Pilgrimage

In 2001, when I was 50, I got an urge to revisit my childhood and after a business trip to Boston I stayed on for a few days, rented a car and took the ferry down to Long Island. I saw Ann Dunbar, who lives on Shelter Island, she took me to the small house where my grandparents retired and in which I spent the summer of 1968. That was the summer that man first landed on the moon, though I was more preoccupied with not getting laid. Those firefly nights, my grandmother forcing me to eat enormous quantities of zucchini, which, with her Indiana accent she called "Italian Squarsh." My grandfather singing and whimpering in his sleep.

Later, on down the Long Island Expressway in Dix Hills, I spent a pleasant evening with my Uncle Don and Aunt Paula before heading on to Cold Spring Harbor in the morning. This is where it all happened for me. I was 2 or 3 when we moved to the Research Station there, lived there until I was 6. It all came back.


We called the building on the right "The Mess Hall," an community eating place my family occasionally visited. An opportunity to have spaghetti and meatballs, the food of the gods.








To the left a low hill which as a 4 year old I thought the most formidable in the world, after much planning and effort I finally gasped my way to the top of it one day. There, beneath an eroded bluff I found "the perfectly round rock," stupidly left it behind when I ran home to tell my parents, never was able to locate it again. 46 years later it still defied rediscovery, though I spent some time looking. Here's the hill. Strangely, I don't remember the cistern that sat on top of it.




Here's painter Inna Ray's view of the legend. Thanks, Inna!









Take the road to the left to reach our house. I knew it immediately.







Here it is, the house that I grew up in, oddly not smaller than I remembered it. It's been enlarged and refurbished as the research facility has grown, now houses its Publicity Department. In my boyhood there was only a single-lane gravel road to a small dilapidated house at the edge of the woods, a swamp containing Jack-in-the-pulpits and skunk cabbage below.






The second-story windows of the closest corner were my room, from which the cardboard box "elevator" was lowered, fortunately without an occupant. Another similar experiment involved throwing a Coca-cola bottle through the front window on the expectation that because they were both glass, it would bounce off. The back porch was the scene of a horrid epiphany in which, while playing pirate and attempting to construct a cannon from a log and a stone, I suddenly understood, "this ain't real!"






On the shed roof at the back of the house my father contrived a greasy bundle of suet to attract owls. I don't know if we ever saw the owls. Later my brothers and I endlessly played the phonograph record, "sounds of summer," on which the hooting of the great-horned, barn, saw-whet owls could be heard.






In those days an important aspect of our lives was an enormous Elm tree that loomed over the house from the hill in the back. We worried through the big hurricane that hit the island in the mid-fifties. There's no sign of it now.






But the pathway beside it was still there. I caught my breath as I began to climb--absolutely unchanged in all that time, it wound up the hillside, slippery with fallen leaves, still with the same cues and crosspaths I remembered with complete clarity. Because my dad had carefully taught me how to find my way home.






Looking back. I sat at the top for quite a while before I went on. Somehow I forgot to take pictures of the raspberry patches and enclosing tangles of grapevine we used to visit, the bewilderingly close buildings on the other side of the woods. I shambled down to Bungtown Road, the scene of another poignant memory.






"Dingo" was our first dog, a wild soul who broke away from us and was run over by an REA express truck before my eyes. Right here.






On an August evening a short distance away in time and space we watched in astonishment as students skimmed a frisbee through the air.






Here's the seawall, where, as my blog advertises, I left my new glasses at an early age. We were always fighting my eyes in those days, far-sighted and lazy-eyed, I was and am.