I have a remote chance to go to the North Pole this summer. Maybe I'm so excited about this possibility because when I was a kid, we didn't go anywhere — and I mean anywhere. To put it in perspective, even though we lived on Long Island, just a bagel's throw away from the Big Apple, I never ventured into Manhattan (save for a few trips to visit my elderly great-grandparents in Greenwich Village) until I was a senior in college. To me, "The City" remained a mysterious, frightening, crime-ridden entity that intimidated corn-fed suburbanites such as myself.
For the most part, my summer vacations were usually spent languishing along the rocky, seaweed-strewn beaches of Long Island's North Shore, with an occasional day-long expedition to Jones Beach. There was Pryibil's Beach, located right on the edge of the monastery estate we lived on. Slightly to the west, but still within walking/biking distance, was Meudon Beach, former bathhouse to Lattingtown's William Guthrie and family. We would meet some of the other neighborhood kids down there, where we'd swim out to the raft or leap off of the pedestrian bridge into the swiftly flowing currents a la Huckleberry Finn. If my mom was up for a car ride, we'd drive a couple of miles to Stehli or Ransom Beach in Bayville, located right across from the village's renowned boardwalk, where you could grab a gyro, slice of pizza, or ice cream after a day on the Sound.
Souvlaki Palace: serving up Greek goodness along the Bayville strip since the year of my birth.From the time I was 6 till I was about 14, my parents also sent me away to the Catskills for two weeks every summer to Soyuzivka, a Ukrainian resort that featured a kids' sleepaway camp. There I learned how to count to 10 and sing folk songs in Slavic; outrun a rattlesnake; and royally screw up the fine art of pysanky (the technical term for making those famous Ukrainian Easter eggs).
So you think making a Ukrainian Easter egg is easy to do? I can assure you, it most certainly is not.Then there was Hither Hills State Park. Located on the southern tip of Long Island's fishtail in Montauk, this campground set right on the Atlantic Ocean (now notoriously difficult to get into) served as our annual family getaway. Every August, we'd pack up the Ford Pinto and make the two-hour trek "out east," where we'd spend one or two weeks far away from prime-time programming, chores, and the usual regimen of daily living. The initial decompression was always challenging (no TV?!), but after a day or two, we had become one with the sand dunes.
My mom could see us playing on the beach right from our campsite (the woman in this vintage picture of the park is not my mom).It was here, in bucolic Hither Hills, where I'd feel the most like myself. Absent the presence of electronic static, schoolwork, even my friends, it was a time when I would have nothing to do for days on end but simply...be. Sounds very existential, but it wasn't like I was reading Camus. My brothers and I would simply ride our bikes around the perimeter of the campgrounds, making friends with other kids also stuck in the sand for seven days. We'd frolic in the rough-and-tumble ocean surf, getting knocked down so many times our bathing suits were bursting with silt by sunset. Sometimes I would simply find a perch on top of a dune midway between our campsite and the beach proper, simultaneously able to keep an eye on the crashing Atlantic on one side and my mother firing up a fresh batch of blueberry pancakes and thick-sliced bacon on the other while I sifted sand through a brilliantly colored plastic colander.
Our evenings would be spent congregated around the propane lantern in the screenhouse, noshing on chips and clam dip (I'm sure my parents and grandparents also harbored some sort of intoxicant in their Solo cups) while we played boardgames and cards against the backdrop of a starry sky, serenaded by the cicadas and an occasional nocturnal seagull scavenging for dinner remnants from the well-stocked RVs. The main house hosted square-dancing every Friday night, as well as outdoor movies on the lawn in front of the general store, where you could purchase a sweet treat to snack on as you sprawled out on your blanket in front of the giant screen and enjoyed the selected flick.
Not every Hither Hills jaunt was totally idyllic. One summer I spent the entire week curled up in a fetal position in my grandparents' pop-up tent thanks to a God-awful toothache. That was back in the days when parents didn't coddle every malady with a trip to the pediatrician—you put a Ziploc bag filled with ice on that swollen cherub cheek and sucked it up!
Then there was the time when the park got hit with a massive late-summer thunderstorm that lasted for three days, commencing right as we arrived to set up camp. Ninety-eight percent of the other families packed up their Colemans and headed into town to book a hotel until the weather cleared up — but not Keith Gidman. As the rest of us sat huddled in the car, my dad erected the screenhouse, pistol-whipped by the torrential downpour and spewing out a litany of cussing that would have been more appropriate down at Gosman's dock among the shark fishermen and clammers.
But although my childhood travel bug never made it further than Route 27, I wouldn't trade those summertime experiences, both good and bad, for the world. Spending time with your family along the ocean's edge or in the verdant mountains, still in the same state yet so far from the familiar distractions of home and hearth, proved to me that you didn't have to travel thousands of miles to feel like you were at the ends of the earth.
That said, I would still like to experience going to the ends of the earth. Please send me to the North Pole by voting here.
