!Montauk_lighthouse Before we go over to tennis 24/7 and kiss the summer goodbye, here’s a quick recount of a little time I spent at the beach last week.
The word—vacation—doesn’t do justice to its meaning in the end. What’s intended as nothing more than brief break from reality ends up, as the years go by, becoming a defining element of our lives, the time when we look back and feel that we were most ourselves. It’s hardly an accident that such a high percentage of photos in family albums come not from our working life, but from our vacationing life.
This was brought home to me most potently at a cousin’s funeral a few years ago. His older sister eulogized him by describing the ritual that he performed every year when he traveled to Cape Cod, where their family had gone each summer when he was a kid. At precisely the same spot on the highway in Massachusetts that leads to the Cape, he would pop in the same beaten old Cat Stevens cassette and croon along joyfully to the same song (which one it was escapes me), as if all his cares were in the rearview mirror. From there, he would choreograph every part of their approach to their beach house—he had to drive a certain way, stop at a certain place, listen to a certain song, arrive at a certain time. I doubt he was alone in this: For many people, returning to a place where we were most carefree as kids is a powerful, and maybe even melancholy, experience.
As I I’ve written here, my family went to the Jersey Shore every summer when I was younger. It’s easier for me, living in New York now, to head straight east and avoid all forms of tri-state traffic. So before the Open commences each year, I spend a week in August at the very end of Long Island, in the town of Montauk. My idea of a vacation is to sit on a beach and read—nothing more, or less, than that is necessary. But that’s a deceptively basic description of the trip. The simple act of entering an environment that’s both strange and familiar calls up all kinds of new sensations and inspires all kinds of new observations. With that old line, ‘what I learned on my summer vacation,’ in mind, here are four of them.
During the day, I went back to an old favorite, the Drive-By Truckers, a Southern-indie band whose lead singer, Patterson Hood, would be the Bruce Springsteen of his day if anyone cared about rock and roll anymore. Perhaps his finest song is called “The Sands of Iwo Jima.” In a scratchy falsetto, he tells the story of his uncle, George A., a World War II vet. Hood describes how his uncle enlisted after Pearl Harbor because he “believed in God and country/things was just that way.” As a boy, the singer watches an old war movie with his uncle and asks him if that’s the way it was in real life. George A. says he “never saw John Wayne on the sands of Iwo Jima.” The song finishes by describing George A. today, still living on his farm. The singer sums up his attitude to life with these final lines:
He never drove a new car though he could easily afford it
He’d just buy one for the family and take whatever no one wanted
He said a shiny car didn’t mean much after all the things he’d seen
I listened to this song driving out of Montauk. I passed the hipster beach, the locals-only bar, the miniature golf course, and all the big status cars on the Old Montauk Highway. Where Ocean City, NJ, is a vast upper-middle-income morass as far the eye can see, with very few class differentiators, Montauk and the Hamptons are woven together out of layers of discreet classes, all of them, in their own way, snobbish and smug. It’s a beautiful place, and you can find your niche away from humanity much more easily than you can on the Jersey Shore, but I wonder sometimes how you would even begin to afford a house there or drive one of those shiny cars. Thank you to Patterson Hood for helping me keep it in perspective:
He said a shiny car didn’t mean much after all the things he’d seen
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I'll be heading to the qualifiers tomorrow at the Open, and will be back later with a preview of the draws.