onward to montauk

As a girl from the coast (west, that is) and an avid lover of the beach, living in New York City poses a bit of a summertime transportation problem. The beaches out here, all up and down the eastern coast, are actually far superior in many ways to those that I grew up on in Malibu. The thing is they’re just so damn hard to get to. I, like many (or even most?) New Yorkers, do not own a car. I grew up in Los Angeles—where car culture reigns supreme; where road rage, televised police car chases, bumper-to-god-damned-fucking-bumper traffic (hence, oft-times the road rage) and all manner of other vehicular misadventures are par for the course. As a resident of New York City where public transportation is the most efficient way to get around, I have reveled for 13 beautiful years being auto-free. But this makes it difficult when I want to get the hell out of dodge and quickly find myself on some pristine stretch of shoreline, where I will almost certainly spend more time in the water than on the actual shore. To get to the beach here, without a car, involves at the very least a train or a bus, and then sometimes a taxi from the train or bus statoin to the ferry terminal and then the ferry itself. Or, for those who have money to spare, a private plane or helicopter will do the trick. It’s an ordeal and reservations need to be made. Plans need to be in order. Alarm clocks need to be set for ridiculously early times on a Saturday morning.

This all brings me to yesterday. My dear friend Sheila does happen to own a car (although she lives in New Jersey, not Manhattan). So, when she suggested via email: "hey, wanna go to the Jersey shore this weekend and go swimming…I’ll pick you up at the Hoboken path station and we’ll just pop on down and have a day?"…I (ocean deprived for months) jumped at the offer. Online research (at this point, on Sheila’s part) ensued: which beach? followed by Mapquesting directions; followed by a calculation of travel time, and finally leading to a determination of departure time.

She finally suggested Avalon—a place she’d been before and very much enjoyed—but she very nicely gave me an out, warning me (via email) that it would be about a 2 ½ hour drive, and that she’d understand if that was too much time in the car, but she was going anyway because she needed a swim. I don’t mind a 2 ½ hour drive, especially with someone like Sheila, with whom I can talk at length about almost any topic on the planet. Plus we hadn’t seen each other in awhile and there was shit to be caught up on.

No, the driving time was a cinch. The problem was: Oscar. If she picked me up at her recommended hour of 11am and we spent 2 plus hours in the car and another 3 (ideally 4) hours at the beach and then the trip home….well, a dog can only hold it for so long. I don’t have a dog walker, but I know many in the neighborhood in passing…many by name, none by phone number. So I loitered at the dog run (literally, Oscar is done playing and is sitting on the laps of various indulging strangers, panting) hoping to run into one of them. When, by Friday, this hadn’t worked I launched into research of my own, thinking surely there must be a goddamned beach closer than Avalon. Google searches galore brought me to Montauk, which just seemed like a swell idea. I’d always wanted to go, and when I suggested it to Sheila, she said she had always wanted to go too.

So yesterday’s debacle was really all my fault. Sheila rolled up a bit late, due to traffic, and picked me up in the west village at 11:30. The highways were easy enough; we breezed right on through, talking all the way and listening to Sheila’s special road trip Ipod mix. Then—and this is where things started heading south, although we were heading north (or was it west?)--we hit the one-lane-in-either-direction road that runs the length of the Hamptons and, finally, into Montauk. West Hampton, Bridge Hampton, Amagansett, East Hampton, Water Mill (where we saw Japanese tourists posing for pictures in front of what I’m pretty sure was a wind mill)…all just lovely, verdant places with lots of happy rich-looking people whom we had ample time to ogle, seeing as we were crawling along at about 1 mile per hour. We talked of the variety of trees and how the Starbucks out here just don’t look like the Starbucks in the city and how quaint and cute the little villages were. We saw a wedding about to happen…a little white Presbyterian church decked in flowers, people standing about in front in fancy clothes.

Eventually, roughly 3 ½ hours into the trip, frustration kicked in…Sheila needed to pee and I had Oscar’s bladder on my mind…doing the math in my head, I was thinking: OK, maybe we’ll get to a beach in the next ten minutes—at this point any fucking beach with an actual ocean will do—take a quick dunk and get back in the car for another four hours home….if that’s the case, how much damage would that do to Oscar’s urinary system and, more importantly, to his trust in me. It wasn’t looking good.

We stopped at a gas station so Sheila could relive herself, while I assaulted two bemused gas station attendants with questions about the nearest beach, parking, the parking rules, and was there any way, any way whatsoever please, to get around those rules. In retrospect, I’m sure I’m just one in a million stupid foreigners in those parts to stop in and try to get some golden advice about how to circumvent the stringent parking situation enforced on outsiders. Basically, there are maybe two or three public beaches where you can pay for parking. Otherwise, you need to have a “resident permit” for the other beaches, which I’m sure are preferably less crowded. Of course, always being the girl who was more curious about what was going on in the V.I.P. lounge than I was in dancing with the masses, I wanted to find a way to get around this whole parking thing. I asked them, “Aren’t there residential streets we can park on and then just walk to the beach?” They said, “Um, I don’t think so.” I asked them in a different way, “There must be some place near the beach where we can park and walk?” They said, “Still, no.” I think I tried several other lines of questioning, but ultimately there was no golden advice and, if there was, these guys were not going to give it to me.

Sheila kept saying, “They don’t want us here. They just don’t want us here,” referring not to the gas station dudes but to the Hampton folk in general. As charming as it may be, this is not a place that’s set up to welcome outsiders.

So we ended up, finally at around 3:30pm, at a public beach. It was crowded, but it was glorious. The sea never looked so good. We were forced to swim between two strategically-placed green flags, but the water was perfect. I guess in a way, the exhaustion of the journey made the pay-off all that much better. We swam, we talked, we sat in the sun for a couple hours. Then it was time to go.
I drove homeward. We passed that wedding-about-to-happen after it had happened; the front walk of the church scattered with white rose petals; the sidewalk in front populated by a few straggling well-dressed guests immersed in some talk of something that must have seemed important. The bride and groom were, presumably, on their way to some tony country club for their first dance and embarking on their 50/50 chance of making their vows stick. Whoever they are, I’m rooting for them.

We met virtually no traffic on the way back. The trip took about 2 ½ hours. I arrived home at 9pm. Oscar was happy to see me.