Long Island is Bugging Me

PART 1: BATS

On the warmest Wednesday in January, when my dad was feeding our stray cats outside the front door, a bat flew into the kitchen. It’s not totally uncommon to see bats in Long Island, glimmering against purple summer skies, swooping down to eat fireflies, and screeching at us for attention (or mourning the home we cleared for our backyard). But once he entered my home, ignoring the wooden bat boxes that my mom carefully nailed to the tall trees that line our street, we didn’t know what to do with him, besides make vaccination appointments for all our human and non-human family members. I’m an extreme hypochondriac, especially about rabies, and have unsuccessfully begged doctors for a preventative jab, so this legit exposure sent me spiraling. At first, as I waited on hold with the Nassau County Health Department and the vet and my PCP and my mom’s PCP, I was angry at the bat. But, after reflection (much reflection, hovering at the bottom of the emergency room triage list for my first of four post-exposure shots), I start to direct the anger inwards. How many generations of bats did we displace through sprawling single-family-home ownership? Was he just drawn to our chronic bug infestation: moths in the pantry, daddy long legs in the bathtub, katydids holding onto the screen door in summer? I’ll never know. After a few hours of flapping in circles through my kitchen, the bat made its way outside without harming the cats (or more likely, being harmed by them), deep into the night, into the suburbs, into the trees.

Are you a big city girl making the trek out to the suburbs in search of gluten-free dosa in Hicksville and the muddy hiking preserves of the North Shore? Or perhaps you are already a creature of the suburbs, nostalgic for a Long Island past of Christmas caroling with pignoli cookies and paying your uncle’s neighbor’s kid to shovel snow from your driveway? Or perhaps your anger is boiling over and you’re not sure if anyone else feels the way you do about the place you grew up, heartbroken by its racism and classism and school/housing/cafeteria segregation baked into its core? Or perhaps you notice small things about your neighborhood that you want to change — the opaque village zoning commissions, the politically ambiguous lawn signs about proposed housing developments, the not-so-public public library boards — and you don’t know where to start? Or perhaps you love living a five-minute bike ride from the warmth of your grandmother’s kitchen table but wonder why her neighbors threatened to call the cops when she hosted a Diwali puja a few years ago? Or perhaps you are like me and feel all of these things (except you are not the biggest fan of dosa – too sour): riled up about how much you hate this icky cesspool swamp that you also love and no one else can criticize unless they’re also working on a suburban utopian manifesto?

Before you make the journey to, or through, or away from Long Island, I need to warn you about the bugs you’ll meet along the way, especially if your imagination is limited to city bugs — cockroaches, bedbugs, mosquitos, termites, ladybugs if you’re lucky, aphids if the ladybugs are lucky. Insects used to make me itchy: too leggy, too many eyes, too many eggs, too jumpy. Suburban bugs have more character: unassuming, invasive, beautiful only if you look at them the right (or wrong) way, trying to bask in the warmth but ending up in a damp basement, hidden between house and forest, unnoticeable by design, unbounded by train lines or counties or borders or community or shame. Being from Long Island used to make me itchy for those same reasons, word-salading my way out of admitting I’m not exactly from New York: I’m from the suburbs of Queens; I’m near-ish to Bayside; I was born and raised in New York State.

I want to love Long Island but can’t let myself: it’s a moth trap for the same instincts that drove white flight and racial capitalism and relentless pursuit of property and a (perhaps warranted) fear of bats. Whenever we drive past a brambly shoreline, my mom reminds me that her fourth-grade class dragged fishing nets to public beaches and seined them to collect hermit crabs, starfish, and sponges for a fish tank aquarium back at school. This sense of shared ownership that existed (at least in my mom’s nostalgic view) has been replaced with gates, fences, locks, and keypads. I can’t ignore or escape the violence of Long Island’s past and the pain of its present. Or, towns named after Indigenous words: see Jean O’Brien who argues that non-Indigenous people assuage their guilt of settler colonialism by naming streets after Indigenous people instead of sacrificing something material like investing in flood and resilience infrastructure because the very much alive Shinnecock Nation’s shoreline on eastern Long Island is being eaten by sea level rise and erosion from private beach management. Or, housing segregation designed by federal loan insurance programs and Robert Moses’ Southern State Parkway engineered to keep Black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers away from Jones Beach State Park. Or, boring (formative) everyday (interpersonal) racism in the parking lot of Carvel after my grandma and I got our nails done at her favorite salon.

