PART 5: SUMMERTIME

             

            Fire Island – where Mom and Dad and I spent every summer when I wasn’t away at camp -- is one small part of a barrier beach that extends almost unbroken from New England to Florida. It’s separated from Long Island by Great South Bay, in a configuration that keeps repeating all the way down the East Coast until its final iteration, when, renamed the Intercoastal Waterway, it separates Miami Beach from Miami. Miami Beach is a substantial place; Fire Island is no more than a sliver of sand, over thirty miles long but only about a quarter of a mile wide, a desolate place in winter (one of its tiny hamlets is called Lonelyville) but in summer, a beachgoer’s paradise.  The “barrier” in “barrier beach” refers to the fact that if it weren’t for Fire Island, with its substantial dunes, Long Island would be exposed to the ocean, uninhabitable for some ways inland. And indeed, those dunes can be, and have been, washed away by storm surges on occasion, the ocean breaching the dune and prying prized beachfront homes off their moorings before engulfing lesser properties on its way to the bay. Here’s what the pristine beach looked like after the nor’easter Sandy had worked its mischief:

 

Nonetheless, thousands of people, most of them New Yorkers, call Fire Island home during the warm months. To get there from New York, you take a train from Penn Station to Bayshore, then a taxi to a dock on the bay and finally a ferry to the Island, eight miles across the bay. Once you get there, you know you weren’t in America any longer, and that was even more true when I was a kid: there were no cars, not even any roads, and there still aren’t. You got where you were going by foot or by bike, on concrete paths. If you had luggage when you disembarked the ferry, you engaged the services of one of a crowd of small boys yelling “Wagon, Mister? Wagon?” For a quarter (I’m sure the going rate is much higher now), they’d put your bags on a red Flexible Flyer wagon with a handle and follow you to your house, which was never more than a mile away.

The absence of cars made the Island the perfectly safe place for kids, who could wander anywhere they wanted to go. The problem was that there weren’t many places you could go. Each community was self-contained, separated from the others, and even in Ocean Beach and the adjoining Seaview, there were hardly any child-oriented amusements. There was a movie theater – a barn-like building with folding chairs and a 16-millimeter projector that whirred loudly – that was only in operation on Saturday nights, and the films they showed were all oldies. There was nothing like a playground or a penny arcade or a bowling alley or a baseball diamond. Fire Island is all about water -- the ocean and the bay. Sailors cruised around in their dinghy-like craft, fishermen caught blowfish from bulkheads and flounder further out, timid swimmers flocked to the bay and those seeking waves to the ocean, fronted by its wide ribbon of fine-grained sand free of litter and almost unpopulated – at least by the standards of Coney Island and Jones Beach.

Most of the Island is scrub, with a narrow path connecting the various communities, each of which, according to those who knew, had its own distinctive zeitgeist. I never visited Kismet or Lonelyville, to the west, though I can guess what the latter was like. And I couldn’t have visited Point O’ Woods, to the east, if I’d wanted to, because it was a gated community that repelled all boarders. I’d ride my bike down there and peer through the chain link fence, but there was never anyone visible, and even in the summer sunshine, the silent houses projected a faint air of menace, like a place in a Stephen King novel. Not only would the community brook no visitors, it stretched from ocean to bay and so blocked everyone’s passage to the rest of the Island, which could only be accessed by circumnavigating the fences by way of the beach. Its clannish inhabitants even blocked off the beach from both sides during World War II, in an attempt to prevent the Coast Guard from outflanking them. They were like our present-day militias and vigilantes out west, suspicious of government interference and just wanting to be left alone, though minus the heavy artillery.

Why even bother going past Point ‘O Woods? There was something worth seeing a couple of miles further along, a place called Sunken Forest, celebrated by botanists and ecologists as what they called a “maritime holly forest” – one of only six in the world -- containing, apparently, trees and plants rarely found together. It had a Jurassic Park-like feel to it; as you walked along the wooden paths that meandered through the somehow petrified-looking trees, you expected a pterodactyl, at the least, to swoop down on you. A little further east, at the end of what was then the known universe of Fire Island, was Cherry Grove, a gay community that anticipated and predated the upscale Fire Island Pines, later settled further east still.

Ocean  Beach had a couple of bars (Goldie’s was the saloon of choice) and a couple of restaurants, but on weekends, people younger and more adventurous than my parents and their friends would charter a jeep for the bumpy six-mile journey down the moon-drenched beach to the Grove, and, arriving, would mingle with the cross-dressers and other louche and exotic types at Duffy’s while they sipped outlandish cocktails at the raffish outdoor nightclub. During the day, according to many reports, men sunbathed on the nude beach. It wasn’t a place you’d take your kids.

                                                The Cherry Grove scene today

My parents and their friends stuck to Ocean Bean and Seaview (which was really just one community, though it was big enough to merit two ferries, run by different companies). Seaview, where we were based, was a kind of isthmus of the Upper West Side, an assemblage of mostly ramshackle but comfortable wooden houses that belonged to the middle-class families who lived on West End Avenue and Central Park West. The people we saw every day on the beach were the same people we ran into in Barney Greengrass. If you were the kind of New Yorker who didn’t own a car, maybe couldn’t even drive – a large cohort of Manhattan in those days, and one skewed Jewish but not to a Catskillian extent -- it was an ideal pastoral retreat. The grown-ups spent lazy days by the sea or socializing just the way they did in the City, by playing canasta and drinking quite a lot at cocktail parties that they took turns giving for each other. But for those of us too young to drink, the ocean was a place to ride the waves for an hour in the morning, not lie like a lox on a blanket all day. And there weren’t that many other kids my age in July and August; in that demographic, people typically sent their children to camp in Maine or Vermont every summer of their young lives, as I was sent when I was 9, 11 and 15.

