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| Sammy's Beach, East Hampton, N.Y. (Corcoran Group Real Estate) |
Between 1967 and 1985, my
parents owned a small beach house on a windswept road in East Hampton,
N.Y. One drove from the stately old town,
through woods crackling with sunlight, to arrive at a spit of land which faced
a bay whose water turned every shade of blue.
The bay was named for a
seventeenth-century English settler, Lion Gardiner. He had lived in the middle of the bay, on Gardiner’s
Island, which he purchased from an Indian chief named Wyandanch.
Sammy’s Beach Road ran along
the spit, and we were the second house from the end. The homes were modest. I remember one contemporary cantilevered
house; otherwise they had all been there since the 1940s and 50s. One house looked like a shingled box and was
extra-mysterious because its owner never, ever appeared.
The beach had not yet
eroded. A dune covered with beach grass
and Rosa rugosa sloped from the deck to
the end of the path.
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| Easthampton Elms in May by Childe Hassam (Smithsonian American Art Museum) Main Street, East Hampton, looked much the same in 1970 as in this 1925 print. |
The town was still fun: pre-Ralph
Lauren, pre-Tommy Hilfiger, pre-Tahari. The
hot spots were a grocery with a donut machine and the Ladies Village
Improvement Society bookstore, packed with books that had been abandoned at summer homes after the war.
About a half-mile down the
beach from my parents’ house, an old shack stood back from the shore. Made of weather-beaten boards that had turned
splintery and silver, it contained a few benches and a partition from its days as
a place to change into a bathing suit.
You could sit on a narrow deck and look at the water. In the manner of teenagers, I thought of it as
mine.
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| I drew the shack, as recalled, in the mid-90s. |
Recently reminded of the shack, I examined a few real estate photographs. It’s definitely gone. That feels poignant, for this is exactly the time of year, a baby step toward summer, when we would head out to East Hampton to open the house for the season. It became a habit to cast an eye toward the shack to make sure that it was still there.
https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2018/05/a-shack-in-east-hampton.html
That's what we called out place in the Berkshires, which was a helluva lot shackier than yours, I guarantee you. I visited once, with Ellen in 1979. I read my student script out loud to you both, I could hear how static and sterile the dialogue was. it was an invaluable lesson and I rewrote it accordingly.
ReplyDeleteI love that library of books left from the war. And I also often quote that opening line -- it is particularly fun to land it with Meryl's Danish accent. "I had a two bedroom in Hollywood..."