An entry for the Daily Telegraph 'Just Back' competition - a 500 word maximum travel essay:
The Long Island
‘Expressway’ of New York is optimistically, even mendaciously named. But at last here we are in trendy
Southampton. The twee shop fronts of the
boutiques look like something that Prince Charles has dreamed up to represent
‘Olde England’. ‘Honey, that stuff is
way too old for you, we’re not going in there’, insists a tanned fifty
something in shorts, who looks like Harrison Ford, and is considerately
clutching the hand of a girl who might or might not be his niece. But later he is marching her back down the
sidewalk, she feigning pseudo-reluctance.
‘If you want it honey, we’re just gonna go back in there and buy it’,
Harrison announces.
Personally I’m way too
old for everything here, including the flashbulb popping trendy lunch venue, 75
Main, where everyone wants to be photographed with a woman who is apparently in
‘The Real Housewives of New York City’.
The Western half of Long Island is Dutch, this Eastern half is
English. Indeed we are in Suffolk
County. Signs proudly announce the
settlement of the area in the 1630s. A
fashion shop states that the style is ‘Fabulously English’. But the most beautiful people in Southampton,
or at least the wealthiest, are rarely seen, hidden away in their enormous
houses behind the beach on Gin Lane. In
the gas station I think I recognize a film star at the wheel of an immaculate
1958 Chevvy Corvette convertible, but it turns out he is just the mechanic, and
he won’t say who owns it. A tanned
superfit man jogging along the road is just as likely a hedge fund manager as a
film star.
Beyond here, in the
more picturesque Easthampton, we are looking for the remarkably named Springs-Fireplace
road, and the cabin of Jackson Pollock, the abstract expressionist artist, who
moved here in 1946. The cabin has a
rural feel. ‘It looks like something by
Andrew Wyeth’, I tell our guide.
Predictably she is not impressed.
In Pollock’s studio, where he painted on the floor, there is almost more
paint left on the boards than ended up on his canvases. It’s a curious feeling to walk across these
rough strips of wood, and to reflect that they would probably fetch a hundred
million dollars in themselves. A cliché
maybe, but somehow it seems possible to feel the rhythms of Pollock’s paintings
in the whirls and swirls of paint left behind.
The genius in the floorboards, is still there, catapulted into art
history, literally, as he turned his Oldsmobile over near here one night in
1956.
In late Spring the
temperatures are pleasantly around 25°C, the creamy dogwood blossoms have still
not faded, and everything is green and fertile.
On the Northern fork of the island, we sit on the deck at one of the many
vineyards which have all sprung up since the 1970s, and sip a glass of Long
Island wine. The sun streams down. One doesn’t have to be Jay Gatsby to enjoy
Long Island.
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| Chevvy Corvette 1958, Long Island, June 2013 |
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| A more beautiful rear than J-Lo? |
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The Pollock-Krasner house, Springs, Long Island, NY
I still feel it looks like an Andrew Wyeth |
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| The genius in the floorboards |
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| Jackson Pollock's painting equipment |
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| The beach at Southampton, Long Island, NY |
