They're usually 16-year-olds, in sweatshirts, working the register and absorbing conversations between adult gay guys. In fact, they keep a running list of some of the most memorable things they've heard behind the register.

[2:48] Pantry Girls: We realized we weren't wearing enough clothes. Can we buy a shirt? Hi, I'm gonna make your life miserable. What's your name, Kimberly? Jessica. You're gorgeous with those big brown eyes. Only $10.63? I deserve a trophy. We're gay. We can figure it out. I'll have five cookies. I'm on a diet. There's a guy running around in his underwear. He's following me. Pay your bills, bitch. You mean I have to pay for that? We had a can of Lysol under the counter. Guys would come in with their Speedos and go to pay for their groceries. They'd whip out their money from their Speedo. We would sort of gingerly let it sit on the counter. We were told we had to spray it with Lysol.

[3:39] Nikki LaFountain: I started working as a pantry girl back in 1982 when I was just 13 years old. I was raised in the Pines as my grandparents were among the early settlers in the 1930s. I look back on it now and think, oh my gosh, it was so unique and so strange. And yet at the time, none of it was strange. And I was running the night shift. And so I would go to work at 7 o'clock at night and I'd work all night until 7 in the morning. And no one thought that was odd. What 15-year-old works the overnight shift anywhere? No one was ever going to bother us. And so the idea of me working from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. when the guys are coming out of the club, tweaked up out of their minds, wanting ice cream or whatever, never occurred to anybody that this could ever be a problem. And it wasn't. It was just it was crazy. It was crazy.

[4:40] Nikki LaFountain: One of my favorite things is spotting people repping pantry or liquor store merch in the real world. In the city every now and then you'll look at a guy and you won't think he's queer. And then you see a Pines Pantry anything and go, oh, holy shit. OK, hey, family. A friend of mine came over and he was wearing an H2O limo shirt and he cut the sleeves off and he looked so good. And I was like, this is so if you know, you know. And thank you for wearing this to my house because I appreciate that. But it's really if you know, you know.

[5:10] Jess Rothschild: Now, you're currently wearing an H2O limo hoodie.

[5:13] Nikki LaFountain: Yeah. Clearly you're passionate.

[5:15] Jess Rothschild: Well, well, yes.

[5:17] Nikki LaFountain: The H2O limo gets us from Cherry Grove to the Pines.

[5:21] Jess Rothschild: So we're grateful for their service.

[5:23] Nikki LaFountain: In under three minutes. It's a very it's a lovely ride at times. It's like the best inside joke. So if you're just out in the world, it's just another T-shirt. No one's paying attention to it. But when I see it or when you see it or when somebody who lives in the Pines sees it, it's like a wink, wink, nod, nod. It's a little bit of bragging rights that you're in the Pines, that you support local, that you shop local. It says, like, I go there, I get it, I'm in on it. And also because they are both small businesses, it's sort of also like scratches that part of the leftist brain of being like, well, I'm not wearing like a Whole Foods T-shirt. It's still kind of like indie, right? It's like both like I'm in the know, I belong, but also like support small business drag, which I mean, you are you are buying the T-shirts.

[6:19] Nikki LaFountain: Support small business drag.

[6:20] Jess Rothschild: Yeah.

[6:21] Nikki LaFountain: When I see someone wearing a pantry T-shirt outside of the Pines, I say they're one of us. That's one of our people. I may not know this person, but I know they're one of us and I know that they're doing it to identify themselves as associated with the Pines and that makes them part of our group.

[6:41] Jordan Cohen: Think about this. You had generations of men who went to the Pines to hide from their lives, and now they are proudly wearing where they live on a T-shirt all over the world. Like if that's not like rah rah gay rights, I don't know what is because you can't you started coming to the Pines in the shadows and now you're wearing a T-shirt that shows the world that you've been to the Pines. I think it is the best. It's the message, you know, it's the message of community.

[7:13] Jordan Cohen: They are the first ones to open up the store to like a firefighter and start giving water, start giving food and making sandwiches and stuff to bring it to a fire scene. This is what they do. They are the community. We're all the community, but specifically the pantry and the liquor store.

