Taking a Hampton Hopper shuttle from Baron's Cove over to the Steinbeck House is more than a nice, communal touch. It feels like a theme park visit, a San Diego Zoo faux safari, an excursion to a special, hermetically sealed place.
What you might find otherworldly there is just how much of a peninsula the house and outbuildings actually sit on. At the point, the famous and well-glassed writing shed protrudes like a tugboat's wheelhouse, facing the water just this side of the edge of a small cliff.
If you can shoulder past the ghosts, the cottage itself offers a valuable lesson for all those who continue to come to Sag Harbor and build: Less is more. A sleeping loft here, a ring toss there, through one doorway a sunroom that once sported jealousy windows, and call it good.
As always, bitchy thoughts intrude. Must the property be ringed with a black chain-link fence? That renovation a relative did nine or 10 years ago, he didn't bother to use real wood flooring. And who in his right mind would take up the brick?
But these are like the "quibbles" critics feel they have to add to reviews when they realize they're tacking too hard to the positive. What really matters are the glimpses into the private sphere. Like the labeling still to be seen on drawers in Steinbeck's garage workshop: "Screws. (Anyone?)"
To those who have read only a couple of his books, Steinbeck's sense of humor might be a revelation. As tour guide, Kathryn Szoka, late of Canio's Books, did well in mentioning a 1957 Holiday magazine piece, "My War With the Ospreys," in which he finds he had "been insulted" and had "thrown down the gauntlet and had it accepted."
He comes to admire a sturdy nest within easy view, later finding in it "my bamboo garden rake, three T-shirts belonging to my boys, and a Plaza Hotel bath towel." But the birds abandon it for another nest atop a transformer on a telephone pole.
He builds a new nest for them, only to discover them "dismantling it, tearing it to pieces, lifting out the carefully bound reed pads and carrying them across the bay and propping them clumsily on top of the same transformer. Of course my feelings were hurt." And so on.
John Steinbeck in Sag Harbor is a big topic, and there's no way in hell it will be explored at length here. Just know that while house tours are over till the other side of winter, you can still see the grounds for six more Saturdays this year. And maybe that's enough.