The next to last bus for Greenport leaves at seven o'clock on Friday evening from the corner of Forty-Sixth and Third Avenue. If you're lucky (and I was lucky), in a little under two hours and with few stops or much traffic on the Long Island Expressway, it drops you at the Greenport Train Station where you can buy a two dollar token from a machine to walk onto the ferry. The ferry fits two rows of about five cars with room for passengers along the rails and takes about ten minutes to cross over to Shelter Island. And so, with one small rolling suitcase and very little hassle, I arrived for the first time to Shelter Island on the Friday before the Fourth of July.
Technically, Shelter Island is in The Hamptons, which is why I returned my friend Janet’s invitation to spend a weekend at her rental house with a deadpan look of dread and a stutter of possible excuses. Finally I just said, "I'm much more Jersey than Hamptons. I really just love the Jersey shore." I said this with a long, direct look in her eyes hoping she would understand that me in The Hamptons was like my brother in a sushi restaurant. (My brother owns a coffee table that is a crouching black lacquer panther supporting an oval of glass on its shoulders.)
To be fair, I've only been to The Hamptons once before in my life. It was a pleasant weekend spent with three old friends, one of whose parents owned the house in which we stayed. The house was a lovely and secluded on acres of green land with a nice pool in the yard. The surrounding area was lush and the houses that were not hidden behind ten-foot hedges, breathtaking. Perhaps it was the crowd on the double-decker train, painted and polished and bronzed before the season was really under way, or the strip malls of Fifth Avenue stores, or one shiny, expensive vehicle after another that made us stick by that pool all weekend and never venture off the property. It felt like a scary scene out there, the materialism and showiness of Manhattan transplanted to a beach town and none of the stuff that makes the beach the beach. No saltbox houses and burger shacks. No groups of loud families wheeling coolers to the beach. No large, wrinkled women in skirted bathing suits. No Tower of Death blinking and spinning and daring you to take a ride. No Barnacle Bill's mini-golf. No fried food.
I repeated my entreaty thinking that any time spent in Shelter Island were days missed in Seaside. "But it's not The Hamptons," Janet said. She continued to explain how she too disliked The Hamptons, for the same reasons. "If anything," she said, "there's absolutely no scene at all. Nothing to do. Very quiet." After confirming that Shelter Island was in The Hamptons, but nothing like The Hamptons with several trustworthy friends, I agreed.
My first few steps onto Shelter Island were promising. There were a handful of cars waiting at the dock, one of which was Janet, and we drove about two minutes to her two-bedroom cottage with a shady view of a lake. The cottage was on the property of a larger house, but secluded and clean, decorated in whites and soft blues with adequate furniture to lounge and read, as well as a patio and two deck chairs by the lake. For the Fourth of July, the weather was unseasonably cool, but because we both enjoy biking and bikes are the best way to explore the island, we spent our time tooling around on two wheels. We rode past The Chequit, an inn built in the 1920's with a large screened in second-story porch off the main dining room and a hydrangea encrusted patio with umbrella covered tables for outdoor dining. We rode past cape cod like houses and Janet being in real estate gave me a sampling of the millions it would cost to own any one of them. We rode in the middle of the island where there are shady suburban streets, lush ponds and modest ranches. We rode into the glamorous part of the island where houses are built on bluffs and obscured by enormous trees and long iron gates. We stopped at an abandoned modern property on the coast where the sea was taking over and climbed up rotting piles to peek in the windows. It was empty but for a kitchen garbage can, newly lined, and a large screen television, and the walls were wood paneled and nothing inside was contemporary or tasteful. A hundred feet away, boys skipped rocks into the bay. We rode out to Sandy Point and then we walked out on the jetty where we had 180-degree views and could finally feel the July sun baking our arms.
Back at the house, being two single women and sick of our books or siphoning a very weak Internet connection, we mused what we might go for an evening out on the town. The problem is there’s no place to go. There is one hotel on Shelter Island that has a scene and it's called Sunset Beach. Other than the gas station on Main Street where Mercedes line up to fill up, Sunset Beach is the only other place on the island where you are reminded that you are indeed The Hamptons. After a few nights in restaurants and bars sitting alone in others wondering aloud and often where the heck everyone might be, we decided to go to Sunset Beach.
We parked the car along the shore at Sunset Beach, one of the few spots left, and as we walked up, we could see the crowd in the yellow lights of the wicker balcony and hear the thump and hum of club music. Inside it was tanned shoulders, silk tank tops, short skirts and coiffed hair. The men wore polo shirts and expensive flip-flops and the better looking ones seemed to have surrounded themselves with girls roughly fifteen years their junior. We assessed the scene quickly. We tried to be game. We stayed for one real drink, a chaser of water and called it a night. We tried, right?
On a particularly cloudy day, on the suggestion of a married couple we had met at a quiet bar, we decided to swim in Fresh Pond. The couple lived on one end of the pond and touted the refreshment of swimming across it, which they did each day, and assured us that we'd have no problem making it roundtrip. Since the couple did not look particularly fit or sober, we figured we'd give it a shot. Suited up, with toes in the muddy edges of the pond, Janet did not look either gung ho or convinced. The look she gave me was similar to the look I had meant to give her when she had first invited me out. It said, "I don't do cloudy day swims in cold, strange ponds."
The pond looked like it might be half-mile across and about half that wide. There were a few houses around it, a boat dock here and there, and a small cluster of birds resting on the surface towards the middle. All around were marsh grasses and above was a heavy gray sky, threatening rain. It had drizzled when we were looking for parking and it looked like it might start again.
The funny thing is, the more doubtful she became about the swim, the more determined I was not only to swim, but also to not swim alone. After some haggling and much coaxing, I got her into the pond and away we went. We did a gentle breaststroke. The water was dark and cool, olive at the edges and clear around my fingers as they swept through it. I tried some freestyle, which affirmed that looking into a dark bottom of open water, no matter how small the pond, freaks me out. As my fear of open water grew, Janet’s mood lightened. "How about just past those rocks?" I pointed. "This is fantastic!" she said. Her breast stroke was easy and light. Her fear of being too cold gone. We made it three quarters of the way to the other side, not far from a red canoe tied to a short wooden dock. Satisfied with our accomplishment and with a faint drizzle coming down, we turned back.
The swim back was easy. The rain was pocked the surface of the water, but the sky lightened a bit and we couldn't feel the rain as we swam, could only see it on the water’s surface. We were plenty warm from the effort, and as we trudged the last few steps out of the mucky bottom to the sandy shore, we felt a little tired and plenty refreshed.
On the last afternoon, we sunned at Sunset Beach. We didn't want a scene, but we missed looking at people, talking about people, surmising and judging, and at Sunset Beach, the opportunities for all of those things abound. The sea was as calm as a pond with the tiniest of waves curling at ankle height on the shore. A few boats were anchored off the shore in anticipation of that evening’s fireworks, and when we left in the afternoon, yachts were jammed together along the shoreline, waiters shuffled trays of drinks up and down the stairs and the music from the second floor bar began to thump. We pedaled away, more than satisfied with our week and no desire to stick around for the glossy evening crowd. Ahh, The Hamptons. Ahh, Shelter Island.
