Detour Down Memory Lane

My home is Plum Island, Massachusetts. I’ve asserted that since I was about 10 or 11 years old. But the reality is: Plum Island started out as a summer house. My father, who grew up in Medford, Mass., started visiting the island when he was a boy in the 1920s and I first visited in 1965 when I was still in my mother’s womb. My folks bought the house my brother and I now live in back in 1972, when I was 6 years old.

And while I consider Plum Island my home, the fact is that my early years were largely spent in Orangeburg, New York, a hamlet just outside New York City. Orangeburg is in Rockland County, on the west side of the Hudson River, just north of the New Jersey border.

Autumn on Kingswood Drive in Orangeburg, New York

With the maturity (ha!) of age has come the realization that it was an amazing place to grow up. Despite being just 20 miles from Manhattan, I lived in a forest with deer and all kinds of critters running around. We had trails to roam and creeks to wade in, and there were foundations and wells scattered throughout the woods that dated back to when the Dutch first got to the area in the 1600s. Really. And in addition to this rural playground, we had the Big Apple within easy bus range.

How did my Dad, a guy from Medford, Mass., end up in Rockland County? Simple: World War II. Orangeburg was home to Camp Shanks, the largest embarkation point for troops headed to Europe. Dad moved through Camp Shanks en route to Europe and on his way back from the war. When he graduated from Dartmouth and attended Columbia Journalism School on the G.I. Bill, Dad and his first wife settled into veteran’s housing at what had become known as Shanks Village.

Despite being a Bostonian, Dad was of the mind about New York City that, as Sinatra sang, “If you can make it there…” (though Dad ALWAYS preferred Liza Minelli’s version of the song from the movie, but that’s a different story), so he was staying in New York and making his career there. He and a handful of other vets who were also living at Shanks Village found a plot of land at the base of nearby Clausland Mountain. (If you’ve ever driven across the Tappan Zee Bridge, Clausland is the mountain that forms the western shore of the Hudson River.) Dad and his cronies platted out a dead-end street — laid out such that the top of the road ran into a grade too steep to go any farther — and built eight homes, one for each family.

Ours was at the top on the right-hand side. We had no one behind us to the summit of the mountain (on which sat an Army Nike-missile-guidance station, this being the height of the Cold War) and a view from the living room that included the tallest buildings of the Manhattan skyline. We could see the lights on the Empire State Building and I grew up watching the World Trade Center rise in a stutter-step pattern above the New Jersey forests between our house and the city. We raised damn near every domesticated animal there is — chickens, ducks, geese, dogs, cats, horses, rabbits and more — and yet we went to movie premieres at the big theaters in midtown Manhattan (thanks, Mom!).

Like I say, it really was an amazing place to grow up, but I’ve pooh-poohed it for decades in my New England snobbery. I mean: Dad was from Boston and Mom from New York…my sister was hanging out in NYC as soon as she was a teenager, while my folks and I had worked it out that, had I not gone to prep school I was going to live with neighbors and attend school (and play hockey) in Massachusetts. Guess who got whose blood?!

All of this is a long-winded introduction to the point of this post: I’d not been back to Orangeburg in many, many years — until yesterday. And the result was a surprising (to me, anyway) clench in the chest and even a slight tearing up at the corner of the eye.

I was driving home to Plum Island from Maryland, and rather than cross the Hudson River at the George Washington Bridge I turned north and rolled up the Palisades Parkway.

The Palisades Interstate Parkway is a lovely, cars-only thoroughfare that Rockefeller and other wealthy folks donated way back when. It runs along the crest of its namesake cliffs and overlooks the Hudson, New York City and out toward Long Island, before turning away from the river at the town of Palisades and running north to Bear Mountain and West Point. My parents commuted on the P.I.P. every damned day seemingly forever, and I rode and drove it tons of times myself. But driving it yesterday I was reminded of just how lovely a drive it is. Forests, grand vistas, no billboards or buildings — it’s a civilized way to travel via automobile.

The basketball hoop is gone — it straddled the “no parking” sign — but the tree my friend and I turned into a fort a good 40 years ago is still visible lying in the woods.

I left the parkway at exit 5 onto Route 303 right by the old 303 Drive-In Theater (now a flea market) and north past the former site of Orangeburg Pipe (now a mall). (Sidenote: Musbro Kennels is STILL there, though the Wedge Deli is long gone.) The Orangeburg Library is still at the corner of 303 and 340, and is now part of the Camp Shanks Museum (to which my father donated a bunch of stuff). Turning right onto Kings Highway, the old stone house (dates back to the 1700s and was a little local museum when I was a kid) is still a restaurant. The phone company and the comic-book factory (now some other company) are still there. And the creek still runs alongside the road before crossing underneath and heading onto the campus of St. Thomas Aquinas College.

