Jenifer’s Shelter Island Journal: Ithacas

The end of summer is what the word “bittersweet” was made for.

June, July and August aren’t just months, but time out of time, especially for kids, to whom that time feels endless until, suddenly, it’s over. And very likely they have been changed in ways that they don’t fully understand, while sunny days and thunderstorms and waves and camps, and first jobs and new friends were transforming them.  

They return to school two to three inches taller with memories that have already woven themselves into the personal mythologies that will last their lifetimes. And if those summer memories happen to have their roots in this magical island I, for one, know they can go very deep. My pen-pal and friend of this column, Carl, spent a goodly portion of his long-ago summertime here, too, and seems to feel the same way. Allow him to introduce himself:

Hello to y’all. My name is Carl Nicoletti and I have been invited by my new bud, Jenifer, to submit a guest column. She flatters me with this offer but between us, I think she just wants a week off.

Some of you may remember me from the ‘60’s as being a summer kid who slept in the woods and on Louie’s beach and who worked at The Dory and The Chequit. A long-time reader of the Reporter, I see many familiar names… and being that it’s been 60-plus years I thought it might be time we caught up.

I live in Colorado now and have for years. Despite our beautiful mountains, it is rather dry and having been a water baby, (hence my love affair with the Island), I have to wonder how I got here. I can remember what seemed to be days spent waterskiing until we just couldn’t any more. .. and since moving here 55 years ago, I’ve only waterskied once.

How do any of us get where we are? For me, it all started as a road trip to California that made a stop in Boulder. You party until you’re out of money, then you get a job, meet someone, get married, and wind up with a house, two kids, and a mortgage. Not that I’m complaining, but when I walk my dog, Luna, at night, our streets are very dark, and it brings to mind walking on the Island as a teenager at night.

The roads were so dark we could only find one another by the glow of our cigarettes. Fireflies and stumbling through the woods to the deserted house I called home one summer. I shared it with numerous animals that sheltered in it every time it rained. Deer would jump in through the broken windows, never aware that I was sleeping upstairs. And a party that we’d meant to have there was broken-up by the police (how did they know about it?) sending a dozen or so teens out through those windows and into the woods, leaving a friend sitting alone up in the rafters. His original job was to make spooky sounds to frighten everyone but, sitting up there watching the police outside shining flashlights about, I think he was the only one who got scared.

It’s not hard to start daydreaming about Shell Beach parties, and clamming, and fishing and waterskiing — Behringer’s for a beer and Louie’s for a burger — tobogganing on Goat Hill, (O.K., that was in the winter, but I spent as much time as I could on the Island — I usually stayed with the Pagliaros on Stearns Point Road in colder months), pretty girls at the beach. I mean I learned to drive on Shelter Island, I got drunk for first time on Shelter Island, I kissed a girl for the first time (maybe not exactly the first) on Shelter Island: the list goes on and on.

But maybe we all have a “Shelter Island” in our past somewhere. I thank everyone for the lovely memories of that special place you call home.

Carl’s right. Mmaybe we all have a “Shelter Island” in our past somewhere. A place where our sense of adventure is triggered, our incipient autonomy tested, a place of firsts, a place that calls to us across time to keep becoming who we’re meant to be. A place you seek or yearn to return to, like that other island, of Homer’s Odyssey, the same Ithaca of Cavafy’s classic poem, which begins:

When you start on the journey to Ithaca,

Then pray that the road is long,

full of adventure and knowledge …

And ends with …

… Without her you would never have taken the road.

But she has nothing more to give you …

… With the great wisdom you have gained, with so much experience,

You must surely have understood by then what Ithacas mean.