This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Jess Rothschild: Welcome to Finding Fire Island. I'm your host Jess, and this is Episode 8, Winter.

[0:16] Jess Rothschild: In this episode, we're detailing everything that goes on outside of the summer high season. We'll hear from those who stay on year-round through the winter. Plus the hurricanes, fires, and storms that have threatened to destroy this fragile island.

[0:34] Jess Rothschild: I like that the seasons are getting longer, but people don't realize the weather is so different when you cross that ferry. Pre and post-season, it could be gorgeous on Long Island. You get on that ferry, and you get over there, and it's as if you entered a monsoon. It's cold and wet and freezing and terrible, but also like fun because it's really cozy.

[0:52] Boudoir LeFleur: This is Buddy Flowers, better known as Boudoir Le Fleur, who rules the House of Assassins. Buddy often goes out in March or April to help his boss get cherries on the bay ready for the season. You have to bring a winter coat. You have to bring extra scarves. An umbrella is never going to make it. It's windy. It's blustery. Pre and post-season, I feel like you're going camping out there, but it makes it fun. The official Fire Island season is from Memorial Day through Labor Day. That's about 15 weeks. But what about the other 37 weeks of the year? Well, there's early and late season, meaning April, May, September, and October. What's left is the off-season, winter, where maybe 30 residents of Cherry Grove and the Pines stay on. While ferries run every single hour during summer season, they dwindle to just one or two per day and only on the weekends in winter.

[1:39] Phil Chan: So off-season is great because during the peak of season, like, you know, you hear some week in July, you know, it's like all the hot boys, they don't look at you. They won't say hi. They won't make eye contact because if they do, they might be vulnerable or you might want to fuck them or they might want to fuck you or something. But we're just like all not going to talk to each other or look at each other or behave like normal human beings. Phil Chan is a newish Pines homeowner, having bought his house about three years ago. But off-season, it's mostly the owners and everybody is like, hey, hey, you make eye contact. How you doing? Which is like a novel concept, but like eye contact in the Pines from April to like middle of May. Fantastic. It disappears until like early September. Then you've got the eye contact and the hellos again.

[2:36] Phil Chan: The other thing about off-season that I love is like nature. There's no FOMO. So it's not like you're missing a party or an orgy or like there's not something better happening. And so you can just be chill. You can watch the sunrise and sunset. You get in tune with the cycle of the moon and the tides and you watch the seasons. As New Yorkers, it's just like concrete and like the days get longer or shorter. But out here, it's like, when did the flowers come out? When did the leaves start to drop? Like all of those things. When do you need to put that extra blanket on the bed? Because there's a little chill in the air suddenly. God, how much of the beach has been washed away after that last storm? My dream would be to like move to the Pines June 1st and not come back until October 1st. Honestly, November 1st.

[3:27] Ben Rimalower: Here's Ben Rimelauer in his full Gray Gardens, Another Winter in a Summer Town moment. First of all, even in October, even the end of October, there will randomly be some Indian summer days that are like absolutely beautiful. Even when it's not, that's how I want to experience the transition to fall. I want to be like walking on the beach in like a warm sweater and a scarf and like being like, oh, in September, the light changes. It's a title of an Andrew Holleran book. But you know, it feels very romantic and it feels like closure on the summer. And it's like you're still in the summer place, but you're watching the undeniable signs of the changing season. And that really takes me emotionally through the process of being ready for like fall. And you're still just want to cling to every last drop of sunshine. But it's a little pathetic, like in May when you're trying to get the drops of sunshine, but it just ain't happening yet.

[4:18] Ben Rimalower: One nice thing about my share being Memorial Day is that that's pretty much when everything's like opening like full tilt boogie, like basically Memorial Day is when everything's starting, drag shows are starting, pretty much everything's open. Really in October, the entertainment stuff is pretty much all shut down and the hours are much more limited with the ferry and the pantry and that kind of stuff. It's just that kind of romantic like changing of season and being like, oh, almost no one at tea this week. By next week, it'll be a ghost town. But you know, it just feels like it's like the bell is tolling. I get into it and I like being with my friends and having game nights in our house. For some reason to do that in May feels lame because it's like your life in the city is like still like at its absolute peak.