[7:38] Jess Rothschild: The grocery first opened in 1953 as the Shippenshore, but it wasn't until the early 70s that it became the Pines Pantry, as we know today. In 1974, Broadway producer Myron Tucker and his boyfriend Jack bought the struggling Shippenshore. They reinvented it as the Pines Pantry. Today, it's the island's all-purpose institution. It's a place where you can buy food, drink, and have a good time. Today, it's the island's all-purpose institution, where you can buy fresh fish, chocolate chip cookies and lube all in one trip.

[8:13] Jess Rothschild: Myron and Jack also discovered a teenage Lori Schrader, perhaps the most legendary pantry girl of them all. Why? Because Lori now owns the store.

[8:21] Lori Schrader: So I had a paper route. I lived in Sayville. I was 16, 15. And my neighbors said to me, hey, kid, you want a job over at the beach? And my mom was like, over at what beach? Where? What are you doing? And I went over. My mom was very nervous because I was going over to an unknown community by myself, young girl, you know, I wanted to make money. So I would catch like a seven o'clock boat. And a lot of times I'd work till eight thirty at night. Myron and Jack were very good to us. So we loved working there. We loved the people. I loved the gay environment.

[9:01] Lori Schrader: I met my husband, Eric, while he stocked shelves at the pantry. Eventually, the two bought the store for Myron and Jack and have cared for it ever since. Myron and Jack were master curators of getting things for the store and making it different than any other Fire Island stores. The original owners lived in New York City, so they had access to the finer things, you know, the delicacies that the gay community liked and the gay community pretty much lived in New York City. So a lot of that, the goods and all was cultivated through their knowledge of what the gays liked from the city. So like Grace's Market, I don't know if that's even there anymore. Dean and DeLuca, Zabar's. But Myron and Jack would bring us into the city and they would take us to all these different places and show us stuff.

And, you know, we it's really for Eric and I cultivated a real interest in the business. And they were such incredible role models to us. I mean, we owe them everything. We just also love where we are.

[10:03] Jess Rothschild: Can I hear your love story?

[10:05] Lori Schrader: All right. Well, it's it's a funny one. But I mean, basic, I guess it's so I was a cashier managing. Eric was you tell it.

[10:12] Eric Schrader: So I started a year earlier, 1978. We lived around the corner from each other and we wound up meeting at the pantry. I'm working back in produce with John and you come up front and John goes, oh, that's a cute girl. They said something like, you know, I'm going to ask her out. And I thought to myself, damn, I think we started dating. You started to me. I think we started dating in 80 and we tried to keep it quiet, but that didn't work.

[10:36] Jess Rothschild: So how did Lori and Eric come to buy the pantry in 1988?

[10:40] Lori Schrader: Well, Myron and Jack were trying to build a small restaurant above the store overlooking the harbor. They couldn't make it work. And it was also the height of the AIDS epidemic. Anyway, the town turned them down, really crushed Myron. They also learned they were HIV positive. So they started to look to sell the place. Lori and Eric watched as potential buyers kept backing out. The pantry was a difficult business to make work. It's seasonal, open just six months a year. Finally, they turned to Lori and Eric. He hands me a flat of beer. He goes, want to buy a grocery store? Now, I the whole time I'm watching these people, I'm saying, well, I'm going to be in the cat bird seat because Lori and I, we're managers. Whoever buys us has no idea. So we'll be able to write a good ticket for ourselves. But we never thought we could ever buy the place.

[11:40] Lori Schrader: I've always found it strange that there is no ice cream shop in the Pines, especially when over in Cherry Grove, there are lines down the boardwalk. Well, the pantry did have one called the Encounter, an ice cream shop tucked beneath the pantry, right on the harbor dock. It really transformed because, you know, when we started having more of a night atmosphere over there, nightlife, we would stay open till like two, three in the morning. And it was really popular. People loved it.

[12:10] Eric Schrader: Why close it? The tide would rise in the bay. And, you know, when it got really bad, you'd have the waves coming in. So that would all come up to the ice cream shop, which is down low, as you know, it was on the dock. You know, we had no choice but to close the ice cream shop because of the loss of equipment and income. So what does it take to run a grocery?

[12:35] Unknown speaker: One of the things our previous owners taught us was your vendors are your key because you need vendors who can get to the boat in the morning, the freight boat, because the freight boat leaves at 7:30 in the morning. Everything has to be loaded on that boat by 7:30. So you may choose some vendor that's a little more money than anyone else, but they're the ones who are dependable. You have to choose vendors who are dependable because if you don't have it, there's no way you're going to get it.

