From my vantage point in the basement office at the session house behind the Presbyterian Church, I can look out the ground-level windows to watch the workmen who have built elaborate scaffolding from the ground up to reach the spire, which they will soon be repairing. They scamper around five and six stories above the church lawn, clanging the steel pipes, in bright orange or yellow T-shirts, hopping from platform to platform like I imagine the Mohawk iron workers of the Six Tribes do.
These scaffold workmen seem to always be in high spirits up there among the clouds, like the happy-go-lucky chimney sweeps in “Mary Poppins.” The other day, when I ran out into the driveway to chase after a parishioner’s departing Honda, brandishing a left-behind iPhone, I could hear the workmen laughing, calling out, “Stop that car!” and whistling humorously as if they were hailing a taxi. The church staff and members of the buildings and grounds committee arrive in the dew of morning to stand on the grass and look up in admiration. We look up and speculate about whether we’d climb up the scaffolding if we could.
Imagine the view from up there.
Have you seen the 19th-century illustration from Picturesque America, or the Land We Live In (D. Appleton & Co., 1872), a scenic vision of old East Hampton from steeple height? It’s an engraving called “East Hampton, From the Church Belfry.” It shows a man with a broad-brimmed hat lounging Walt Whitman-fashion beside the belfry louvers, thrown dizzyingly wide open, with a young boy lying on his stomach on the belfry floor, both looking out over the open landscape of the village, to the sea.
To be literalist about it, “East Hampton, From the Church Belfry” seems a bit twisted around geographically: From the engraving’s belfry you see farm fields and a windmill in the middle ground, and then, on the right side in the distance, a high dune bluff that I presume represents the high dune bluff that is today the southeasternmost parking area of the Maidstone Club on Old Beach Lane. (From which high viewpoint, I’m told, the men used to peer out over the ocean to spy whales or schools of stripers. And, if I’m being honest again, I still secretly feel some territorial right to trespass onto that private parking lot to look out for a whale, even though that feeling of entitlement is patently ridiculous.) You didn’t have to actually mount the church belfry to see the ocean in those days, though; that much is fact. You could see all the way from the churchyard to the dunes from the ground 150 years ago.
We are somewhat view-starved in 2025, having spent 100 years and more cluttering up the joint with signage, driveway gates, ever-higher houses, powerlines, and Green Giant arborvitae.
There is something deep down in humans’ nature, our atavistic pre-rational brains, that hardwires us to appreciate and linger pleasantly over a wide-open view. I’m convinced it’s in all of us. Did this appreciation evolve, à la Darwin, because a wide-open view allows us to see predators and bad weather approaching? Or do we like an open view, also, just because there is something in our spirit that finds beauty in a horizon and has a hunger for beauty?
I have exactly one anecdote about the roof and spire of the Presbyterian Church, and that is a half-remembered one from my dad, who somehow got up there as a boy in the early 1940s to ring the bell and wake the village in the dead of night. This sketchy old family yarn begs the question: How did my father and his compadres in mischief clamber down again quickly enough to avoid capture by the then-minister, who lived in the manse, mere yards from the church? Although I’ve always animated this story in my mind’s eye with a Huckleberry Finn scene of the young rascals capering about the roof and swinging from the bell rope, upon reflection, they probably just walked in through the unlocked church door and mounted the stairs.
What is it that gives rooftops a whiff of magic? I’m thinking of the Darling children in “Peter Pan,” when they fly out their bedroom window and over the rooftops of London, turning circles around the church spires, flying straight on until morning. I’m thinking of Mary Poppins, Bert the chimney sweep, and the Banks children singing “Chim Chim Cher-ee” in the mysterious key of C minor as they ride “up where the smoke is all billowed and curled, between pavement and stars.”
Being up there in the open air, up through the atmosphere, up where the air is clear, does clarify the mind, does turn our thoughts philosophical. Even if we’re up there not in body but only in spirit, in our imagination.
It has always struck me as wonderful, this ancient architectural concept that a church spire or minaret should point skyward, to elevate our thoughts. Similarly, both magnificent and humanly comical those marble funerary statues (sepulchral sculptures?) you sometimes see in cemeteries of veiled maidens or Angels of Resurrection raising one arm to point skyward: That-a-way!
Anyway, Jane, the church’s director of music, and I are conspiring to get permission to climb the stairs of the scaffolding and enjoy the view from high up beside the spire. Would we go up if we could? We all say we would.