The turn onto Kingswood Drive was pretty much the same. The families are all changed — I believe with my father’s passing last year all of the originals are now gone — but the houses are mostly the same. The Ulrichs’ house is identical; the Landreths’ has a big fence with a loud dog behind it. The Lunds’ house is completely different, but the Wallachs’ and Les Thompson’s and the Markalouses’ all looked like they did when I was walking up and down that hill each day to catch the bus to school. The Gwilliams’ house is basically the same, though where the pool was is now a forest of small trees and weeds. But in the woods just above their home (but below Marty Pizza’s house), the tree that fell during a storm when I was 8 or 9, and in which Neil Gwilliam and my brother, Scott, and I built a series of forts, is still there, if quite a bit disintegrated now.

Still the same shade of red my parents painted it. That driveway was AWESOME for sledding in winter. The two evergreens were Christmas trees (that we transplanted) when I was a kid.

And my house is…the same. Mostly. I didn’t drive up the steep driveway (GREAT sledding in winter and down which Scotty rode his Big Wheel once while barefoot, resulting in a slam into the Gwilliams’ rock wall on the other side of the street) but it’s still the same shade of red my parents painted it. Hell, the mailbox is still the green my father painted it 20 or more years ago and it still reads “7” and “Smith.” There was a guy raking leaves in the front yard — dropped by the same huge oak tree that is still there but has had one major branch cut off — and throwing them off the edge of the level ground, just as I’d done countless times as a kid.

I stayed for just a few minutes and then continued on, east along Kings Highway past Rockland Cemetery (resting place of my childhood friend Neil Gwilliam, who passed away late in his freshman year at Brigham Young University, and also John C. Fremont who expected it to become the national cemetery), past Lawrence Park Apartments (home of many of my elementary school classmates) and onto Route 9W north to the now-new Tappan Zee Bridge (which is a stunning piece of architecture and engineering).

The mailbox hasn’t changed a bit.

Before I left, while standing next to my mailbox taking it all in, a car came barreling up Kingswood Drive. It slowed as I stepped out of the road and a woman asked out her open window, “Are you lost?”
“Nope,” I replied, smiling.
She looked a little wary but nodded and rolled past before I could say anything more. She turned into the Gwilliams’ driveway, where she parked and went into her home. I got into my car and drove to mine.

Home Is Where…

Whenever I return to Plum Island, I cross the drawbridge onto the island and there’s a palpable feeling of lightening in my shoulders. No, Plum Island is not Xanadu or any other vision of utopia, but it’s home, warts and all. And home just feels RIGHT.

But as good as it feels to be back on the island, it feels even better — even more like home — once I get into the water there. My preferred method for getting into the water is to surf, but even a swim or  just a brief dip in the water between suntanning sessions is enough to make me feel like I’ve really made it back to where my heart and soul feel comfortable.

Truth be told, the surf at Plum Island isn’t very good. The swell window is rather small, meaning wave-generating storms need to be in just the right spot or we won’t see anything in the way of rideable waves. Most of our best and biggest waves come from nor’easters, two-day (or more) storms that blow fiercely, pushing locally generated waves onto Plum Island’s sandbars and beaches.

And those sandbars are made up of very course grains. As such, they are very malleable and change dramatically with every storm. It’s not uncommon for a sandbar that has recently been the site of a decent break to get trashed by a storm you were looking forward to riding there.

On top of all that there’s the tidal swing, which is large enough that unless the swell is quite big, there’s too much water at anywhere near high tide for the waves to be rideable.

Because of these factors, most area surfers bypass Plum Island for the more reliable and higher-quality breaks in nearby New Hampshire. And they are high-quality breaks: on good swells, the points and reefs in New Hampshire can be spectacular, and on average swells the denser sand at Hampton Beach makes for more reliable conditions. That means Plum Island’s waves are typically uncrowded — which is a good thing.

On top of that, there’s something comforting about being able to wake up in the morning, reach from your bed and pull the curtains back, and see what conditions are like. It’s so easeful to don your wetsuit in your basement, grab your board and walk a hundred yards to the break — no cars, no parking, no towels, no changing on the side of the road…none of that.

In that kind of situation you come to know the waters and the breaks at home very intimately. You learn what swell and wind and tide conditions are going to combine into the best surfing conditions. And when you’re able to hit those optimal moments in an instant, when no one else is out — or even better, just you and a couple of friends who grew up in the same place are out — magic can happen. It’s fleeting, but that’s scarcity is what makes magic special.

I’m happiest when I’m in or on or at the ocean — any ocean — but I have ties to Plum Island’s waters unlike anywhere else in the world. I spent three years surfing Seaside Reef in Solana Beach, California, and while I got to know the nuances of the break I never felt like a local. I never felt like I could talk to the break and get a response. When I’m out at Plum Island, when I’m waiting for a wave or actively riding, there’s a dialog taking place between me and the Atlantic. It’s a comfortable, joyous, heartfelt occasion every single time.

I feel a particular affinity for Plum Island’s waters, too, because that’s where my younger brother died in 1985. He drowned while surfing and though his body was resuscitated and he hung on for another couple of days in a Boston hospital, I knew he was gone when I pulled him from the water. We spread his ashes there a few days after he’d passed and though I don’t feel like I’m talking with Scott while I surf there, I do feel like he’s part of the ocean I’m surfing — like we’re connecting still, 25-plus years later. And I do sometimes feel like he’s listening, if not talking back, when I’m on the beach or in the water.