[13:02] Unknown speaker: Are there any items you never thought you'd stock in a grocery store? Lube, fleet enemas. We used to have to bring condoms for GMHC. They used to bring us cases of condoms, and we would put them in bags, and then men would pick them up and bring them to the meat rack. The pantry and the Pines Liquor Shop were already beloved institutions by the time Baroon Wrappers had arrived. It wasn't that they just provided condoms. It was that they provided condoms.

[13:31] Unknown speaker: It wasn't that they just provided services, groceries, and liquor. They got involved in the community, and that involvement really dated back to when it was difficult to be involved.

[13:42] Unknown speaker: In a time of AIDS, when AIDS hit, people ran from the Pines because they blamed the Pines and called it Ground Zero for AIDS. But the people who ran the pantry, the people who ran the liquor store, not only stayed, but they dug in and supported the Pines community to get through that crisis.

[14:00] Unknown speaker: And that giving, that generosity, that family behavior that they demonstrated embedded them in the community.

[14:09] Unknown speaker: So, fast forward to 1998 when I'm doing my first share, they paid great attention to the changing tastes of the community they served, which in the Pines is a lot of high-end fickle gay men who, you know, tastes change from season to season. But they stayed on top of that. They were very responsive, and they knew the community.

[14:31] Unknown speaker: Lori and Eric now have children of their own, 28-year-old twin daughters, both college graduates. They've been working at the pantry since they were teenage pantry girls, and they plan to keep it in the family when Lori and Eric decide to retire.

[14:46] Unknown speaker: I'm going to get a little emotional, but I just connected with the gay community so much. I mean, they uplifted me. I'm a heterosexual woman, you know, but I just, a lot of these people have just become my really dear friends. I prefer to be here than anywhere else.

[15:02] Kyle Merker: Fire is a very big problem on Fire Island, more than it is on the mainland, very much so.

[15:16] Kyle Merker: These houses are made of wood. They bake in the sun 365 days a year. Most of them are raised off the ground, so instead of having four sides and a roof, you also have underneath. Also, you have to realize, for half the year, nobody's there.

[15:38] Kyle Merker: Last year, a fire was caused by an in-home sauna, while renters went to the underwear party in Cherry Grove for the night.

[15:46] Kyle Merker: So, these people Airbnb-ed their house, and there was a sauna in the house, because the owner said she didn't like the sauna, so she would store things in there, and then she locked it.

[15:59] Kyle Merker: And then the Airbnb people came by, and they, oh, what's this dial for? Oh, I guess nothing. And the next thing you know, the combustible's in there.

[16:09] Kyle Merker: So, the whole house was lost. There's nothing left. It got too far ahead of us before we even got there.

[16:16] Kyle Merker: So, it was a very, very dangerous situation. There was a pool in the middle of it. They had walkways. Their decks would, like, drop off without a fence.

[16:25] Kyle Merker: So, it's dark. You're tired. You can't see anything. You're carrying a big fucking hose, and you're trying to get it to the fire. You could fall in any of those directions.

[16:36] Kyle Merker: There are obstacles that you don't even know exist, like houses collapsing.

[16:44] Kyle Merker: Typically, there are propane tanks flying in the air like rockets. What goes up must come back down. These propane tanks are heavy.

[16:53] Kyle Merker: So, as they come down, people are looking all over the place. Where is it coming from?

[16:57] Kyle Merker: There's electrical. There's trip hazards.

[17:00] Kyle Merker: Probably the most dangerous fire that I have been to was most likely the downtown fire, which consumed the pavilion and the SIP control building, otherwise known as the NICKE building.

[17:14] Kyle Merker: It was three days of firefighting, tons of propane, tons of trip hazards, building collapsing.

[17:22] Kyle Merker: I think it was the second or third largest response to a fire in Long Island history.

[17:28] Kyle Merker: We were there. We stayed there. The water was all off in the pines.

[17:33] Kyle Merker: So, that was difficult because there's nowhere really to go and take a shower.

[17:38] Kyle Merker: There's just a lot of obstacles. It's hard to explain exactly what it is.

[17:42] Kyle Merker: You kind of go into a kind of automatic mode, and the next day, you don't remember half the things that you even did.

[17:57] Kyle Merker: Both the Cherry Grove and Pines Fire departments are run entirely by volunteers.

[18:03] Kyle Merker: Everyone must complete the grueling Firefighter 1 training program at the Suffolk County Fire Academy.