Why are you just here in this like cold, weird place like wishing it were warmer when it's not? But in October, you're like, guys, summer's almost over. And just like you just want to like hold hands and like kind of mourn it. And it just feels it feels very sweet and cozy.

[5:26] Parker Sargent: There's a sweet neighborly feeling among the homeowners in Cherry Grove as they reopen their houses every spring. So much life happens in Fire Island outside of quote unquote the season. I love opening now that we have the house. We open really early in April. I was just talking to my neighbor this morning about hooking up, making sure we help her when she goes out. So we're going out on the same date, April 14. And that's usually when we start the season. It's cold. It's still beautiful. It's just kind of the core group of us, the homeowners who are coming out to open up. And it's such a wonderful feeling. The phrase is Happy New Year. It's fun. It's people you haven't seen in months, or you may have seen them on and off through the months, but really not the same way you do all season long. So the season just seems to fly by. And then Labor Day is kind of like the crescendo of the season. And then most people, yes, they call it tumbleweed Tuesday.

[6:29] Parker Sargent: I love a tumbleweed because it's I feel so much like in the off season that the whole town becomes like an extension of my yard. It's just really there's I don't know, I can't even describe it. It's such a comforting feeling. They always have a Halloween party at Sip and Twirl. And I usually close my house by this, depending upon the weather at the first or second week of October, because I don't want the pipes to freeze, you know, when you're done, it's you're done. But somebody's convinced me to stay for the Halloween party.

[7:03] Karen Adir: Many return to Fire Island late October for the Halloween parties. This is Karen Adir and Randy Lauwasser, who both live in the Pines. Randy has been a resident for almost 18 years and owns a coffee business on the island.

[7:14] Randy Lauwasser: But I got invited to my friend's house on the other end on the eastern end of the Pines. And I walked down there and it was dark. It was about eight o'clock. And I did not see another living soul during this 15 minute walk. And it was creepy. And I said, I'm never doing this again. Halloween, the Pines is crazy, crazy, meaning people want shares. They want the weekend. There's a camaraderie of people that want to be here. And homeowners, they put up decorations and they put up pumpkins because there are so many kids out here now. Some people will trick or treat to houses. And, you know, that kind of is the new part of the Pines. But Halloween in the Pines has always been fun because everybody likes to get in an outfit.

[8:09] Randy Lauwasser: The history of Fire Island Pines is disastrous weather. And about every 35 years, there's a storm that wipes the place clean. I remember when there was one very powerful storm while we were there and a lot of houses on the oceanfront were swept out to sea or certainly their swimming pools were and you'd see these huge fiberglass swimming pools floating out into the ocean. And I saw one wonderful queen who was standing at the top of a stairway that no longer led to anything because there had been so much erosion. And he was looking and he just said to himself, you know, don't mess with Miss Ocean. I thought that's well put.

[8:44] Paul Rudnick: All home renovations take place off season and require a beach driving permit to get materials on and off island. Screenwriter Paul Rudnick remembers this vividly from his Pyramid House days. When we did a renovation on the house, we would get driven out by our contractor in his pickup truck along the beach, which is both very atmospheric and completely nauseating because I'd never driven along a beach. It's very rocky and you really start to get nauseous. But yeah, it's very it's gorgeous in the winter, but extremely shut down because there aren't many stores anyway and they all are gone.

[9:21] Paul Rudnick: That's one of the things I love about Fire Island is that as hard as certain people want to make it a Hampton or make it more distinguished and more expensive and more valuable, it resists. You know, it's still very raffish and a little bit down market and it's for doing everything you don't want people to see you doing in town. You don't go to the hardware store because there is no hardware store. If you need lumber, if you need glass, anything that's required, you got to haul in. The hardware store. Oh, my God. How do you live without a hardware store? It's like, oh, do I have to fuck to get some duct tape around here when you have an emergency?

