Jones Beach Island: Captree State Park
1. On Chicken and Slipgut
For having grown up on Long Island, for all the times that I’ve been near the sea, and for having a brother who is a fisherman, you would have thought that I might have at least heard of slipgut. My guess is that you don’t know what it is either. To answer your next question: yes, it is as disgusting as it sounds.
I googled the word after my dear high school friend Gigi and I saw several signs posted on a fishing pier at Captree State Park, which lies at the far eastern end of Jones Beach Island. The sign advises fisherman to throw slipgut — along with any seaweed they might pull up — back into the water “after catch.” Best I can tell, zero fishermen using this pier actually do this.
Like this one, the signs I’ve seen at nearly every beach I’ve visited on this walk are routinely ignored. No one heeds a single one of them. There are the “Stay off the Rocks” signs that you can’t see because so many people are on the rocks. There are the “No Loud Music/No speakers” signs on the boardwalk, perfectly placed next to the speakers blasting loud music. My favorite of all was the triple-sign combo just north of the Coney Island boardwalk: “Stay Off the Grass,” “No Smoking,” and “No Dogs.” All three of these pointless pieces of metal were above the heads of three men sitting on the grass and smoking cigars with dogs. Another sign at Captree asking that you not to “Sit or Walk on the Railing” read like a challenge. The top of said railing is at a 45-degree angle to the ground. “Go for it, Spider Girl,” the sign whispered. “Let’s see what those webs can do.”
I have clearly lived in Connecticut too long.
In any case, my friend Gigi and I had our first encounter with slipgut on that dock — some greenish-brown gelatinous substance that no one, not even Google, seems to know how to define. Frankly, we are not anxious to see it again. Ever.
I am anxious to see Gigi again, however.
Gigi is the best kind of travel companion. Throw out a suggestion like “Let’s have ice cream for lunch,” and without a moment’s hesitation, she replies with a hearty “OK!” She flew all the way from her current home in Houston, Texas, just to walk the once-familiar beaches of Jones Beach Island with me. Like my mother had many years before, Gigi lost her husband, John, in his 50s, leaving her with three children under the age of 18. To say Gigi is a rock is to underestimate her strength. She is a rock, she is a reed, she is a tree, she is a tiger. Most of all, she is exactly who her kids need her to be: kind, tough, compassionate, and funny as hell.
About two weeks before the two of us intended to meet for our walk, Gigi’s father, Larry, passed away at age 94. I knew Larry well since he employed me — along with Gigi and probably a more than ½ dozen of her friends at one point or another — at the Chicken Delight franchise he owned in North Babylon. If you’ve have never had Chicken Delight, you do not know how fried chicken is supposed to taste. Larry taught me how to cut up a whole chicken into eight perfect pieces. He taught me how to navigate using a map for our chicken deliveries. Most importantly, he reinforced for me the value of hard work and of being kind. Larry had long ago sold the North Babylon location and he and Gigi’s mom, Ginger, had moved to Las Vegas.
I still picked Gigi up at Newark on the appointed day. Her father, who suffered from a rare neurodegenerative disorder, requested that his body be donated for scientific research on the disease, so there was to be no immediate service. Lucky for me, she still wanted to come out for our walk. We spent the first night of her visit in Manhattan, acting like tourists, eating pizza, and sloshing in puddles (not intentionally. Ew.) in Times Square like the rest of the tourists who chose a rainy night to visit. We made our way out to Long Island the next day in the pouring rain. As we came out of the Queens Midtown Tunnel, Gigi turned to me and said that the last remaining Chicken Delight on Long Island was in Westbury, a slight detour from our destination in Seaford, where we would be staying with Gigi’s cousin, Carol.
“Should we go?” she asked. “OK!” I responded.
Trips down Memory Lane are not always as vivid as this one was. The owner of this last output of Chicken Deliciousness remembered Larry. Fortunately, he also remembered to never change the original menu signs above the counter, other than the prices, which are still quite reasonable. In a fitting homage to Gigi’s dad, we shared a regular four-piece chicken dinner with fries ($13.99) and, while it wasn’t quite as good as we remembered Larry’s chicken to be, it was every bit as fun being with Gigi, licking chicken grease off our fingers, all these years later.