[18:09] Kyle Merker: They do things like they put you in a smoke maze.

[18:12] Kyle Merker: So, they black out your mask so you really can't see, and you have to be able to keep in communication with each other, and you have to identify where you are in the house.

[18:21] Kyle Merker: Because if you're in a fire and the smoke is banked down, you're not going to be able to see anything.

[18:25] Kyle Merker: You know, you go into a live burn where they simulate a flashover.

[18:30] Kyle Merker: So, you get into this building, and they build a fire, and it gets hotter and hotter and hotter, and you're on your knees.

[18:37] Kyle Merker: You're as close to the floor as you can be, and as the heat banks up above you, they get ready to simulate a flashover.

[18:45] Kyle Merker: Now, a flashover will kill you, right?

[18:48] Kyle Merker: There are superheated gases in a room, and it's starving for oxygen.

[18:54] Kyle Merker: And once oxygen is introduced, it becomes a big flash, and that will kill you.

[19:00] Kyle Merker: It'll just blow out all the windows.

[19:02] Kyle Merker: So, you're in this room. You're on your knees.

[19:05] Kyle Merker: You are cheek-by-jowl with the other firefighters right in front of each other, and then you take turns going to the front of the room and crawling around.

[19:13] Kyle Merker: It's a lot of crawling in fire service.

[19:15] Kyle Merker: And they slowly introduce just enough oxygen so you can see what we call dancing angels on the ceiling.

[19:22] Kyle Merker: So, that's the smoke up there, and those little flickers are a warning sign that you have to get the hell out of there.

[19:30] Kyle Merker: From the moment a firefighter steps off the ferry until they leave the island, they're on a call day and night, ready to respond to everything from house fires and boating accidents to downed power lines and medical emergencies.

[19:44] Kyle Merker: We've seen many, many people come in and out and not take it seriously or say, you know, this is not for me.

[19:52] Kyle Merker: Whereas we have these new 11 guys, which nine of them, we had a big fire Memorial Day weekend.

[20:00] Kyle Merker: Nine of them were literally told that they were going to be part of the fire department the day before that fire, and they got thrown into this fire the day after, and they came back the next day.

[20:13] Kyle Merker: Some people would be like, guys, this is so not for me.

[20:17] Kyle Merker: I mean, they're up all night. It's exhausting.

[20:20] Kyle Merker: It's exhausting putting on all the gear for six to eight to ten hours.

[20:27] Kyle Merker: You have the pack on, you have your gear on, you got a hose in your hand, and then when the fire's out, it's not done.

[20:35] Kyle Merker: You still have to pack the hose. You have to clean the hose. You have to clean your gear.

[20:39] Kyle Merker: It takes days to recover from it. It's literally like you're hungover.

[20:43] Kyle Merker: Days to recover from it. Your body aches.

[20:46] Kyle Merker: You're mentally exhausted from it by thinking about, did you do everything right? Did you not do everything right?

[20:54] Kyle Merker: You're doing everything right. The house is on fire. You're supposed to put it out.

[20:57] Unknown speaker: In November 2011, a fire broke out in the alley between the pavilion and the complex that has Sip and Twirl, Pines Pizza, and the Visitor Center.

[21:07] Nikki LaFountain: Nikki LaFountain is one of the original pantry girls we met early this episode. Nikki owns that complex. Sip and Twirl and the others are her tenants.

[21:16] Nikki LaFountain: So what happens when half of the commercial district burns down?

[21:21] Nikki LaFountain: All I could think about was the fact that I had seven tenants. And what the hell were they going to do? And how were they going to run their businesses? And the pavilion's gone. So if the pavilion's gone and the Sip and Twirl's gone, where is anyone going to go? And how is this going to function?

[21:39] Nikki LaFountain: Just that pressure of knowing what the downtown means to that community.

[21:45] Nikki LaFountain: The whole ecosystem runs on the nightlife and the downtown, which is this tiny little, basically, you know, four or five building area off the harbor.

[21:57] Nikki LaFountain: The fire began around 9 p.m. and was still smoldering the next morning.

[22:02] Nikki LaFountain: But it really is the epicenter of the entire community.

[22:06] Nikki LaFountain: And so without having things to do and places to go and a restaurant or a bar or a pizza place, I really was concerned.

[22:16] Nikki LaFountain: And so I assembled the best team of people I knew.