But in this muck is also something beautiful: highways surrounded by phragmites and frigates and late night chai shops, injustice surrounded by bubbling ethnic enclaves and counter organizing, underground cicada broods, communalism that looks like carpools not community gardens, fascists fighting against quiet environmental stewardship and museum educators stealthily politicizing purple wampum shells and our history for field-tripping-with-a-permission-slip elementary schoolers. Long Island is a place of struggle, and I don’t just mean trying to find a seat on the Long Island Rail Road evening peak train as the sun sets over the wetlands. Liberatory struggle on Long Island does not always look like liberatory struggle in the city, or as Chicanx studies and geography scholars Genevieve Carpio, Clara Irazábal, and Laura Pulido argue, “people of color in suburbs are often treated as apolitical, and suburban struggles are often assumed to be conservative and, as a result, are under theorized as sites of liberatory struggle.” Long Island is a place where people resist quietly and brashly and often cowardlily; its tidal, brackish Sound, saltburned and shriveled still from Hurricane Belle in 1976, wrapping around the city and exchanging people and policies, workers and wages, cormorants and herons flying between Nassau and Queens or commuters taking the LIRR every morning or driving in through local roads to avoid the bridges and tunnels and suing the city over congestion pricing. This guide to the bugs of Long Island will teach you how to protect your pantry from hungry moths, how to avoid spider crickets joining your morning shower, how to keep your books and archives away from silverfish, how to prevent carpenter bees from boring holes into your siding, and how to feel and learn if you, too, think that the best strategy for changing a place is embracing it.

My mom and I spend the days following the bat’s emergence making ourselves feel good by researching humane and ethical “pest” removal services, speaking with bat sanctuaries, and frantically posting on my very active college Facebook group, where my former archaeology professor comments that a bat slept in her room overnight at a crumbling field site. Most professionals tell us that our attic is probably not infested with bats, and the balmy weather following the week of unexpected January rainstorms woke the bats up early from hibernation, hungry for stink bugs that keep crawling up my window blinds. I can’t fall asleep: every time I hear the attic creak from possums or chipmunks who now probably also carry rabies, I check the Ring camera for evidence (I only find foxes and raccoons and guilt about buying into the hypervigilant crime panic state). Our experts say the only way to tell is to check the floor for bat droppings: when you press against them, they’re silver inside, full of insect exoskeletons.

PART 2: SPIDER CRICKETS

With a body length of about five centimeters and an additional ten of gangly legs, Spider crickets (Rhaphidophoridae) are neither spiders nor crickets. More closely related to grasshoppers or locusts, spider crickets are missing inner ears, wings, and the ability to chirp. They are neurotic and seedy: drawn to cellars, rotten logs, hollow trees, and sewers, and nibbling on everything from fungus, to fabric, to you. Transported here from Asia through immigration, colonization, or accident, they are taxonomized as invasive by exterminators, but not regulated by the New York Invasive Species Council. I used it earlier without qualifying, but I take issue with the term “invasive.” It gives naughty kids permission to hurt lantern flies (ladybugs without pretty privilege) instead of inscribing a sense of compassionate responsibility towards buzzy critters. Maybe spider crickets are not from New York, but they’re certainly from Long Island: overtalkative on the snaking Sunday bagel line but getting in a fight over a spot in the parking lot on the way home.

Every time I sit down to write, I get distracted by these needy spider crickets who enter my kitchen through the basement or pipes or holes in the screen door and stare at me longingly. Of course, I’d never hurt a bug, especially such an anxious one, but they can’t stay in the pantry, so I cover them with glass cups and yell at my dad or sister to bring them outside so that the cats can’t torture them. But maybe it’s just writer’s block, so I go with my friends to a free queer POC poetry workshop that started an hour late / open mic (but I leave before this starts because the event is at Nowadays in deep Ridgewood on a worknight) / mutual aid book swap / opportunity to lock eyes with a cutie selling overpriced handmade candles. I’m the target demographic for an event like this, but as we work through a gentle sensory poetry exercise with prompts like “what are your strongest sounds of home,” I wonder what I am doing here, two hours and three train transfers from Long Island on a weeknight.

