Others say it grew out of a misreading on early Dutch maps of vier, or four, islands. Some have linked it to the signal fires of whalers or wreckers who tried to lure ships ashore for plunder, or to the onetime fiery stands of poison ivy. The first thing many new visitors want to know is where the name Fire Island comes from. And Friday and Saturday nights are definitely wilder weekdays can be positively idyllic. Still, some hotel managements are laxer than others. A commune of wildly celebrating youth in a Fire Island group house can be noisy, but when the party is compressed into a thin-walled hotel room, the disruption can be truly hellish, as we found out on our last night in Ocean Bay Park. To book a hotel on Fire Island on a summer weekend is to cast one's fate not to the winds but the singles. Indeed, there is probably only one restrictive community, Point O'Woods, where outsiders, whether natives or off-islanders, may get the cold shoulder but even here we carried out a beach-based incursion without incident. We splashed in the same roiling surf, hunted for the same horseshoe crabs and shells on long stretches of deserted beach, strolled and bicycled the same few blocks between the bay and beach and took the same water taxis to the same outlying communities. We breathed the same fresh salt air and patronized the same restaurants and shops as any third-generation islander. For five days, my wife and I and our two girls sampled the many delights of New York's quasi Key West with its own rich social and cultural history. But between a hotel and nothing, the choice was clear. No, you wouldn't generally pick them over a house. Which left us somewhere near the bottom - hotel guests on Fire Island. And all feel superior to the day-trippers who sail in on the morning ferries and sail out again in the evening. The renters disdain the groupers who chip in for housing shares. The homeowners turn up their noses at the renters. The natives, it is said, look down on the homeowners and other summer folk who seasonally throng the roughly two dozen communities. At the top are the natives, flinty souls who live year round on the 32-mile-long barrier island between the end of Robert Moses State Park and Moriches Inlet, where the Hamptons begin. IT'S a barefoot society, car-free and carefree, but as long as anyone can remember, Fire Island, the skinny sandspit stretched along the underside of Long Island, has had its distinctive hierarchy.
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