[10:01] Karen Adir: Since Karen has been in the Pines for 40 years, I was wondering if there was ever a decent restaurant. No, no, no. That's why I cook. That's why I was completely prepared for cooking during covid because I've been in the Pines, especially in the off season. The store closes Monday through Friday. And so you look around your pantry, go, well, what can I make out of this spaghetti and these frozen vegetables? Also, like food. Oh, it gets a little survival, which is super fun. Like when the pantry closes and you have to rely on the peapod orders and you're like, you know, you got a couple of cans of soup just in case you're playing Iron Chef at all times because you're like, how much time do I have before this broccolini goes bad? What can I pair it with? Am I even going to stay out here that long? Maybe we'll close next weekend. What's the temperature? All of those things you're thinking about.

[10:46] Karen Adir: Yeah, it's magical. I say, you don't understand. We live in the 16th century. We didn't get cable TV and Internet until just a few years ago. And before that, we had three TV stations, which we'd watch the weather on to know if it's going to rain tomorrow. That was it. What do you mean no phones? Andy Warhol called Calvin Klein from the boardwalk, according to the Andy Warhol diaries in 1982. Well, like I say, we had landlines, which, you know, during storms would go out. Cell phones started coming in. Unless you had Verizon, you had no service. And even sometimes Verizon didn't work. We didn't have cable TV. We didn't have we have anything. Until when? What year did Princess Diana die? It was like around then.

[11:29] Karen Adir: If there were leaks, if there was a problem with the toilets or electricity or whatever, the Fire Island Pines has three of everything. Three carpenters, three plumbers, three electricians. And you basically have to kidnap them to get them to come do the work. So I would come out and I say, yeah, OK, I need the roof fixed. I need the plumbing fixed. I need the electricity fixed. And then I would try and find somebody to come do that. And they would say, yeah, I'm coming tomorrow. And then they wouldn't turn up, of course. But I knew that they were taking the four o'clock boat back to Sayville. So I would run down to the harbor and say, you, you are supposed to be at my house. And they went, oh, sorry. Yeah, I'll be there tomorrow.

[12:10] Bob "Rose" Levine: Cherry Grove legend Bob Rose Levine has been here since 1955. He's lived through everything. Two years ago,

[12:18] Bob "Rose" Levine: We had a 10 minute, uh, like a tornado. And I wasn't even on, I was on the boat leaving Cherry Grove to go to the city. I had to go back to New York for something. And all the furniture on my deck blew off because it was so sudden. And my partner, Michael was there alone and he had to hold the doors locked. The door, the whole house was like in the Wizard of Oz. It was unbelievable. And Diane Romano lives down the bay and she wrote on the internet, "Rose Levine's furniture is floating in the bay."

[13:02] DJ Lina Bradford: Some prefer to ride out hurricanes and storms in their homes on island, like during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Hurricane Sandy, I think was the first one. Um, and they wanted everybody to evacuate. And I was like, you know what? No, I mean, I was so in love with this island. I would have taken a fucking way for this island. I'm not even kidding you. I'm like, nope. I'm buckering into my house. I mean, you're a dog. I'm saying you're, if I say, if this island is going anywhere, I want to be on this fucking sand dune. I did not want to leave. I was upset in the car going back home and having to sit in my apartment in New York, having to leave the island. I'm like, God, it was crazy. I did not want to go.

[13:40] Phil Chan: I met Phil Chan at a birthday party in the Pines this summer. He invited me over and I immediately asked him how often he comes during the off season to check on his house. You're out here in February and you're like, we're coming here to check out on the house. And you go to the Seville Ferry and it's completely gray. And that blue that looks so welcoming and nice in the summer, it's blue and gray. Everyone is bundled up. You can't even wear like, you can't even take your shoes off in the house because it's so cold in the house. If there's snow on the ground, it's just like icy or like, you know, they've just plowed the Boulevard. And so the walk in your flip-flops suddenly becomes like trying not to slip and like kill yourself on the icy boardwalk, right?