Until I make my way over to the mutual aid book swap, where two masked vendors are distributing free books on racial justice and zines about Reasons to Move to Long Island: great history (of slavery and the KKK), great neighbors (if you like housing segregation), and great schools (for white students). I come on very strong: offering to help write and collage zines about different protest rules across Long Island’s municipalities, or run a reading group together, or be best friends, or write a column in Newsday together about loving to hate (and hating to love) Long Island. I gather through borderline cross examination that the stall is run by Autumn and Rebecca, childhood friends from West Hempstead who go by “Long Distance Readers” and have been sharing reading recommendations and tabling with free books at events across Long Island and the outer boroughs since 2020. They don’t quite agree to becoming best friends with me yet (soon they will), but they agree to getting coffee in Bayside next Sunday morning.

Bayside is in Queens but is culturally Nassau County. Long Island’s westernmost county is immigrant-dense with constantly growing and shifting ethnic enclaves, accessible to the city with buses and shuttles and ample LIRR sitting room third spaces, and more generically liberal than neighboring Suffolk County. Long Island has another axis of dissimilarity running from north to south. The North Shore, lining the rocky beaches of the Long Island Sound, is closer in proximity and vibes to single and multi-family Northeast Queens, with sprawling Koreatowns and South Asian working class hubs, ethnic white immigrants with strong religious communities, and is wealthier and smellier than the South. The print-only North Shore Today’s tagline is “the guide for the discriminating.” The South Shore, above the sandy coasts of the Atlantic Ocean and its barrier islands, is closer to South Brooklyn and Southeast Queens, with a rich density of Black home ownership, higher flood risk, and more working class residents. I ask my mom if this sounds intuitively right to her, and she just lists of a series of neighborhoods (Oceanside, Soundview, Great Neck) that don’t match my analysis.

As the workshop facilitator wraps up the event by sharing that home smells like her mom cleaning with Fabuloso, the hosts thank their partners, coming all the way from Brooklyn, Queens, and even Long Island: “They’re brave for that.” Whenever people from The City complain about Long Island and suburban urges, even ones that repel me, like the obsession with Stanley Cups brought on by boredom-driven overconsumption and late-capitalist-greenwashing, or spending Friday nights driving between Target and Home Goods because the suburbs lack walkable communities, or calling us “brave” for living in a place that hates us, it makes me lean into my townie tendencies. I don’t know if this reactionary behavior is encoded into suburban planning (rapid 1930s-era growth around the Long Island Sound that spewed unregulated sewage and nitrogen into the estuary until phragmites crowded out native plants and took over the mudflats) or encoded into suburban desire (calling the cops on block parties in the Bronx because the music reverberates across the water). Suburban desire is slippery. I can’t define it besides lawn mowers and foghorns before the storm and bird feeders and seagulls, but I still live here because I feel a sense of debt to this expansive, crumbling place and an obligation to restore it; like letting jumpy spider crickets live in the shed for one more winter or pretending we don’t see them prance around so they don’t have to go out into the cold just yet.

PART 3: SILVERFISH

Silverfish (Lepisma saccharinum), with a body length of about 13 to 25 millimeters, including their “primitive” antennae, are nocturnal and avoid light. Unlike most bugs, silverfish can digest cellulose, hungry for polysaccharides like book bindings, wallpaper, and coffee. Silverfish are the furthest thing from primitive; the most intellectual bug, bookworms are hungry only for first person memoirs about re-archiving and re-writing places along the periphery that have no right to think of themselves as an underdog but still do. Silverfish also like starch, like the yellowing paper from my book on the history of Nassau County in early photographs from 1869 to 1940. I’m worried the silverfish have ventured into the basement, snacking on the corners of old family archives, some of which my mom and I packed up into plastic baggies of 25 and shipped out in an unearned act of trust to an Instagram-ad promising high quality digitization, and some of which I stored in cardboard boxes to digitize once I can find a quality scanner whose software doesn’t outsmart me.

This Nassau County photo archive (not my family photos, although they are also a Nassau County photo archive, like the record of my mom at Andy Lipset’s 1980 bar mitzvah) started slightly before the establishment of Nassau County in 1899 after a “bitter battle” during a “citizen’s meeting” in Mineola to decide whether it was part of Queens or Suffolk. The politics of this archive made me nervous. How would the editors, Bette S. Weidman and Linda B. Martin, talk about slavery, settler colonialism, or housing segregation in 1981, if at all? To my surprise, they argue, in their introduction, that the history of Long Island is predicated on colonialism, slavery, exploitation of immigrant labor, and poor transit; encouraging readers not to “succumb to an uncritical nostalgia.” The book’s first image, taken from the Suffolk County Historical Library, is of a small, enslaved child in Lake Success in 1880. The caption reminds readers that “after the abolition of slavery, the master-servant relationship still lingered.” The archive is populated with grainy photos of main streets with general stores and horse-drawn carriages and petticoats and frowny Irish and Italian immigrants working in leather factories — “the glum-faced workers seen here suggest that the conditions were less than desirable,” chime in Bette and Linda — and photos of displaced Indigenous people and environmental degradation wrought by unregulated dredging and oyster harvesting, and author laments that “few photographs survive… of members of the Black community, whose history on Long Island goes back to the colonial times.”

