This Father's Day I am not in Pottstown.

Having written this ahead of time I am, as you read this, spending it with my father.
He lives in Sag Harbor, which is out on the northern side of the southern fork of Long Island. About as far out as you can get without spending Christmas in the Atlantic.

Like father like son, my dad is a writer.

However, he's braver than me. He eschewed a regular paycheck to live as a free-lancer, writing books and magazine articles for folks like American Heritage, Esquire, Connoisseur and, of course, The Atlantic.

He does not know how to blog and I doubt he'll read this one, which is just as well. He's not much for maudlin sentiment. I'm the mope in the family that tears up during "Extreme Makeover, Home Edition."

Father's Day is when we celebrate dads and, this being an environmental blog, I promise there is a green shade to this entry.

As a lad, my parents often took my sister and I on weekend hikes. OK, every weekend it wasn't raining and sometimes when it was. We considered them to be more in the line of a Bataan death march.

I will never forget my sister, about age 13, with a water-soaked handkerchief on her head to keep away the feasting mosquitoes swarming in the pine swamp we were hiking through, sitting down on a rock and refusing to go on. Hey, I never promised this trip down memory lane would be pretty.

I grew up north of New York City and the hikes were mostly in state parks in the area, everything from Sterling Forest to Fahnestock State Park to even a few in the Catskills.

Twice we drove across country and everywhere we stopped, there was a hike.

National Parks with names like Rocky Mountain, Arches, Canyonlands, Bryce Canyon, Acadia, Mount Rainier, you name it, we hiked it.

At the time, my sister and I were not what you would call thrilled to be there. Like all kids, we were suspicious of anything our parents endorsed.

And, as with most kids, it was only as I got older that I realized the value of those experiences.

When you've seen eco-systems as varied as high desert, low desert, seaside, deciduous forest, conifer forest, the plants and animals that survive there and the adaptations they make to do it, you begin to appreciate the patterns of nature -- and to decry how humans tend to run roughshod over them.

You don't look at a desert as a wasteland. Just something different from what you know.

Not surprisingly, as someone who spent his childhood summers on Long Beach Island, my dad has always tended to drift toward the seashore, which is how he ended up on Long Island.

In fact one of his books is titled "The People Along the Sand."

In the preface to this book, my dad (Anthony Brandt for you Googlers out there) caught the nature of the beach in a way that I have adopted as my own.

He wrote: "An architect friend of mine describes the beach as not so much a place as the transcendence of place, a border between two realities, and another friend calls the people attracted to it, who feel they must live next to it or very close to it, edge people."

The changeable nature of the beach is what gives it its magic. When I visit, I picture myself living there year-round, yet can't shake the feeling that would be impossible, that I don't deserve it, that the beach would never stand for it.

His understanding of natural systems, fueled by his vast and insatiable reading habits, fostered an environmentalism in me based not soley on fervor and passion, although it did not forestall those attributes, but on understanding and practicality.

Don't save the forest just because you love it -- because you will never convince those who don't to join you -- save it because you and the people you are trying to convince need it. Explain to them why they do. Help them appreciate its value to them and then, often enough, they too will come to love it and thus help you preserve it.

By way of example, my dad helped me understand what many real estate agents do not; that in so many places, the beach is what geologists call "high speed real estate."

Eventually, the sea changes everything it touches.

"When I was a child a hurricane deposited a 35-foot power boat in our front yard in Brant Beach, New Jersey. You do not forget these things," he wrote.

He's right.

As I have not forgotten all those hikes and the quiet thrum of the Shawngunk forest audible only to those with the patience to listen for it; or the wind whistling across the twisted granite of Breakneck Ridge, my favorite mountain if only for its funky name and its unbelievable view of the Hudson Valley.

And yes, I remember those two-week stints, always in August, at my grandparents' tiny house at Brant Beach, with the outdoor shower, the splintery porch always in need of paint and breakfasts, the house now finally cool from the ever-present morning breeze, at a dining room table so big it seemed to me to have been salvaged from a schooner.

I remember the evening walks along the salt marsh on the bay side, and my parents pointing out the birds that lived there.

Each day there, I now realize, was a day stolen from some time in the future when the Atlantic steals away the sand that makes up Long Beach Island and decides haphazardly to deposit it somewhere inconvenient to us.

All of these experiences which he and my mother made possible, have shaped the way I see the natural world.

In fact I found I treasured them so that I have tried to duplicate some of them.
So, when my mother suggested a few years ago that my family and my sister's vacation together with her, I did not hesitate (despite the inherent inter-personal volubility of that oil and water mix) to agree and further, to suggest that the place we do it be at Long Beach Island, hoping to give my son, as my parents had, memories of a place on the edge.

Each year we can manage it financially, the more successfully we will have passed down an experience to a fourth generation, stubbornly struggling to further root a tradition in a place that is ultimately transitory by nature.

If nothing else, it may teach him what I learned during those hikes with my father, always striding inpatiently far ahead of us stragglers: How learning about those woods made it hard to watch the heavy hand of man fell them for yet another shopping center, much as is happening in West Pottsgrove right now.

I hope my son learns, as I did at my father's knee, to be watchful of what society too often foolishly throws away.

Having just finished covering what I roughly calculate to be my 30th high school graduation for The Mercury, I can tell you I have heard just about every cliche that can be earnestly uttered in those circumstances.

But something the Pottsgrove High School valedictorian said last Wednesday struck me through my indifference for its marvelous simplicity.

"We face our future with our past," Victoria Mitchell said.

And I realized it's true, of course.

Without those hikes, I would never have realized the truth of the fact that forests provides us an economic benefit by cleaning our water and the more we fell those trees for sub-divisions, the more expensive it will become to make clean water.

I would not have so readily believed the cooling power of trees as Pottstown debates the value of street trees.

And without those days at the beach -- or my own hurricane memory of the man paddling a flat boat down Farragut Avenue -- I might not have had the insight into how the economic benefits of over-development along barrier islands disappear when the inevitable hurricane flattens them. The storms are not necessarily worse, I realized, but there is certainly more there to destroy.

That past with which I face our increasingly uncertain future was shaped in large part by my father, and I just wanted to take the day to thank him for the strength it provides me. I urge you to do the same.

Happy Father's Day Dad, and thanks.