So then you finally get to your house and it's like a foreign country. It's like all the lights are off. The hot tub isn't plugged in. Like, you know, nothing is on and it's dark. It's darker than usual. The sun is a lot lower in the sky. So it just feels like the shadows are off. You know what I mean? Like the light is off because it's not in the right place and the plants are weird because like everything's dead. So you can see your neighbor's houses very clearly. There's traces of people. You'll see like footsteps in the snow. You'll see like, you know, animal prints. I don't know. It's different when you know that like in the middle of July, if you scream, you know, someone will hear you. Whereas like in February, like you could just be out here. They'll find your body and someone's already eaten half of it. I don't know.

[15:11] Mike Fisher: I've experienced two hurricanes out here. There's one in the eighties that I remember that took away the beach. And I remember standing on Sal Hayes's house on sale and watching it go into the water. And that was something that I just, I couldn't believe that it was happening. The other one was Sandy and I was out here. I mean, they evacuated the island. Nobody wanted to leave, but we all knew we had to. And just getting on the boats, you know, everybody was nervous, everybody, because, you know, especially the homeowners, they didn't know what was going to happen. They didn't know when they would be able to get back to see their houses. They cut the electricity off at each block. So it was kind of a scary time.

[16:05] Mike Fisher: During Hurricane Sandy, the storm surge carved breaches in the island, allowing water to flow between the ocean and the bay. Along the beach, the sand dunes that served as a line of defense for many oceanfront homes were flattened. Those same dunes that had been replenished a few years earlier were credited for saving Fire Island from far worse damage. The reality is a home on a barrier island is not permanent. You must have a high tolerance for risk to build a home here. It's just the reality of living on the ocean. That was very, very scary. And of course, our beach is just very, very fragile. And, you know, we talk about these parties. I'm all for the parties. I'm all for community. But I don't really know how much damage it actually is doing.

And I mean, if you look at where the most damage is on the beach, it's where the parties have been the last couple of years down on the east side. And my feeling is in talking to people who are architects and engineers in the city, one guy specifically, we had a conversation two weeks ago about, you know, when they build those berms to stop the water from lapping over the dance floor, they're unearthing the beach and the stability of that beach that's been packed. And so I'm a proponent of these parties and bringing business to the Pines. But if it's going to hurt the fragile beach, I think that we need to re, you know, we need to rethink that.

[17:45] Julia Sanderson: Julia Sanderson owns a home in Cherry Grove. She and Randy talked about the fires, which can light up out of nowhere because the island is so vulnerable. Well, I mean, it's, you know, we'll say it's like we're basically on a little sandbar, water on both sides. And what I have been told is also because it's like any kind of seashore housing and these wood houses that get like saturated and dry out and like all of that brittle wood. And so it takes the smallest spark. I remember being woken up, which I thought was in the night or it became the morning. It was light out, but I heard crackling and I did not know what it was. I remember looking out the window and seeing a ball of fire like a block away from where I was living.

And I ran down there. I didn't hear the fire alarms, but I ran there. I saw the firefighters basically is stopping it from spreading. The new pavilion burned down in 2011. One homeowner was quoted as saying, "I watched this building when it was being built and last night I watched it burn down." When firefighters are called to battle a serious blaze in the Pines, they race for a ferry, not a fire truck. They can't just jump on the highway and be there within minutes. In 2015, the Grove Hotel was destroyed in a fire, as well as an apartment complex called the Holly House. When these fires destroy the nexus of nightlife like the pavilion, it means it will be a full year before the Pines in the Grove, you know, are rebuilt.

Folks work feverishly to rebuild these commercial districts in time for Memorial Day the following year. But I did see the guys that had their pillows and their pajamas and they were on the walk. And I always remember that because fire in the Pines on Fire Island is very scary. And what a lot of people don't recognize is during the summer, when you flip your cigarettes off the boards, there's a lot of brush that's dry and that can cause a fire. And if you know that light, a series of homes can go up. And that's kind of what happened a couple of years back on, I believe it's Pine and Ocean, between Pine and Cedar, where five houses went up and it almost was a catastrophe because the winds were coming off the ocean and they were just the fire department was just stopping the fire from going north. And if that went north, it could have gone all the way to the bay and that would have been horrible.