Every photo of women, or brown and Black “servants,” or immigrant not-yet-unionized laborers was taken by Hal Fullerton, a photographer who worked for the LIRR to document cars and stations across the Island. I’ve been developing a para-social relationship with Fullerton. I imagine him as a quietly subversive photographer intentionally documenting the covert power dynamics of turn of the century Long Island under the guise of recording train cars and stations. Fullerton called Long Island a “utopia” and spent his life creating “experimental farms,” and rogue ad campaigns for cycling, and abstract photography. But the Long Islanders who anthologize his legacy are not as interesting as Fullerton might have been. Charles L. Sachs, from Staten Island (Long Island’s cousin) who curated an exhibit about Fullerton at a Huntington arts museum in the ‘90s, published a half-biography half-photo collection with Hofstra’s Institute of Long Island Studies, and argued that Fullerton’s photography represented a romanticized, agrarian era of Long Island that predated his photos. Hal was a bit of a freak: described as “perpetually wound up and on the move,” dressed often in traditional Mexican clothes and fascinated by Yucatan ruins, dipping into disparate and unrelated careers: hydraulic engineering, cotton seed oil milling, amateur photography. I desperately want to project nobler intentions onto Fullerton, but I think he mostly just wanted to take pictures of train tracks.

Instead, it’s Bette and Linda who contain and exploit nostalgia to cast a gently critical lens onto Long Island. Their sharp condemnation lies in contrast with professional bird lover Tom Andersen’s This Fine Piece of Water, published by Yale Press (with a poorly aged introduction by RFK Jr.). Andersen opens his environmental history with “The Indians settled the area and eventually thrived for the same reasons the Europeans would”: instead of how European colonizers, who he refers to as “explorers” making “contact,” were able to thrive thanks to centuries of genocide. Anderson’s book tiptoes around an “ecological crisis” plaguing the Long Island Sound without implicating commercial fishermen, overdevelopment along the waterfront, or even climate change. How do you rehabilitate a broken place that you adore? Is it through naming, shaming, and blaming, like Bette and Linda, or through quietly seeping into people’s subconscious, like Tom Andersen, hoping readers will make the connection between nitrogen pollution and the indulgence of sprawl and take action to petition and pay for their street to join their town’s municipal sewerage system?

What if it’s by highlighting and cherry picking a not-so broken past? Journalist and urbanist Amanda Kolson Hurley, in her 2019 book Radical Suburbs, makes the provocative case that suburbs are not only homogenous places full of “little boxes all made of ticky-tacky which all just look the same,” to quote folk singer Malvina Reynolds’ infamous anti-suburban lullaby which always pissed me off until I learned she was a life-long socialist but I still agree with Tom Lehrer who said it was “the most sanctimonious song ever written.” Instead, according to Kolson Hurley, “cities are becoming more homogenous while suburbs grow more diverse,” and she traces how the city that Reynolds wrote her song about (Daly, California) is now a growing Filipinx enclave (“Little Manila”), and that immigrant anarchists built places like Piscataway, New Jersey, and that suburbs aren’t just sprawl and concrete and single-family ownership, but have secret histories of utopian planning and socialism. I wish I could say the same about Long Island, but I haven’t been able to find anything besides the Levitts.

What if it’s by highlighting loud and quiet acts of resistance in the present, rebuffing the past? Orly Clergé, a sociologist who has interviewed immigrants from Black middle-class ethnic enclave suburbs in Long Island and Queens, argues that the secret history of Long Island is not of radicalism, but the succession of slavery, replaced by Black codes, Jim Crow Laws, racial segregation that inscribed white control over the development of contemporary suburbs, and predatory lending. Clergé also argues that Long Island is not an empty vacuum of culture, identity, and place, but an emerging space of creativity that Black immigrants have to carve out by necessity. Long Island doesn’t necessarily need to have an anti-racist counter-history to have a present-day resistance.

