My first glimpses of Plum Island, like most people’s, were
from afar. I grew up in Wading River, amid cabbage fields and subdivisions, and
when we made the 40-minute drive out to the tip of the North Fork, usually on
the way to somewhere else, the island had a way of peeking into view.
As
a kid in the ’80s, the ospreys’ nests and oyster beds that lined the route to
the Cross-Sound Ferry terminal in Orient didn’t have much allure to me. I didn’t
know then how precious the pockets of nature, and the moments of quiet, would
come to feel as the undeveloped parts of Eastern Long Island got smaller and
smaller. The fresh golf courses and the build-to-suit signs didn’t yet feel
ominous.
What
never failed to transfix, though, was Plum Island. On school field trips to
Boston or Mystic Seaport, we’d crowd up against the ferry railing and squint
through the fog of Plum Gut toward the low beige buildings with smokestacks and
ventilation pipes lining their roofs. Our knowledge of the island, and the gaps
in it, added up to fascination. We knew it was a lab; we knew they experimented
on animals; we knew there were diseases there that were best separated from the
mainland by a cold, choppy body of water. And when “The Silence of the Lambs”
came out when I was 14, we knew it was a place even Hannibal Lecter wouldn’t
want to live.
“Anthrax
Island,” the cannibal doctor called it, and he wasn’t alone. Real events there
– a power outage, multiple disease leaks and an early history of weapons
research – mingled in the popular imagination with the Montauk Monster and the stuff
of campfire stories.
“Look
at that place,” wrestler/governor Jesse Ventura intoned years later, bobbing in
a boat offshore for his conspiracy-theory TV show. “It’s a toxic ticking
time-bomb for an outbreak of cataclysmic proportions.”
How,
then, could I pass up a visit?
*
It
would have been unthinkable decades ago, but Plum Island today, under the
auspices of the Department of Homeland Security, is open for tours. They don’t
make it easy – there are background checks and restrictions, and forms to sign
with warnings not to visit farms, zoos, stockyards, “various menageries,” or
pet stores for days afterward. But by the time I showed my ID to a security
guard in Orient and boarded the morning boat to the island on a clear day last
spring, I had been preceded by Cub Scout troops, bird-watchers and volunteer
firemen.
I
was there as a magazine reporter, a species that the island’s government
minders now found surprisingly welcome, in large part because of Plum Island’s
uncertain future. With plans to move the lab to Kansas and sell the island
weaving through the branches of the federal government, Plum Island was now
more than just the site of a secretive animal disease lab – it was real estate.
I had an escort from Homeland Security, whose name I had to promise not to
print, and two more from the General Services Administration, the branch of
government that sells off excess property.
After
processing on the island we loaded into a van and rode, past the vine-covered
remains of Fort Terry and through a weedy former parade ground, to the East
End’s quietest beach. The fort, dating to the Spanish-American War, once housed
hundreds of soldiers but was declared surplus after World War II. Now, by the
island’s southeastern shore, there were a volleyball court and a horseshoe pit
used mostly on the lab’s family day, and a lifeguard chair that lay on its
side. Except for scraps of driftwood, a spider crab shell, and a stray thermos
and Wiffle Ball washed up from points west, the long stretch of white sand was
pristine. And with good reason: Besides environmental protection specialists
who pick up trash regularly, security guards on foot patrol do what they can to
tidy up.
Cool
water lapped at the beach, and crickets chirped in the field nearby. The view
to the south, across Gardiners Bay, took in the broad sweep of the Hamptons. To
the east was Block Island, and wide open ocean.
“Just
watch your step,” my government escort said. “Because sometimes out here, you
find little tortoises.”
*
Here
is Plum Island’s greatest secret: It’s beautiful. The landscape, wild and
untamed, is a taste of what the rest of Long Island must have looked like
before all the people came. All it took to preserve it were a few buildings, on
a few small lots around the island’s 840 acres, with enough contagious
pathogens inside to scare away the world.
But
life abounds. Along the rocky northern shore, where purple beach blossoms line
the road, an emergency medical technician out for a walk in the days before my
visit came upon an injured red-tailed hawk. Other workers have spotted bald
eagles. I saw a seal poke its head out of the water, one of hundreds that stop
at the island in cold weather on the way to their breeding grounds. And nature,
over the years, has been reclaiming territory.
At
the island’s eastern tip, down a bumpy gravel stretch of road, is a cluster of
heavy concrete fortifications that once held gun batteries to defend the east
coast from air and sea attack. Now they’re overgrown with weeds and brush.
Another
look at the horizon offered a hint of Plum Island’s possible futures. To one
side, Gardiners Island, five privately owned square miles off the coast of East
Hampton with their own history of development intrigue. To another, Fishers Island, a
playground for the wealthy with a military background much like Plum Island’s.
Finally, in the distance, Little Gull Island, a tiny outcropping that was government-owned
for the moment – though the GSA was on the case.
“The lighthouse sits on an acre of
land,” one of the GSA guys said. “So we’re going to sell that.”
We
stopped at another gun battery, where a brick room once used to house
ammunition now held a drum, marked “non-hazardous waste.” Poison ivy lined the
path in and out, and when we emerged, we all stopped to pick ticks off our pant
legs.
It
was the ticks, later, that nagged at me. When you’re on an island rumored to be
the birthplace of Lyme disease, little things can unsettle. So can bigger
things, like the ghostly block of a structure, near a spot called Pine Point,
that once held the island’s biological weapons lab. First built to store mines,
it was vacant now, its entrances sealed shut and its cinder-block walls covered
in peeling paint and vines. A barbed-wire fence ringed its perimeter. Fifty
feet away was the beach, long and empty. We stood on a gun fortification and
took it all in.
“This
could all be yours,” someone mumbled.
*
A
place like Plum Island, though, is not disposed of easily. In the months after
my visit, the funding for the Kansas lab dried up and talk of Plum Island’s
sale went quiet – though the real estate listings remain. (My magazine story
dried up, too; not enough conflict, the editor said.) There were also questions
about the island’s real worth. Optimists in the government had floated sums of
$100 million. A real estate agent told me he’d guess more like $40 million.
Let’s say you build a house there, he said. Would you want your kid digging in
the sand?
But
maybe the island’s value lies beyond money. Much of Long Island, after all, was
empty a century ago. Since then the wide roads and housing grids have spread
ever-eastward, over woods and potato fields and most everything else in their
path. In Southold, a few miles from Plum Island’s shores, real estate offices
tout mansions priced in the millions of dollars and undeveloped lots for almost
as much.
In
context, 840 acres of wilderness – even 840 acres of wilderness with a carcass
incinerator – begin to look precious.
“Is
everything really reduced to the marketplace?” Bob DeLuca, an East End
activist, asked me. “Is everything just always for sale? Is everything always
at a price that somebody can buy it if they have enough money? Or are there
some things that we’re going to step back and say, enough?”
Perhaps
Anthrax Island is an odd place to take that stand. But from the shoreline near
the old weapons lab, as a breeze blows off the bay and a family of geese edges
into the water, it looks like the best place we have left
