Frozen in Time

On old maps, one circa 1700, the geography of Sagaponack is differently portrayed. The bodies of water are the most significant features on the map. Poxabogue Pond, Sagg Swamp, now owned and with trails maintained by The Nature Conservancy, is dominant, etched large, drawn like an expanding spider web across the yellowed page. Sagaponack Pond, too, looks impressively large, its northern boundary marked “Forest” and, at its edge, by 1750, the dam for the adjacent mill. This place is now called White Walls, and few of us crossing there can imagine this former, former time.

There is also a dotted low, illustrated as a boggy vein that ran diagonal, southeast, almost all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, called Little Sagg Swamp. This swamp is not drawn on the map dated 1800.

We change and forget the lay of the land very quickly. But the land itself does not move on so fast. To this day, Little Sagg Swamp runs right past my door. I see this when it rains. I see it because both freeze and fog form here first.

On Friday morning, a few days after the full moon, clear, cold, and very still air displaced the record highs, and as the sun rose, a white frost spread where the shallow waters once lay.

A chest freezer, one that dates back more than a decade, quit. On the first day of the nor’easter, it seemed an opportune time. Why not defrost the Long Island duckling from 2017? It was a door prize at the Long Island Farm Bureau’s annual dinner, frozen even then, I think.

The trouble with freezers is that they allow you to keep food you will likely never prepare. And you keep it because you cannot bear to waste it — but then, seven years on, you’re cooking it for the dogs.

Our broken freezer has its share of imagined meals. A whole fish sent by a friend who went to Alaska. That, too, years ago, arrived frozen. Thanksgiving’s leftover turkey, bones and all. “I thought I’d make soup,” my mother says.

As I free the butchered fish from the vacuum-sealed pouch and drop the slab into a bucket, I feel guilt. We cannot help but establish the origins of each thing. Sometimes there is a clear memory; other items, just dread.

Our freezer — and I realize after writing this that we will never receive any RSVPs for dinner, ever again — is also where we have saved, for reasons we cannot fully understand, the fragile bodies of the birds we have found dead.

Here, in ice crystals, the sora I found after Hurricane Isabelle. Rolled softly in paper towels, a least bittern, a Virginia rail. The bright, modest feathers of a kestrel, the merlin. A flicker, I can remember, was electrocuted by the power lines, and the screech owl was hit by a car. The only dovekie I have ever seen died in a different nor’easter.

The only thing actually frozen in time is our regret. So, out into the storm, it also feels opportune: We finally return them back to the earth.