What if it’s through agitation, which, as my friend Marva says, is love? I finally sat down with Autumn and Rebecca, of Long Distance Readers, at a sterile café, where they talked about their lifelong goal of starting a community bookstore in on the border of Queens and Nassau. Autumn and Rebecca went to St. Francis Prep together in Fresh Meadows (near the AMC and LIE and Shirazi Afghan cuisine and my old friend Tiffani’s mom’s house) and felt called to create a mutual aid group while Autumn was having a “mental breakdown at the Lynbrook LIRR station because you can see the disparity between the stations. In Freeport, there are no benches.” In the summer of 2023, Autumn and Rebecca went on the Nassau Library Tour, designed by the county’s library system to encourage readers to visit different branches, rewarding them with a sticker for each library visited. Crisscrossing the county to visit all 60, they were reminded of a 2019 Newsday article about real estate discrimination, and how redlining can manifest as North Shore libraries looking “like citadels, versus in the South Shore, you have to pay for parking.” Alongside opening a bookstore, they want to change the relationship between property taxes and library sizes, create a database to help understand opaque library system leadership, and replace older, white library board members with Long Islanders with progressive, sympathetic politics to stand up to book bans, censorship, and repopulate circulation with diverse books.

The cover of their zine, which they created in a research frenzy bubble to distribute at Rebecca’s sister’s derby team event in Bethpage, has a map of Long Island KKK recruitment spots. The zine is inflammatory, dripping with hatred for Long Island’s past and present racism, and almost makes me defensive, which probably is more reflective of my own privileges and pearl clutching than anything. Only four people took the zine, and three were family members. At the same time, Autumn and Rebecca love Long Island and hated when the Ridgewood event organizers shaded it: “Long Island is like family, we defend it, we have our problems, but we’ll handle it.” At the Ridgewood event, they distributed all their copies.

Long Island is also full of drag kings who work at the Glen Cove LGBTQ and Youth Center, and roving farmer’s markets that accept SNAP and WIC, and that one gay bar in Farmingdale, and the Halal food Instagram that started the first Palestine protest on Long Island in Hicksville and organized a kite-making solidarity day in Eisenhower Park, and queer roller derby leagues suing transphobic county executives and giving testimony using their derby nicknames. I think that it’d still be interesting to write about even if it was all reactionary all the time because loving (or at least owning or claiming) a place is a good strategy for rebuilding it. Or as Autumn and Rebecca said, “we rep Long Island.” Long Island is for us to trash, but we’d never set out sticky glue tapes for silverfish or stomp on them with our boots or flush down the toilet, it’s for us to clean up.

PART 4: MOTHS

The common clothes moth (Tineola bisselliella), with a body length of about 6.5 millimeters and a wingspan ranging from 9 to 16 more, is drawn to dim areas, rugs, and the mold that accumulates in the corners of rooms. My house is rapidly becoming infested with these moths. It started quietly with holes in my wool socks and yarn stuffies that I could attribute to wear and time (and loving visible mending in theory but being bad at sewing in practice) and ended with houseguests overstaying-their-not-so-welcome in the pre-packaged khichdi. Of course, their prolonged visit is not because I forgot to seal the daal properly, it’s climate change’s fault. The shift in average temperatures tricked the moths into emerging earlier and falling out of sync with the birds and bats, and in sync with my mom’s new orange sweater. A moth evades my fusillade of cedar balls and lavender sachets and (supposedly) humane glue traps and flies out of my backpack into the empty Long Island Rail Road car as the conductor stops to punch my ticket and notice that my monthly pass expired Friday. People see the LIRR, empty except for me and my moth, as anti-social, lacking community: home to closed-off or closed-minded behavior like using (or not using) headphones, averting eye contact, and putting up your feet on the seat across from you to avoid a neighbor.

I pull out my wallet to pay the off-peak fare and miss my old conductor who used to hole-punch smiley faces into my ticket stub at 7:36 am until everyone’s schedule got changed after the Grand Central extension (he misses his regulars), but this new conductor winks and lets me get away without paying the step-up fare, maybe because he feels bad or embarrassed for me, maybe because he knows I’ll be back this evening during standing room rush hour, maybe because we’re both distracted as we pass through the brackish wetlands full of herons gentrifying spindly egret nests made by third graders on trips to learn how estuaries and marshes are natural hurricane buffers, as the sun rises across the opaque cartographies that only the distorted windows could provide, maybe because it’s storming (it wasn’t raining when I left, but concave specks are appearing on the Long Island Sound), maybe because I got lucky, maybe because it’s the suburbs.