[22:22] Nikki LaFountain: Scott Bromley was my architect. I knew he was the guy to design it.

[22:27] Nikki LaFountain: And I think the one thing we had in our favor was that the town was devastated, too.

[22:34] Nikki LaFountain: The town of Brookhaven, who governs all of these permits and all of these things, they were pretty rocked by it. And so they were amenable to sort of helping us, whereas I think the town can be a lot of a roadblock when it comes to people trying to get permits and trying to get things done.

[22:51] Nikki LaFountain: Against all odds, the new building opened on July 4th, 2012, restoring Sip and Twirl, Pines Pizza and the other beloved establishments to their rightful place downtown.

[23:03] Nikki LaFountain: We got waivers to be able to work, you know, hours that were not really permitted to work. And it just got done. We had a couple of things, again, like I believe were divine intervention. And one was that the bay didn't freeze that winter. And it was the first winter I can remember that the bay didn't freeze.

[23:21] Ron Martin: Ron Martin is a longtime Pines resident. He told me the story of an arsonist loose in the pines.

[23:30] Ron Martin: I think it was 1984, October. It was late in the season. We just had started dinner at my house and the fire alarm went off.

[23:41] Ron Martin: So I went ahead and went down to the fire department. And as it turned out, there was an arsonist that was loose in the community that night and he was setting fires.

[23:52] Ron Martin: And the first one was somewhere over on the west side. And then I think there was another one down towards the east end. And then the third one was the pavilion in the harbor.

[24:03] Ron Martin: So there was a little bit of a panic because there was uncertain about where all he was going to be setting these and whether or not we could contain them.

[24:12] Ron Martin: But I distinctly remember fighting the fire at the pavilion. It was already late in the season, so the pavilion was closed. But we must have been putting water on that fire for a couple of hours because the fire was in the decks and in the board.

[24:29] Ron Martin: And I particularly remember being under the decks and in the board with the hose for a long time. And I think we finally finished around the sun was coming up.

[24:41] Ron Martin: And by the time I got home and I went into the bathroom and I looked in the mirror and my face was completely black. And I thought that was the real thing. I really was a firefighter when I saw how my face was totally covered in black soot.

[24:59] Unknown speaker: In Cherry Grove, women make up more than half of the fire department.

[28:00] Kyle Merker: Yeah, my firefighter drag, I think of it that way because it is this butch uniform that is like smelly and macho, weighs a lot. The same type of uniform that FD&I wears. And you get it on, and you're like fully geared up, and you just look like an action figure. But that's so not the person I am outside of a fire department. So it does feel like you're putting on a costume. And the installation dinner is kind of firefighter prom, and it literally is like a bar mitzvah slash wedding. I am in that formal attire of like the gloves, the hat, the clip-on tie, the buttons. It is drag in a way. It is that masculine realness in such a major degree. It can also feel like rushing a fraternity. I mean, the only reason I joined was because Robin Bird got on a microphone and told people to join the fire department.

We put our firefighter gear on and went to the sip and twirl, and we went to tea, and we like passed out flyers. Literally, it felt like fraternity rush. So when you volunteer for something like the post office or the fire department, or you join the Meatwreck Birdwatching Club in the morning, we joke about it being gay summer camp. And it is. There are activities for everyone. Putting fire to the side, everything from hurricanes, storms, and simply wind can also wreak havoc on the island. I have seen a house from the water pick up, spin 360 degrees, and then lift back down. It is like the true story of the Wizard of Oz, but with water, not with wind. It is incredible what the water can do and what the ocean can do.

It is one of the most powerful sources that we have, for sure. It is mind-boggling. The first storm that I lived through destroyed several houses around me, took my pool and several other pools around here. That storm was really cataclysmic for the Pines, and after it, the houses were really on stilts with water underneath them. Looking out my living room window, it was like being on a boat. You couldn't see anything but water. It was spectacular, but kind of scary, too.

[30:16] Kyle Merker: So Fire Island, as you know, is a barrier beach. It is a little strip of land that is out there in the middle of the Atlantic, and we take storms very, very seriously. You know, we watch the weather. I get very nervous whenever they name a new one. I am like, just Hippobuta, just Hippobuta, leave me alone. But as it is coming closer, there is a lot that we have to do as a community, but also as a fire department. And sort of a dry, windy day is almost worse than a storm because once something ignites, and it is windy, and that wind just starts moving that fire, and everything is dry underneath, you have got a problem. So wind is not our friend. Not having rain is definitely not our friend. Superstorm Sandy was a perfect example.

