Jeanne Wilkinson: Montauk Two Turtle Day

(Pics by me, Andrew & Jennifer Keeley Yonda and Frank Lind)

June, 2011, Andrew, Jennifer and I spend a sunny afternoon in Dumbo, Brooklyn...

Then we take off for Montauk...

A Walk On The Beach, Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863-1923)

...where we do a photo shoot, research for Frank's latest series of paintings inspired by Joaquin Sorolla, the Spanish artist whose former studio we visited in Madrid.

Picking beach roses for the shoot.

Pinning the rose.

Andrew checking his costume, a Talbot's size 12 women's beige linen pantsuit from the Downtown Brooklyn Goodwill. In certain poses, it has kind of a funny fit,

reminding us of the episode of "The Office" where Michael finds out he's wearing a women's
suit. Unfortunately I forgot the boater-style hat so Andrew wears a stand-in.

Being Sorolla-esque.

A guitar break at someone's amazing beach castle complex. We wonder if the locals who drive their SUVs on the beach at sunset will fall into the moat!

The next morning Frank finds a box turtle walking next to our motel and worries that it's going to get run over on the highway!

We decide it's a she, for no apparent reason, and bring her up to the park, Camp Hero, at the very eastern tip of Long Island, to give her a better home. We name her Ginger because of her fancy footwork and beautiful eyes.

After we see her off into her fabulous new life,

we run into (metaphorically speaking)
yet another box turtle, this one crossing the road. Why? We can't imagine.
Frank, a turtle afficionado, is awed - it's a two-turtle day! He takes this one and turns him back to safety (we decide it's a him for no apparent reason) whereupon he clomps along at a good pace on only three legs (the turtle, not Frank).
We name him Fred, for obvious reasons.

The fourth limb is totally gone, but it looks like an old injury (a war wound?) and he seems to have adapted to his 3-legged status. We hope that Fred will find Ginger and they will dance away into happy-ever-after-land, turtle style.

Camp Hero used to be a WWII base - here's an old gun emplacement, now boarded up, formerly housing a big honkin' 16 inch gun to protect the East Coast from

U-boats and the like.

Here's the space alien that watches our every move...oh, sorry, the Cold War radar tower, now deteriorating.

A paste-up pin-up on an old barracks building in the fake WWII "fishing village" says: "The Ideal Female Body - Deformed by Tight Corsets." Oddly, no other graffiti is to be found. When this base was active, the inside walls of these buildings might have been covered with
pin-ups, but none of them too concerned with women's health issues.

Andrew relaxes before the second shoot, looking like a drug lord who just pulled off

the deal of a lifetime. He's picked up a new hat at White's in downtown Montauk,

which has everything the 21st beachgoer could ever dream of, and a few items for 19th century beachers, too.

I'm an excellent actor.

Striding atop the hoo-doos.

Now on the rocks...

...with the lolli-crab.

(Really a horseshoe crab, which isn't really a crab at all - more related to a spider than a crustaceon.)

Last year it was my sister Sherry and Brett on the hoodoos.

Another inch and they'd have been on the rocks.

Sherry helmeted herself with a horseshoe crab, sometimes called a living fossil (the crab, not Sherry). As so much else in our beleagured world, their numbers are declining because of habitat destruction and over-harvesting (for use as bait and fertilizer).