Long Island, too, is seen as anti-social: a commuter town, an exurb, a bedroom community, a railroad suburb, a periphery where people sleep and take the train into work before breakfast is hot and return home after dinner’s already cold. Anti-social places, like train stops or airports or bus terminals, are great spaces for advertising, and I’ve always wondered how the MTA picks which ones are poorly wheatpasted with big bubbles inside the LIRR. Of course, as the MTA moves to digital advertising boards across the NYC subway and Metro North, it’s all becoming more standardized, but as I take the commuter train from Nassau County into Queens into Manhattan, I stare at posters from CUNY (“Long Islanders pay NYC-resident tuition rates”), Fair Housing Act know-your-rights posters showing Black homeowners closing a home with their white realtor, and Great Gatsby on (off) Broadway posters, offering an “immersive experience” at the Park Central Hotel. These posters behind me (especially the advertisements for nine-month cruises), tell the slippery story of these suburbs: of ongoing housing discrimination alongside growing home ownership opportunities outside of the city core (Tasiya from Valley Stream calls people of color buying houses in Long Island and white people moving to Manhattan “reverse white flight”); of the cultural blurriness between Nassau and Queens; and the lure of the Great Gatsby (literally because it took place here, but also figuratively, in regrettably embarrassing opulence or urban experiences and policies designed to sate suburbanites’ cultural escapism and fears).

Me and the Long Distance Readers (both wearing keffiyeh) and their middle-school Eagle Scout friend gather at a Korean café in Bayside (near Whitecastle, “the first Bayside settlement,” whose parking lot they found in an archival book) for the first session of our new book club (“Not Another Suburban Book Club” which later becomes “Subverting the Suburbs”) and we talk about sewerage the whole time. I didn’t want to talk about sewerage. Instead, I wanted to devise a manifesto on how to organize Long Island or how to reverse the rapid development of the trash-strewn saltmarshes creeping around the LIRR which seem unprotected by the Clean Water Act. Our book, on the history of the Long Island Sound’s ecological destruction, couldn’t name even bad actors like reckless waterfront development. Autumn and Rebecca agree that the book’s provocations are all subtext (“I know that the Levitts are evil bastards, but he doesn’t say that the Levitts are evil bastards”), but they don’t mind. Instead, their focus is on understanding why Long Island’s whiter, wealthier North Shore has a privatized sewerage system, with constantly overflowing cesspools and septic tanks that homeowners struggle to manage and which flow directly into the Sound, suffocating its marine life with toxic quantities of nitrogen. My dad is always complaining about our cesspool, which stinks every time my sister takes a long, hot shower (which Autumn and Rebecca tell me is a “North Shore issue”). Instead of tackling the whole Island, or the whole North Shore, Autumn and Rebecca want to target our action towards our own backyards: reducing personal consumption and release of nitrogen (Autumn’s always “beefing with her dad about ecofriendly fertilizer”): “None of us are homeowners, but talk to your parents.”

Later, I meet up with Amanda Lerch, an environmental water quality analyst for the Town of Huntington, to talk about community gardens and municipal government on Long Island. Instead, we talk about how cool the Suffolk sewerage plant is. She explains how, at public treatment plants, waste goes through a series of chemical processes like exposure to UV light which disinfects effluent and biological practices like the bacteria and bugs sent in to break down and eat sewage. In private cesspools, waste accumulates in a holding tank until it filters underground and seeps into our aquifers. In some parts of Long Island, effluent is clean enough to grow tiny grey shrimp, and in others, bungalows that became multi-family homes overload the water with sewerage and bacteria levels are too high to swim. Balancing urban sprawl by regulating private and public sewerage happens everywhere, not just Long Island. The difference is that in areas of the suburban city, like the easternmost squiggle of Queens or the northern crescent of the Bronx, there are coalitions advocating to change the city’s stormwater and wastewater infrastructure, and in Nassau, it’s just my dad lecturing my sister.

I meet up with an old-school investigative reporter who spends her time talking about Long Island at Newsday, Long Island’s primary news source whose front page is sometimes a combination of crime panic, Billy Joel commentary, municipal policy changes (Riverhead’s addition of cannabis shops into commercial zoning), and hyperlocal announcements (a new needlepoint studio in Locust Valley). Originally from Minnesota, Sandra Peddie writes about how there is no oversight board for police misconduct in Suffolk and Nassau, municipal-contract-having mob bosses (several have purportedly asked her to write a book about them and only one has succeeded), and garden-variety political corruption.