We knew that the winds were going to be high, and we knew that there was going to be severe flooding, and that it was going to be a major rain event. But the main thing on Fire Island, and in New York, basically, was the storm surge. Now, the Great South Bay sits between the mainland and Fire Island. And when the storm surge comes, on each end of Fire Island, there is an inlet. And the storm, Superstorm Sandy, had a full moon, and the wind, and a high tide all at the same time. It pushed all of this water into the bay, and the bay could not hold it all. But it had nowhere to go. So the only place it has to go is on land. When it was done, you could actually now take a boat from the Atlantic Ocean to the mainland by going through that breach.

It was that big. About once a year, a storm hits hard enough that Cherry Grove and the Pines are essentially evacuated. Ferries are canceled, and no one knows when the island will reconnect to the mainland. And yet, some residents choose to ride it out. Now, this is America. You know, we can't, like, force people if they are stupid enough to want to stay. You can't really force people out. Kyle, Jordan, and all of the volunteers make sure every house is visited, and that residents are prepared for what's going to happen. Often, the boat is the last boat off. We try to get them to not take the last boat, take the one before that, because the last boat is like the last helicopter out of Saigon.

You know, it's just so much stuff. But some people just refuse to go, and we tell them, we need to identify your body, so you should mark your security number on your arm. And then they either get scared and leave, or they laugh. Once that last ferry departs, you're on your own. And if you ignore a mandatory evacuation, no one is coming for you. In order to get onto the island in certain catastrophic events, now you're dealing with government. So we all have reoccupation cards. They'll shut the island down unless you have this specific card. And the card has a QR code on it. They scan it, and it comes up in a computer system saying whether or not you're legit or not. And without that card, you can't get onto the island.

For Hurricane Sandy, I was one of 13 people on the island for the hurricane. We called ourselves the A-Team. A lot of people probably called ourselves stupid, but we stayed. That was a life-changing experience.

[33:56] Kyle Merker: The one thing that you learn from going out there is it's constantly in flux. That beach is changing minute by minute. Sand is moving. It's moving west. It's going to the grove. They have a big, wide beach. The Pines has a little skimpy beach. Then you could come back a month later, and the opposite is true. So sand is always shifting. That's the natural course of a barrier island, right? In 2024, the Pines was dangerously close to losing houses to the ocean. FIPOA is the Property Owners Association. They fought tirelessly to get FEMA and New York State to restore the beach. You know, that strip used to actually be five separate islands that were now all strung together because of the movement of the sand.

The efforts to protect it, to keep the beach, to build the beach up, which we've just seen in the last couple years, I totally understand because people have very expensive homes on those front dunes, and if your house is taken away, you cannot rebuild. You know, it becomes national seashore. Plus, there's a strong element on the mainland that knows that if Fire Island goes, then the south shore of Long Island is threatened. So there is a lot of good reason to keep Fire Island intact. Back in the 60s, Lorraine's Aunt Alice Thorpe was instrumental in securing Fire Island's designation as a national seashore. This means that the island's footprint is essentially frozen in time. So stretches like the meat rack between the Pines and Cherry Grove will be preserved forever.

I asked what Alice would think of today's beach erosion. On some level, I think what Alice would say to me is, we should leave it alone because it's going to take care of itself, as it always has done. And it's just that people don't want to see the money they've spent, you know, sail off into the ocean. I think people get that the minute they get there, that this place is very special. It's only, what, 40 miles from downtown Manhattan, but you are in a different world out there. And it's a natural world. And I think that's what my great aunt really cared about was preserving that natural world. She used to say to me as a kid, I remember as a nine-year-old, she said to me, if we really love this place, we'd leave it.

And I remember thinking as a kid, oh my God, I never want to leave this place. And I feel, I think a lot of people who care about the Barrier Beach feel that way. They know that just by being on that island, they're taxing it in a way. But I think there's a lot more attention now to not having that be the case of preserving it, keeping it.

[37:19] Jess Rothschild: Finding Fire Island is created, executive produced, and narrated by Jess Rothschild, co-produced with the Pines Historical Society, sound design by Caitlin White, video editing by Evelyn Darr. Special thanks to the Pines Foundation and Sage USA.