And as I sat in the water at Plum Island yesterday having a spectacular session all by myself, I settled back into my discussion with the ocean, Mother Nature, the universe, and a thought occurred to me for the first time ever: I wondered if my 20-plus-year sojourn to the mountains wasn’t a subconcious escape from this place, from the site of what is without question the single biggest happening in my life so far, even though it was home. Yes, I’d continued to fancy myself a surfer and a sailor, and I’d surf whenever I was visiting my parents and waves happened to appear, but for more than 20 years I don’t know that I was ever actually in a place that felt like home, even when I was at Plum Island. It’s like I was fighting this place, not realizing that I should have been embracing it.

Yes, I’m very comfortable in the wilderness and the mountains — moreso, in some ways, than even the ocean — but it’s still not home on the level that the Atlantic at Plum Island is. I will say that Alaska is the only other place in my life where I’ve felt that sense of home; in some ways, even more since it was a home that came not by birth but as the result of a discovery I made on my own. But through all my time in Alaska I always felt like northern New England was where at least half my heart lay.

Did Scott’s accident take not only his life but also my comfort, my sense of home? Subconsciously, was I torn that this place that had always been so special to me had also wrought such pain and anguish on my life? Maybe I was running away from that anguish — and anger — for two decades, and it’s only now that I’m older and, theoretically, more mature, that I can come to grips with the fact that home is precisely where such tragic events happen, that the ties that come from such losses are precisely what make a place home for generation after generation. Not that my family is exactly Waltonesque in its manners or because it’s been in one place for hundreds of years, but there’s never been any doubt that northern New England in general, and Plum Island specifically, and the ocean at Plum Island even more specifically, was where my heart and soul always wanted to be. And as a result of Scott’s accident, I just couldn’t be there, not for a while, until I’d become several different people and lived several different lives over the course of two decades.

So surfing Plum Island isn’t just fun and it isn’t just thrilling, it’s also personal and spiritual and comforting. I don’t imagine I’ll ever find a break or an ocean where I feel that level of comfort, no matter how much time I spend exploring. I don’t know that I’m done living some of those other lives yet, but I do know where my heart lies. And getting to touch that feeling yesterday goes way behind sliding across a wave on a board. That’s how good the surf was yesterday.

There’s No Place Like Home

Being a surfer in New England is not easy. The water is usually frigid, the ocean usually flat. What waves we do get tend to be locally generated, with winter nor’easters usually creating the biggest surf.

The highlight of every New England surfer’s year is hurricane season. No, it’s not easy to cheer on storms that can wreak havoc elsewhere, but the fact remains that these tropical behemoths typically don’t mess with New England (this year’s Irene being a notable exception), they generate large surf from great distances away so there’s usually nice weather here on shore, and they’re in the fall which is when our water is warmest. Throw in the bonus that they tend to arrive after Labor Day so the crowds are even smaller than usual and it’s a great recipe.

So imagine my delight when I returned home to New England just in time for Hurricane Ophelia to cruise northward through the Atlantic. Ophelia’s trajectory was perfect: a few hundred miles offshore so there was no destruction, and straight north past us here in the north-of-Cape-Cod section of the region. Sadly, Ophelia had one fatal flaw: speed. She blew past us at twenty-five to thirty miles an hour, so she didn’t spend enough time in the window needed to send significant swell our way. What could have been an epic Sunday and Monday turned into a “cross your fingers for Monday” situation. So cross my fingers I did. All weekend.

And there was payoff. Finally.

This afternoon, I had a truly primo surf session. DeLIGHTful, even. Simply wonderful. And not just any surf session. No, this was at my home break, the wave I grew up surfing. A place where I have the most intimate knowledge and the deepest connection. MY place. Home.

For about half an hour, forty-five minutes, I had this break all to myself. It was spectacular, with high-performance waves peeling along an underwater sand bar before unloading in a hollow shore break just off the beach. Head high, glassy, lined-up walls, with warm water (even by SoCal standards: my 3/2 fullsuit was much too warm) and bright sunshine amid puffy cumulus clouds…all to myself. Yes, all to myself. With no one to battle, no one to have to outmaneuver, I got more waves in thirty minutes here than I’d get in an hour-plus in San Diego County. But more than the wave count was just the simple pleasure of being able to surf casually, nonchalantly. Without having to worry about positioning in the lineup, I enjoyed a carefree session where I could instead focus on the act (art?) of riding a wave.

No, the wave wasn’t some razor-sharp, super-hollow Hawaiian reef break. Hell, it’s not even a shitty beach break in L.A. County. But it’s mine and it’s home and it was wonderful. Bottom line: I had the kind of session this afternoon that gets a surfer stoked for days and weeks on end. It was that good. And all I can say is, “thanks.” To the Atlantic, to the planet, to the universe: one big “mahalo” for an afternoon to remember.