My cousin has worked for half of the Nassau Democratic Party, so most of our (sacred, mandatory) Sunday night conversations at my maternal grandparents’ kitchen table over some combination of eggplant parmesan (my grandfather’s favorite, he calls it parma jaan) that my aunt makes and achhar added to whatever desert my mom brings (think: banana bread with fermented carrot and cauliflower) are about the political swamp of Long Island. My cousin and I always joke that my grandmother is the perfect suburban Democratic political candidate. Whenever we go to the grocery store, at least five of her former students or their parents run into her and she remembers them all (she’s also an immigrant businessowner hustler who knows how to curry political favor). We meet up for our March book club meeting to read Mariame Kaba’s Let this Radicalize You and talk about our beef with apocalyptic media and thinking (Rebecca said, “We’ve lived through Hurricane Sandy: it’s not people fighting in the street, it’s Autumn’s dad calling my dad that the gas station next to us was full,”) and how we all wish our dads knew each other (or at least we knew our neighbors), but how it’s difficult to create care in the isolation of the suburbs. To remedy this, we assign ourselves the homework of introducing ourselves to someone in our community. My neighbors know me already, thanks partially to the outdoor cats we triple-feed and the mint from my mom’s garden that we share and my grandma’s students and years of torturous extended conversations in parking lots.

Even though this Newsday reporter recently received redacted disciplinary records from local departments even after suing them for the information, even though Peddie thinks that in order to understand Long Island you need to understand its seedy undergirth of political corruption that shapes our social lives, career aspirations, and sewerage, even though Peddie laments that grandmas with too many pairs of clip-on earrings in Oyster Bay are not allowed to have garage sales and residents in Port Washington need a permit for political protest signs, Peddie still loves Long Island. Perhaps Peddie loves Long Island because it hasn’t broken her heart, like it has for Autumn and Rebecca. Sometimes I want to turn away from Long Island’s racism and classism: Aren’t systemic injustices present everywhere? But, how lucky must you be for Long Island to never have broken your heart?

PART 5: CARPENTER BEES

Carpenter bees (Xylocopa virginica), with shiny abdomens and a body length ranging from 19 to 23 mm, are often mistaken for bumblebees. You can tell the difference because, unlike their friendlier cousins, carpenter bees are “not social insects.” I think they’re just misunderstood. I’ve had countless backyard parties ruined by surprise visitors who just wanted to join the festivities (and bore tunnels into wooden sidings and porches to raise their new broods). Some species of carpenter bees, like my grandparents, are native to Punjab, but somehow made their way over to Long Island.

Carpenter bees re-emerge in late spring — New York City’s primary election season — so whenever I see them, I’m reminded of when Sandra’s friend Jaslin ran for New York City Council in the Nassau-Queens border district 23. Her turf, bisected by Long Island highways and scattered with cafes like Usha Foods (Tri-State dhol player for hire posters, clippings from the now-defunct Edible Long Island magazine about their paneer grilled cheese sandwich, a window open for midnight chai service) is halfway between South Asian Americana (front door steps covered in chalk rangoli, massive trucks with “no farmers, no food” stickers, stainless steel gates with symbols of Khandas and Mercedes Benzes) and the Italian American Festival my mom grew up with (zeppolis, Vince Aletti’s forward to Joseph Szabo’s Jones Beach photo collection).

Jaslin ran to provide debt relief for taxi drivers like her dad, with the support of hundreds of eager comrade-volunteers from New York City’s socialist urban core of Astoria (although maybe originally from Buffalo, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh). Accustomed to sweating up five floor walk-ups with broken elevators to knock doors for Bernie, they instead wandered through single-family neighborhoods with possums and outdoor cats that come inside at night and uncles that get upset at you for suggesting we defund the police but simultaneously inviting you in for chai because you spoke three words of worse-than-broken Punjabi. My friend Janggo (from Glen Oaks/SUNY Old Westbury) spent that door-knocking spring bitter that our friends would say that this part of Queens was “basically Long Island” or that they were “bringing socialism to the suburbs.”

All of this is to say that socialism (and solidarity, and kinship, and organizing, and mutual aid) already exists in the suburbs. Long Island is already full of a sometimes slipping love for our neighbors that comes in the shape of community garden shares, and passing out masks at Eisenhower Park after the ban, and dozens of social services organizations providing support in Spanish and Haitian Creole and Hindi for migrants and asylum seekers, like OLA of Eastern Long Island, which supports Latinx immigrants to the Hamptons in navigating ICE and reporting wage theft, and says “if you can’t get to us, we’ll come to you.”