[20:33] Julia Sanderson: You know, the only reason we eventually sold the house was because we wanted a year-round place and there's a handful of people who live year-round in the Pines, but most of the homes aren't winterized, which is part of the sort of absurd luxury factor there that you go to houses that only exist for a very few months of the year. Julia Sanderson and Mike Fisher, the filmmaker behind Cherry Grove Stories, are year-rounders. Starting mid-December, there are no ferries during the week. Perhaps year-rounders fascinate me more than any other story we've heard so far. Mike is lucky to have a beach driving permit. This allows him to drive along the beach all the way to the eastern end of Fire Island and onto the highway. This is necessary in case the bay freezes and ferries are no longer running.

[21:20] Mike Fisher: When I bought my house, one of the selling points of it was it's winterized. I grew up in New York City. Like, I don't even know, like, OK, cool. Like, I don't even know what that means. And it's so winterized in quotes. And I've had to do various things, like the first winter that I was there, funny story, Mike drove me out once, a lot of snow on the ground, made sure I got into the house OK and just helped me bring bags in. And as he was leaving, he was like, I got a lot of snow on your floor. I'm sorry, but I don't think it's a problem because it's not melting. Like, it was very that. So I never closed the house. And every winter I've managed to kind of make it a little like more livable and cozy.

[22:03] Mike Fisher: So what does one need to survive out here all winter? The checklist would include ample deep freeze capacity to store food, a wood burning stove, a lot of firewood and a winterized house, meaning insulation and winter water. You might also want to think about a backup generator in case of a blackout. Also stock up on any medications to last at least a month or two. The thing about Cherry Grove and Fire Island in the winter is it's cold, no colder than New York City, but there's a dampness out there. And if you don't have really good heat, you're screwed. Mike says he is central heat and as hot as toast in the winter in his house on the ocean. A lot of people, they have this romantic view of living out there in the winter and it'll be so fun.

And if you don't have a driving permit, it's not fun because there are no boats during the week, starting like the third week in December. So you're stuck there. And if you want to go off the island to shop or whatever, there's only a boat on the weekends. But for me, my partner and I, we go out there and I can't even like, I wish I could like visually show you some of the things that have happened. Like, like the ocean freezes.

[23:35] Mike Fisher: The ocean or the bay? The ocean, but it doesn't freeze solid. It freezes in like little pellets, like ice pellets. And there's no waves because there's too much ice in the water. So it just sort of rolls in and accumulates on the beach. And then there's these huge, like glaciers on the beach of this ice that rolled in from the sea. And it's spectacular. And the sun never sets. It sets and rises over the ocean. So it never is high in the sky. So in the morning it's to the east and at night it's to the west over the ocean. And it's just it's so spectacular because there's no one there. So there's no sound. There's not a lot of ambient light either because there's no houses open. So the stars are just mesmerizing.

While Mike is a filmmaker and can work in the city, he finds that there's way too much distraction, always thinking he should be doing something or that he's missing out on a dinner by working. But in Cherry Grove in the winter, he can really concentrate and figure out a lot of new projects, like his film Cherry Grove Stories or his new film that's currently on the festival circuit.

[24:37] Bob "Rose" Levine: I've been a year-round resident, I think, for 20 years now. I really thought during the pandemic, like, a lot of people were, oh, I'm going to just move out to my house in Fire Island. And they moved out there, and it was the last time they went out there in the winter on Fire Island because it's hard. You have, there's no food stores open, there's nothing. And if you don't have a car, you can't get on and off the island. And even if you have a car, if the tide is bad, you can't go down the beach. In the Pines, there's times in the winter where you cannot access the Pines. You can't get down the beach because the tide is too high. So you're really connected to nature and what's going on in the winter, which I think is the big attraction to Fire Island for me.

It's the nature. Yeah, I love all the drag and all the parties, but there's nothing like walking down the beach in the summer, particularly like in August, there's, and I know we're talking about the winter, but in August, there are these phosphorescent jellyfish that come and you walk down the beach and as you step, they light up in your steps and you can see the green rolling in the surf. It's really spectacular. And I have pictures of seals and foxes and deer and all kinds of wildlife. So I find the winter is very fantastic. I sort of dread when people leave and I dread when people come back because now they're starting to come back. Just this weekend when I was out there, like there was a boat and there's people and I'm like, what are these people doing here? Like they need to leave.

