The Evening Hill Diaries: The Long and Short of Long Island

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.