When I went into the water off Long Beach at 9 Saturday night, it was in part an attempt to recreate a scene from my return here 23 Julys ago, when after a cross-country drive from a rented cottage outside Bellingham, Wash., I floated on my back and watched the flashing lights of distant fireworks.
This time there may have been the echo of far-off booms, but the only light to be seen was the beam of a flashlight belonging to a guy casting a fishing rod down the shore, bachata sounding from his boombox.
Such company can be reassuring in the dark, but the distance between us was welcome, as I dropped my fetid shorts and took the plunge in full birthday suit. It was like that famous photo of Burt Lancaster, nothing but a towel over his shoulder, preparing to go skinny-dipping. Only without the 6-foot-2 frame, good hair, and sculpted Adonis ass.
A fog gently blurred everything that night, brought on by the heatwave, and off the coastline could be made out what might have been Fitzgerald's green light, urging us onward, but here ominously blinking red.
Sure, much has changed on the South Fork in those 23 years, but, funnily enough, it wasn't until rousing out of the pandemic's cloistering and venturing again into the former farm fields of Water Mill that the full horror registered — the uniformity and sheer size of new home construction.
How could any one family require so much space, you may well ask? Answer: They don't. Nor the punch-pad security gates. Nor the tall, lot-obscuring greenery.
We know, we know, it's all been said before. And yet it must be said again: How 'bout that Farrellized Bridgehampton Main Street! For this suburban unsightliness we lost the stately Elaine Benson Gallery (formerly the J.C. Sayre building) and the Wallace Halsey house just to the west?
And to the east, at the Founders Monument, why is there a medical center in a fake Greek Revival structure ham-handedly made to look historical, as if to fit in?
It's axiomatic you don't go faux in that situation, thus diminishing the nearby old red-brick Starbucks building, the old if remodeled Topping Rose House, the old and hugely columned Nathaniel Rogers House, and the old whitewashed Almond restaurant across the street. No, you go new, as a contrast, as was done with the successful glass-box addition to the back of the John Jermain Library down the Turnpike.
Unless, that is, instead of another clinic the Beebe Windmill could've been moved up Ocean Road to that intersection. What a hamlet-changer that would've been. But I guess no one thought of it at the time.
Oh hell. The beaches are still nice.