[26:17] Paul Rudnick: Both Mike and Julia are now going to chronicle the year for us beginning with Memorial Day. Memorial Day is the big push and everyone thinks, oh, Memorial Day is going to be amazing. I can guarantee you a Memorial Day will be freezing and people think that I'm going to be laying out my bathing suit and it usually rains and it's cold because it doesn't really get warm out there, at least till the end of June. It just keeps getting more and more ramped up and you get all that sort of like chitter chat of the boys coming down from the Pines to come and party in the Grove, drag queens, high heels, like that sound on the boards. Very distinct. I remember the first year I had the house and in October when everybody had kind of gone home and I thought like, what is it?

And I thought it was like, was somebody very drunk and kind of staggering because I could hear this clopping and it actually was a deer. True story. But I thought like, is it something like, you know, some gal out there and I'm like, is it something like, you know, some gal out there and her heels sort of weaving? So you hear a lot of that. So everyone's sort of warming up, coming out, all the things open and everyone loves each other, like because they haven't seen each other all winter. And, you know, there's a lot to look forward to, like in Cherry Grove, there's the invasion and the homecoming queen and all these events and the Ice Palace opens and it's exciting and it leads up to 4th of July and everyone's still friendly in July and then in August, it hits and everyone hates each other.

They call it ugly August because they're so sick of looking at everyone and you can feel it at the end of August because the light starts to change and everyone is always like, oh, the light in Provincetown is so special. Let me tell you something. The light in Cherry Grove and Fire Island is amazing at the end of August and September. In September, you start to get those cool nights and it's not so humid and the water is super warm because it takes all summer for the water to warm up. So September is fantastic. Then Labor Day happens. But then in late September, and this is what's funny about being there year round, and it happens to me every year, there's something that starts to feel a little depressing when the sort of like big suitcases and shopping carts and wagons with everybody's like they're packing up their thing and a lot of the conversations are, what's your last week, when are you closing?

Like that starts to happen and it has a little bit of this sort of melancholy thing. So September sort of winds down after Miss Fire Island and then you get into October and a lot of people end. A lot of the houses are over by the end of October and it starts to empty out. A lot of people stay though. There's a big Halloween party at Cherry's, which is always fun, but you can see people are starting to dwindle and as it gets cold, the majority of the houses there don't have heat. So people are just freezing. It's got that lovely fall thing in the air, but you still can be outside all day sitting out on the beach late into the day. It's still kind of light early into the evening, which I love, but more and more people going home and you continue with friends that own houses.

When are you closing? Like that whole thing, it's sort of like we have the same conversations every year, right? By November, it's getting real quiet now, which I also love because it means there are fewer external lights on houses, less of that kind of ambient noise of other people's music, and it's getting cooler. I also love it because I have a fireplace. The house gets heated with it. There's a wood-burning stove insert in the fireplace, so you can start building fires, so you've got that smell in the air and other people are doing the same thing. You know, we get our fall foliage. I mean, it's a lot of evergreens. So you get through October, then November, you have a few stragglers and a lot of people like to try to have Thanksgiving out there, but it's difficult because you have to schlep all the food out, you have to do everything.

I always have Thanksgiving out there. I love it. So I like November. December, I love Christmas in Cherry Grove. It has totally, like, thinned out. Like, there's probably in the Grove maybe 20 people because people just start to go back to work and have their life and daylight savings is over and the sun goes down early, and if you don't have heat and a nice house, it's depressing, but I like Christmas. Then New Year's Eve is the best there because we have a ball drop. So we started this tradition of having this ball dropping on midnight, and Todd and a bunch of people have made this sort of rinky-dink lit ball, and we do a countdown, and it's really special. Plus, during that time period, I should back up because at Christmas, we go to the tree lighting ceremony in Ocean Beach.