Critically loving Long Island in all of its complexity looks like Rodman Serrano, an organizer for Make the Road Long Island and former SUNY Stony Brook student who made headlines calling out the consequences of Trump’s revocation of Temporary Protected Status for Central American Long Islanders. When Long Islanders approach his Brentwood office, Rodman doesn’t just help with case support, he also sends them to Albany to lobby for legislation that protects people from being evicted or deported from their homes. In May 2023, then-Riverhead Town Supervisor Yvette Aguiar declared a state of emergency because New York City Mayor Adams wanted to house migrants and asylum supervisors in the Nassau Coliseum (among other sites in Long Island). Aguiar’s executive order sought to block new residents from entering her community, otherwise “it’ll probably increase the crime rate…it’s going to tax police” and Rodman told me that ever since 2016, xenophobic residents of Suffolk County are louder and bolder. In the face of this, his work is to empower immigrant Long Islanders as a collective: “it’s not just them” fighting the town board or their landlord or their under-the-table employer.

But when I asked Rodman about organizations that Make the Road works with, or leans on for social services or legal support, he largely drew a blank. Perhaps this is because Long Island seems planned to make connection difficult. How can two social service providers work together if you have to route through Jamaica or Woodside, or drive to get between them? Long Island is mammoth. Massive in geography, decentralized socially (what’s the capital of Long Island?), poorly connected and expensive if you’re traveling via the LIRR. I feel bad for the carpenter bees burrowing into the wood siding along the gutters in my house in search of the comrades trapped inside my steel kitchen, and I funnel that guilt into carrying a lost wasp stuck on a busy sidewalk in Midtown Manhattan to a street tree planter.

Sometimes Long Island makes me feel lonely. Autumn tells me that when you Google “books about Long Island,” it’s only “what to read on the beach in the Hamptons.” Suburbs are designed around isolation, exclusion, silence, HOA rules and regulations, and minimizing gathering spaces (someone on reddit asked about best Long Island third spaces and another responded “the southern state parkway”). At our February monthly meeting (over a book on suburban poverty that didn’t even mention Long Island), the reading group brainstorms what mutual aid might look like for us. We want to distribute free masks and seeds and books and fridges, but Long Island is too Long to pick a starting point and instead we leave with plans to write a zine (which we finish four weeks later) or rehabilitate my defunct Substack (which we start six weeks later) or facilitate a radical reading night on Jones Beach (which we host when it finally gets hot enough to dip our toes in the waves). We aren’t the first people who have thought of this and maybe the loneliness is one of our own making. I’ve been ignoring notifications from mutual aid Signal chats and emails to stop by free seed libraries and the professor from Bay Shore who started Eileen’s Free Bodega at the Consulate of El Salvador in Brentwood and the Community Growth Center at Port Jefferson after being inspired by a community fridge in the South Bronx.

Ten new readers squeeze into the Bayside cafe for our March book club meeting, so I pitch a year-long project of reading The Power Broker (someone responds “fuck the Cross Island Expressway”) and get buy-in from a new member who’s organizing a rare non-corporate pride event on Long Island with Brentwood Make the Road’s high schoolers and NAACP’s Freeport-Roosevelt branch and the VFW near her and a new member who works at a law firm that sues cops (and wins) and a new member who volunteers at fire houses because he thinks they’re historic social infrastructure and community care in Long Island and two new members who met doing Suffolk mask bloc organizing who handed me a zip lock bag of masks and zines to place in Little Free Library boxes around my town.

Long Island is full of bugs hiding just out of reach of stomping hands and feet, and readers who try to protect them with glass mugs and paper and cupped hands. We meet in April and May and June and July and August over queer fiction that we’re 99 percent sure takes place in Babylon and feminist criticism about the nuclear family that we didn’t quite understand and vegan Italian American home cooking from Erin (in Lucia’s backyard) and over Discord (when someone wants to call in because it’s an hour drive after work). We sit on mats in Lucia’s building’s backyard, searching for moss and lichen specimens (having just read a book on Indigenous ecology and reciprocity) and instead find horseflies that pinch our calves and eat our rainbow cookies, neighbors grilling dinner on the communal fire but not saying hi, and carpenter bees (are they unionized?) challenging the structural integrity of single-family homes to construct nests for their collective. It’s hard to feel lonely when Long Island is so full.