As I approached my block, passing the castlelike Bedford Union Armory, its red-brick facade glowing in the early evening sun, I decided to do it. Later that night I crawled into bed and snuggled into the pillows, unable to stop smiling as I thought about the week in Montauk and how much fun it could be. I closed my eyes and replayed what I’d seen that morning, those beautiful, graceful people sliding through the waves, so powerful and so free. When I finally drifted off to sleep, it was with visions of myself dancing on a shimmering sea.
2
Hooked
July–September 2010
On a late-July morning almost a month after my reporting trip to Montauk, I was getting dressed for the office, sticky with sweat from the sun beating into my un-air-conditioned apartment, and realizing that I was craving the feeling of water lapping at my feet. The weeklong surf vacation in Montauk was more than a month away, and I could sense the sunsets beginning to quicken and suddenly wanted a day at the beach.
A few hours later I was at an outdoor press conference in midtown Manhattan for the ceremonial opening of a new hotel, fretting over which of the beaches accessible by public transportation I should visit the coming weekend, Coney Island or Jacob Riis, in the Rockaways. I watched the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, deliver congratulatory remarks amid ferns and potted bamboo and then join the hotel developers and other grandees to snip a leafy green plastic vine draped across the entrance in place of the typical red ribbon, part of promoting the building’s environmentally friendly features.
After a question-and-answer session with the media, the group broke up and the mayor, surrounded by aides and security, hustled off to a black SUV. I headed toward the entrance for a tour and reception and said hello to Adrian Benepe, commissioner of the Parks Department, whom I’d interviewed a number of times over the years but hadn’t seen in a long while.
“What are you covering these days?” he asked, his short hair as dark and tidy as his jacket and tie.
“Bars, hotels, and restaurants—the hospitality industry,” I told him. “It’s a lot of fun, but honestly,” I said, laughing, “I feel like I would have been a lot better at it when I was younger.”
“I know what you mean—I’m at events almost every night, raising money for Parks.”
And then I thought, I should ask him where to go this weekend. As czar of the city’s beaches, Adrian was in a position to know.
“Maybe you can help me with something,” I blurted.
“Sure,” he said.
I told him about my struggle to choose.
“Are you driving?”
“No, I can get to either one by subway—or mainly by subway, at least.”
He took a breath as if to speak and then stopped. A few awkward seconds of silence passed, and it occurred to me that maybe I’d done the wrong thing in asking him to put one beach he stewarded ahead of another, like asking a parent which child they prefer. I was about to say, “Never mind,” and withdraw the question to let him off the hook when he said simply, “Coney Island is very crowded.”
Thank god I kept my mouth shut—Rockaway it is! I thought, excited and relieved to have a destination and a new adventure. Though it had been years since I’d gone to any city beach, I had been to Coney a number of times, often for work, covering local politics, but also for the occasional weekend day trip. Not so with Rockaway, as the collection of neighborhoods dotting the Rockaway Peninsula at the city’s southern edge is sometimes known—it was practically the frontier.
Sunday morning arrived, and at seven-thirty, armed with coffee, a towel, water, and reading material, I stepped into the near-deserted Brooklyn streets cloaked in that special summer smell of spoiled milk and stale urine to begin the long trek to the Rockaways. I was on a mission not just to sink my toes into the sand before July ended but also to recapture one of the many leisure-time casualties of my wrecked relationship. Eric and I had often had a car, one parental castoff or another, during the fifteen years we were together, and we found time to head to Maine or Long Island for at least a few days most years. Early on, we even snagged a tiny converted hay barn near the beach at the cheaper end of the Hamptons for an enchanted summer, during which a trio of driftwood-colored rabbits stood up along the driveway one misty morning as if to salute as we left the house.
But that was a long time ago, and without easy access to a vehicle and with my will to travel attenuated by unhealed wounds and loneliness, it just hadn’t occurred to me to try to get out of the neighborhood until that week. My experience with the beaches that dot the city’s 520 miles of coastline was limited, despite my New York City upbringing. Cape Cod had given me my first taste of true independence and a precious respite from the urban constraints of my youth, when my life was defined by the dangers, both real and imagined, that lurked outside our apartments, first in Harlem and then on the pre-gentrified Upper West Side. It was New York’s bad old days of high street crime, and I was rarely allowed out alone, and then always given strict instructions on which blocks to avoid. My parents, like many others, also made sure I had “mugger money” in my pocket—at least five dollars, so as not to make potential assailants angry enough to hurt me or my friends. But at the beach I could wander off for hours by myself to play in the water or examine the dunes, get thin, salty potato chips at the concession stand, or hang out with my summer friend, a local girl with long blond hair and pale-gray eyes whom I’d met there during one of my solo meanderings. It was a relationship that existed entirely in the sand: I’d run into her year after year, and she’d show me the best places to dig for clams or to find the tiniest seashells. I had what felt like a radical freedom at the shore—an association I never lost.
As I got older and couldn’t travel that far come summer, I looked to nearer beaches, which in my twenties became backdrops for a different kind of abandon. At my first job in journalism, I’d become close friends with a guy named Jonathan, a tremendously talented writer and editor who was tall, charismatic, cute, stylish, and fun—one of those rare people who could make just about any situation feel like a fabulous party. Even in an office full of artsy young strivers at a short-lived but influential magazine called 7 Days, he stood out, his long blond hair swinging from side to side as he strode about, a collection of thin bracelets encircling his wrist and a faint scent of patchouli in his wake. He’d grown up in a big, boisterous Irish Catholic family in South Jersey, so we’d go “down the shore” to Stone Harbor or Avalon or Cape May from time to time, but we also shared rentals in the Hamptons. We’d spend our weekend days at the beach or lounging in some chic friend’s backyard or pool and our nights cooking dinners or heading out to house parties, art and fashion events, or dance clubs, fueled as much by our own exuberance over feeling young and optimistic as by anything else.
Eric, whose parents were Latvian refugees from World War II, had grown up in a suburb of Buffalo but had developed a love of the mountains and woods, and a few of my friends from 7 Days had country homes upstate or had moved there. Attracted by the mix of sweet old farmhouses, a burgeoning food and wine scene, and the cultural sophistication of the writers and artists we were getting to know, we began pursuing a weekend life in the Hudson Valley. The beach was nice but so limited, we thought—what would we do once the cold weather came?—and well beyond our means anyway. Here was an area where we could do things year-round, we reasoned, whether kayaking or hiking or cross-country skiing, a place where I could garden, raise chickens and cows, and pursue photography, a place where we could even imagine growing old. It was a picture I grabbed hold of and refused to surrender, envisioning how our life together would play out there: entertaining friends and family, frolicking with dogs and children, visiting vineyards and restaurants, summer-stock playhouses and museums. It would be relaxing yet lively, rustic but urbane. The beach retreated into the background.