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B ■ 6
THE SUN H
Easy come, easy go j
The lessons to be learned from the Isle of Caprice <
I Editor’s Note: Dan Rattiner is editor of Dan’s Papers, a newspaper published in Bridgehampton, on Long Island, N.Y.
By DAN RATTINER
■DAN’S PAPERS
■	I sit here on the back porch looking out at potato fields, at a blue sky curving down to meet sand dunes off in the distance, at a necklace of beach houses, at some people on •horseback trotting around a ring off to my left. And I think: .'can it be? Is all of this to be soon forgotten? Soon vanished beneath the sea?
• I read that the ocean is rising one half an inch per year. There is global warming and the greenhouse effect and it is 'not that there is suddenly more water in the sea, but that the existing water, at a slightly higher temperature, is -expanding, rising higher, eating away at our shoreline.
People say it is not really happening, that the data is inconclusive, that it is just a cycle and the seas are expanding for a while, for a few millennia, and then they •will be contracting, but other say not so. Global warming is real. We have to address it.
Off in the distance some men working with huge beams and big trucks are busy lifting a waterfront home off its •foundations to move it back from the sea a few hundred feet. People in this community say that years ago the .owner of this property foolishly built the house too close to
the water and he is paying the price for it, but I have seen old photographs of this area and there was far more dune and beach in front of this house than now. It certainly seems like it would have been a good bet at the time.
And now I open a magazine and read about the Isle of Caprice. I’ve never heard of the Isle of Caprice but indeed the article in the magazine describes it, complete with photographs.
The Isle of Caprice made its appearance in 1920 about ten miles south of Biloxi, Miss., in the Gulf of Mexico, where the Mississippi River pours in. Caprice rose out of the sea in 1920 as a huge sand shoal, five miles long and one mile wide and within a year plant life began to grow on it. It gave every indication of being there for a long, long time.
As a result, in 1922, a businessman named Jack Appleton built a huge resort on it. There were roulette wheels, crap tables, a faro layout and a 100-foot bar and dance floor
—	this at a time when the drinking of liquor was illegal. Ferries left four times a day from Biloxi and were packed with people. There was a Dixieland band on board. The trip took ninety minutes and cost 75 cents round trip.
SUN HERALD GRAPHIC
But the resort was not just for gamblers and drinkers. There was a big swimming pool, a restaurant and outdoor cafe, cabanas, boardwalk, souvenir shop and beach com- ; plete with life-guards. It was a family affair too. There was even a widely publicized swim marathon from Biloxi.	£
“This dune strip has been the subject... of whispered	f
huge winnings in the casino, trysts of Nereids in the moonlight on the beach, and of dreamy dancing in richly appointed hall, ” wrote a newspaper reporter at the time.	J
By 1928, however, the Isle of Caprice was on its way	^
out. The surf inundated the beach and swept over into the swimming pool. The outdoor cafe had to be closed, then ^ the restaurant. Experts at the time expressed the belief that the picking of a thick matting of sea oats, something the tourists had pulled up in their desire for souvenirs, had somehow weakened the understructure of the Island. But experts today say that what happened to Caprice was -. simply the natural changing of the sea floor structure. There had been a big hurricane in 1926. The currents had changed, and the shoaling slowed in one area and increased in another.
Caprice sank completely out of sight in 1930. Gone -were all the good times, all the singers and dancers, the swimming races in the pool, the fine meals, the romances in the dunes, the moonlight swims, the post cards, even the resort building itself, which was carried away in the sea. Caprice has not been seen since.
I close the magazine and look out from my seat on the porch again. The land before me appears a little higher off to the left. The ocean, when it comes in, will cut off from the right. There will be whole parts of the peninsula cut off in this way. Islands created. How will it be dealt with? Ji Great bond issues will be arranged and become like the Florida Keys, separate and yet connected. And then, eventually, it will all disappear, the summer homes, the A farms, the downtowns, the Town Halls, everything, even v the bridges, and that will be the end of it.
I think I’ll have a drink. I get up and begin to walk toward -the slider separating the back porch from the kitchen. As I walk, I think: perhaps, on the other hand, the oceans will dry up, we’ll have perpetual winter and the Hamptons will extend all the way to Portugal.
An occasional series of articles about the Coast that has appeared in other publications.