When I got too bored, I’d go crabbing. I’d tie a fish head to a line, throw it out as far as I could into the bay, and slowly pull it in; if a crab had fastened his claws to it, I would try to scoop him up with a net on a long pole. Usually, when I let go of the line, the crab would let go of the bait, but in the course of an afternoon, I’d have three or four good-sized specimens, which I’d put into a bucket filled with salt water. The first time I did this, I brought a pail full of crabs in a bucket of water home, and because no one else was there, left them in the shade of the house’s overhang and went to the beach. The shade moved, the bucket spent a couple of hours in the sun, and the crabs slowly cooked to death. After that, I’d practice catch-and-release; the thrill, after all, was in the chase.

But Fire Island was where I had first met Jeff Davidson, and his endless inventiveness helped me out of my boredom and ennui. The Davidsons owned a house right on the ocean dune (which I last saw, many years later, toppled on its side by a hurricane). Jeff was 364 days older than I; our birthdays were June 26^th and June 27^th. There was an ice cream place in Ocean Beach called John and Ann’s that would give you a free ice cream cone if you swore it was your birthday. We’d both go in on the 26^th and I’d get my free cone and Jeff would pay the 15 cents for his. Then, the next day, we’d go back in for his free cone, and Anne would always accuse us of trying to pull a fast one, but he would produce a copy of his birth certificate (where did he get that?) and they’d have to give in. But both our birthday scoops, I thought, were always a little on the small side. Jeff and I lost touch when we both went off to different colleges, and we didn’t see each other for over thirty years, because he married his girlfriend as soon as they graduated from Swarthmore and moved to Rome, where they still live. But we reconnected when he phoned me on a whim while visiting New York on business – phone me in a feigned dialect and spouted random nonsense until, just before I was ready to hang up, I realized that this was his modus operandi. He was a natural actor and prankster, and a very valuable friend who guided me through the trials of adolescence both in Fire Island and on weekends in the city when I came home from Edgewood. We resumed our friendship seamlessly, and now we see each other whenever he comes to New York, which is several times a year. Jeff is a compulsive reminiscer with a voluminous memory, and we spend a lot of our time together combing through events long past.

We did have adventures worth remembering. When we were fourteen and fifteen, we lied to our parents, telling them we were going camping in the Sunken Forest (there must have been a campground there, or they’d never have agreed), and then, after taking the ferry to the mainland, we hitch-hiked to New Hampshire to visit his girlfriend, who was at camp in New Hampshire. It was a remarkably successful trip; we had no trouble getting rides, none of the people who picked us up were creepy, and the two nights we slept outdoors in bedrolls, once going and once coming, were dry and warm.

Jeff has promised to call his mother from a pay phone at the Forest, so he had to do it from New Hampshire without giving our location away. Of our four parents, she was the one who was most strict and discipline-minded, so some ingenuity had to be exercised in the deception, which for Jeff was always the point of his endless role-playing. He impersonated an operator – a female operator to whom he gave, for some reason, a Chinese accent – and when his mother answered, he said something like, “I have person-to-person correct call for Muriel Davidson; will you accept charges?” And she bought it. When we got back, no one would have been the wiser had Jeff been able to resist the temptation to brag about it, but he told his father, who told his mother, who was predictably furious.

That didn’t prevent us from hitch-hiking, later the same summer, to Washington, which was pretty much a disaster. We stood on the shoulder of I-95 for a whole afternoon before a cop chased us, and eventually got a large number of short-haul rides on secondary roads, all of which seemed to be in ancient decomposing trucks driven by pervy-looking guys. We slept in a YMCA in a slummy neighborhood in Baltimore the first night; it was during a heat wave and we were exhausted the next day. Finally we made it to D.C. and did the usual touristy things – the presidential monuments, the Library of Congress, the Mint, the FBI headquarters – but we were glad to go home the next day, and I was cured for life of any desire to thumb my way anywhere again.

The Fire Island summers lasted until I was in high school. That was when my mother discovered East Hampton, whose Waspy vibe she much preferred, and we pulled up stakes (not a big deal; we had always rented) and moved eastward. By that time, though, I spending the summer months laboring in a variety of menial summer jobs, except on weekends, when I usually had a choice: I could join my parents in their new domain, or I could go back to Fire Island, where I could always find a bed at the Carr’s house. Peter and Toby wee often around in those days, and they didn’t mind letting me tag along with them and their friends on their 20-something adventures, which involving cigarettes and alcohol and the heady proximity of girls who put out – though not, of course, for me. The drinking age in New York was then 18, and though I wasn’t that old, no one checked, and I could go to bars if I wanted to. Bars have never been my scene, but this crowd contained many smart, funny people, and besides, there was nothing else to do.