As I hurtled along, the curtain of water swaddling my head parted and I could see that I was speeding toward the shore, where my friends were jumping up and down, yelling and gesturing for me to stand up and actually surf the wave. But I had noodles for arms and nothing left to launch my cramping body onto my feet. I was missing a shot at the very thing I’d traveled for: a ride on a wave, my skin bathed in sunlight and droplets of warm water. It was a disappointment, but I barely had the energy to care. As I neared the beach, I rolled off the board in exhaustion and relief, dragged it out of the water, and dropped it in the sand, then hunched over to rest my elbows on my knees. I stayed there, panting, and listened to my heartbeat slow as the waves crashed and receded somewhere behind me and a sense of security returned. I’d survived the ordeal with no real harm—at least not to my body. I would live to surf another day, and that, in this moment, was all that mattered.
Part I
At Sea
I suddenly realized that I was no member of the crew—simply a blind passenger.
—Frederick Kohner,
Gidget, the Little Girl with Big Ideas
1
First Light
June 2010
It was summer and I was desperate for a way out of the city. Under normal circumstances I’d have had summer plans already: a weekend share somewhere with my husband, visits with friends upstate, or a long trip vineyard-hopping in France or Northern California or hiking and kayaking in Canada or Maine. But I was nearly three years divorced and this summer was mine, all mine, and looking really empty. As I sat at my desk in the third-floor newsroom of the New York Times in midtown Manhattan, bundled in a scratchy wool cardigan against the air-conditioned chill, I peered through the glass skin of the building at the people striding along the sidewalks below and at the buses winding up through the maze of ramps stacked above the Port Authority transit terminal across the avenue. It seemed that everyone was on the move.
I’d been a reporter at the Times for nearly a decade and had a new beat covering the city’s hospitality industry for the Metro desk. I’d convinced my editor that since so many of the restaurateurs, hoteliers, business executives, celebrities, and others from that scene would be heading out of town for the season—especially to the east end of Long Island—I should follow the annual exodus for my next article. But I hadn’t yet found a specific story idea good enough to justify the expense of a trip, so I was on the phone fishing for leads with Jim, a longtime colleague who spent summers in Montauk, the remote and quirky fishing village at the island’s prow.
“Ooooh,” he said, “I know what you should write about—it’s such a good story—but I almost don’t want to tell you. I just kind of don’t want to draw attention to it.”
“Oh, c’mon,” I said into my headset, “you’ve got to at least tell me what it is. If you don’t want me to write about it, I won’t, but if it’s such a good story somebody else, like the Wall Street Journal, is going to figure it out and do it first.”
“Yeah, yeah, okay, you’re right,” he said. “Plus I know it’s kind of crazy to think I can keep anything about Montauk under wraps.” I heard a deep inhale and then his voice dropped low, as if to arrange a parking-garage rendezvous to spill state secrets. “The Montauket’s for sale. They’re asking, like, $17 million.”
“What’s the Montauket—and is that a lot of money for it?”
“Oh my god—the Montauket!” Jim said, his voice back to normal volume. “It’s a big deal if it sells.”
The Montauket, it turned out, was a scruffy bar and motel perched high on a bluff overlooking Fort Pond Bay on Montauk’s northern coast that had been considered for generations to be the best place in the area to watch the sunset. Though the End, as the town is known, is technically an unincorporated hamlet that’s part of greater East Hampton, it had long eschewed that gloss and instead clung fiercely to its maritime history, blue-collar ethos, and hippie surfer vibe. But as wave after wave of development replaced mildewed budget lodgings with whitewashed boutique hotels catering to the fashionable set, the Montauket had become the last bastion of the townies, Jim told me, and a kind of stand-in for the place’s soul.
It was, as Jim said, a good story, and, since the Fourth of July was approaching, a good time to tell it, as editors always wanted a fun, summery piece to run near the holiday weekend. Which was why, on a Saturday afternoon a week or so later, I sat at the bar of the Montauket breathing the salt air of the bay and scribbling in a reporter’s notebook. I took in the framed portraits of fish and seascapes on the walls, drinks listed on chalkboards, and heavy wood beams crossing the ceiling. There was a cigarette machine near the entrance, a jukebox in a corner, and a manual cash register behind the bar that was actually in use, not just for show. The place was practically empty, but a young man and woman were out on the back patio, hardly able to keep their hands—or mouths—off one another.
The bartender, an efficient, no-frills woman in a black tank top, leaned her head out through an open window toward them. “I’d tell you to get a room, but we don’t have any,” she yelled. “I’m sick of looking at you licking each other like ice cream cones.” She came back in and passed by me on her way to another task, rolling her eyes and shaking her head. The whole thing was feature-story gold.
A few hours later the sunset crowd descended. I stepped outside and watched them quickly fill the picnic-table benches and patio chairs under the soft glow of string lights and the descending sun, masked by cottony clouds hovering over the calm ripples of the bay. The jukebox blared Springsteen’s “No Surrender” and a man in cargo shorts and a CLAM POWER T-shirt held aloft his Amstel Light, bellowing along, “No retreat, baby!” I slipped back inside the bar and, scanning the tightly packed room, spotted two men who appeared to be in their sixties. I introduced myself in the hope that they could tell me some of the history.
“How long have you been coming here?” I asked.
“Since the seventies,” said one of them, a retired contractor with thinning dark hair and a button-down shirt. “It was an old man’s bar, and I was a younger man then. Now I’m the old guy.”
The place, they told me, was a popular spot for fishing vacations among Jones Beach lifeguards once the season ended, and a favorite of Billy Joel’s.
“It used to be like time stopped here,” said the other man, a white-haired guy in a coral polo shirt and khakis whose family had begun spending summers in Montauk in the 1920s. “Everything was held in place, like a picture of Roosevelt.” Now, he said, because of the trendy hordes that routinely swamped the town, “we’re just trying to hold back the floods.”
I looked around at the crowd as the occasional raucous laugh shot through the din of weekend-night voices ricocheting off the ceiling. Outside, streaks of persimmon and periwinkle, the dying embers of sunset, hovered at the horizon’s edge. I wondered what would become of the time-capsule charm here if a sale went through—whether the rough edges would get buffed away by the inexorable march of money, much as it had in so many quarters of the old Manhattan where I had grown up in the 1970s and ’80s. The owner of the place, a petite woman with a slim hoop through her eyebrow whose family had run it since 1959, when a relative won the right to buy it in a poker game, had told me earlier that afternoon that, money aside, it was simply time to move on, to try something new.