I drive down, and it's all these kids, and we have a potluck dinner, and it's like a small version of Rockefeller Center. And what happens in December is after Christmas, fairies drop down to two on Saturday and two on Sunday, and that is it. So now we have this, now you're into this sort of certain kind of long haul thing of January, February, and a good portion of March. Now you're committing to a certain extent. Yeah, so this is right. So now we get it. I love the look on your face. I wish I had met you a month ago. I would have had you come out and just kind of see. Because the other thing, too, that I'm, when you said, you know, because it's a podcast and thinking about sound, one thing I love is that it's dead silent.

Things are frozen, and the boards sound different. Like there's this creaky, like the boards sound different in the dead of winter when you're walking on them. It's got a certain sort of thing. And the deer, the deer are just, the deer run the place. And you see foxes. We've had more foxes. So suddenly you have this kind of wildlife moment. So January is really when it starts to get cold and freezing, and the bay can freeze. And when the bay freezes, there's no boats, and no one comes on and off. You have to drive on and off. And it can be really, you really have to hunker down, like it's not for the faint of heart. January and February can also be, those two months can be really rough out there, just because it's really cold.

And once the ocean gets cold, it stays cold. You know, in the summer when the ocean is warm, even in like September, October, it stays warm because of the ocean. This has happened more than once, where you drive out. I don't have a beach permit. So it's like going out, taking the ferry out, and then the bay freezes. And that has happened a couple times where then Mike and Gary, who do have a beach permit, drove me back to Sayville to my car when they were leaving. Or I remember once Todd, who owns the plant store, like drove me to Babylon because it was like bay froze, which usually takes a couple days. So it's a little like you're kind of making your decision. Am I going to do this and get a ride with somebody, or get out of here while I can?

So a thing that also happens in the winter, not infrequently, is they'll cancel ferries because of weather. That it's too rough for them to dock the boats, or there is ice starting to form and wind and all of that. So when you're committing to going out there, you can't be certain that you'll be able to get back. Just sort of a good thing to know. Like if you had an important trip that you were planning on leaving, you know, don't try to fit this in beforehand, because it's not unusual that that would happen, and it can happen very last minute. I love being out there in the winter. It's not everybody's cup of tea. My ex-girlfriend actually, after a point, she was like, yeah, this isn't my thing.

She actually did find it depressing, like didn't like that flat gray. But I love it. And I love being able to do things like, I mean, you get to see the whole town and Fire Island in a very different way, like taking a walk through the sunken forest in February when there are no leaves on the trees. And kind of what that looks like is pretty extraordinary. And just how the colors change and walking on the beach and you just, there's nobody, nobody in either direction. So there you have like February, March is now. March, I can always tell because there's a bird, it's a red-winged blackbird. And when you hear it in the Grove, it has a very specific sound. You know that it's started spring and it happened two weeks ago.

So spring is on its way. And then you have April and April showers. Like everyone thinks April is going to be great, but it's always wet and cold and damp and everyone's out there, but it's not a good month. And there you are, you're back at Memorial Day.

[35:31] Jess Rothschild: This was our final proper episode of Finding Fire Island, but do keep an eye out next week for a special bonus episode along the lines of a Bravo Secrets Revealed or a Real World Shit You Didn't See. So that will be coming out next week. Thank you so much for tuning in. I want to thank all of the amazing people who took the time to sit down and chat with me about all of our favorite plays. If you enjoyed this series, you should definitely check out my other podcast, Hot Takes and Deep Dives, where I sit down with people like Rosie O'Donnell, Sandra Bernhard, writers from Sex and the City, writers from SNL, Rachel Dratch. And I want to thank a few individuals who really contributed to the project.

Caitlin White did all of the wonderful sound design on every single episode. Cecilia Bergier worked on the beautiful cover art. And my friends and collaborators, Carolyn Bergier, Damian Bellino, Ben Rimelower, and Grant Pastor for letting me bounce ideas off of them over the past nine months. I'd love to continue the conversation. Give me a follow over on Instagram at Jessxnyc. And once again, stay tuned for next week's bonus episode.