Little Tours of Hell

I offer the title of this post with apologies to the splendid writer, Josephine Saxton. "Little Tours of Hell", one of Saxton's finest short-stories, tells of a distraught mother who, at some time in the 1970s, gets the crazy idea of going to Algeria with her family on a camping vacation. Although Algeria had some tourist-friendly and very cheap campgrounds in those days, it was still, well, Algeria. The wine sucked, the food was scarce, and the climate was disgraceful. The story is the sad tale of a visit to the ladies' facility provided by the campgrounds. The heroine hopes to have a quiet and private moment, but discovers that the "toilet" is a filthy, brimming hole. While squatting over this Dante-esque nightmare, the clasp on her sandal gives way and the shoe promptly drops into the swill. The heroine looks down and groans. Remember, this is the 70s. The local bazaar has gourds, not cheap flip-flops from Wal-Mart. Our heroine can now either go barefoot on the hot sand or she can fish her sandal out of the mire. She walks away in the stinking shoe, the other campers glowering at her for her little groan of dismay -- the British on holiday can despise the camper without any pluck. The heroine laughs madly, grimly, when she catches sight of an enormous scorpion, stinging itself to death. It is the perfect metaphor for the never-perfect vacation.

So let me say what, about my "vacation", has brought me to this recollection of a much-loved but nearly forgotten short-story I read three decades ago. It's the motherflusteringblasted weather here! Yes, it's a beautiful 82 degrees. Yes, the breezes are lovely. But the Wee Cottage is too damned energy efficient. The house holds onto heat the way an old maid in church holds onto gas. The feeble little window units make more noise than coolth. I thrash the sheets all night. I pray for release. I'm making an unscheduled trip to Texas, so I can just collect my strength and loll about in some A/C for awhile. This is an awful thing for me to do, me, a greenie and a bunny hugger. But I don't care. If the planet tilts 90 degrees from everything and sinks into a black hole as a result of my defection, I'll pop a cold one and whistle a tune. Because I'M GOING HOME!

At least for a few days. Jesse and I had a splendid afternoon at Sagamore Hill, which was Teddy Roosevelt's winter palace while he was in office. The best part was a little wooded walk down to a pebbled beach on Long Island Sound. The water was actually fairly clear and not too cool. And there was no one around. Any beach that Americans have to walk more than half a mile to is bound to be beautifully private (for what we are becoming see Wall-E. Don't read this, just go see it. I may go see it again to teach myself not to whine about the Wee Cottage's amazing capacity for heat retention.)

Our walk to the beach was followed by a great lunch in Oyster Bay Cove's 'Bakery Cafe'. I'm not sure why they chose so generic a name for their establishment, but the salt and pepper shaker was certainly unique.

The drive to and from Sagamore Hill was surreal. I thought Cold Spring Harbor was impossibly upper-crust, but at least Cold Spring's mega-mansions vaguely suggest the kind of money that someone might have earned. But Oyster Bay Cove, the next enclave, challenges the whole notion of just desserts. Off the main road is an endless stream of 'Private Roads' with minatory signs to warn off the idle tourist. The estates have gone from the miserly 5 acres at Cold Spring to so many acres you could train an army of jihadis back in those groves. In Oyster Bay, you can't imagine any occupation, other than 'Founder of Microsoft', that justifies the whispering towers one glimpses behind the massive oaks. Free-born smarties, making their own money in their own lifetimes just don't earn this kind of lucre. No keen engineer or tireless plastic surgeon, working 24-7 on boob-reduction could explain such placid excess. At least I don't think so, not from the quotes I've been getting :)

Daughter Jesse paddling in Teddy Roosevelt's beach