from Sharon Springs, NY: clean slate

After my previous post, a commenter wrote: one of the saddest things around is a long empty house. Fascinating, but sad.


Ed and I wake up to a crisp and brilliant Tuesday. Inside, the cousin house has heated up to a toasty big oven.
What’s the heating system here? -- I ask.
Primitive – Ed answers. He explains about oil and hot water and hissing radiators, but my thoughts are wandering as I look around the room where we spread out our sleeping bags. There is so much that is old here! An entire set of the Encyclopedia Britannica on the shelves. The 11th edition, published in 1910. The room is stuffy now, but we dare not open the ancient windows. The wallpaper shows water damage in the walls. In some rooms, old furniture is stacked to the side. But, the kitchen is modern and we see a copy of an Alice Waters cookbook lying around. And, Ed has us connected to WiFi in no time.

I try not to misplace things, but in a room with someone’s clutter, it’s hard. We spend a good half hour looking for my misplaced watch. As a result, I am now familiar with every dust ball around our sleeping area on the floor.

I need some fresh air.

We walk down to the village and look around. Sharon Springs is one fat chapter in a history book. But it feels like that chapter has come to a close. The spa hotels, the gazebos, the sulphur baths – they defined the Main Street not too long ago, but now they’re shut down. Left standing, but in disrepair, they are not glorious at all. They are a sad reminder of how shifting tastes can ruin a village. Or at least strip it of its significant markings.






There are two or three cafes in town, but all are closed for one reason or another. I search for a cup of coffee and finally find one in a pizza place. The grocery stores have shut down several years back but there is a liquor store, and a place where you can get your nails done. On the outskirts, you can still pull up to Dairlyland for a soft swirl ice cream cone. And some fried chicken tenders.





In the afternoon, we set out to inspect the family houses. Besides the cousins’ place, there is the grandparents’ grand place and the small “Button House” – probably the oldest of the three. In addition, there are the out buildings -- garages, a greenhouse, sheds...

We begin with the grandparents’ place.

On the outside, you immediately notice the peeling paint and places where the wood is warping. But on the inside you begin to appreciate what years of great care can do to a home. It all looks so perfectly preserved! What, to me, is so disconcerting is that nothing has been touched here for decades. The closets have linens, neatly folded, discreetly covered in the old world style with a hanging sheet. The smell is of camphor and mothballs. An old trunk has a beautifully printed card on it: “this trunk was last inspected and cleaned in June, 1966.” The grandfather’s room has jars of his knickknacks in the closet. His shoes are tossed to the side --- untouched for decades. In the room where Ed’s parents occasionally stayed (before the young family took over the Button House), a closet is full of his mother’s clothing. Things that predate Ed’s childhood, I’m sure. No one has touched anything here either. If any relative passed through here in the last quarter century, there is no indication that she or anyone ever entered these rooms. (And certainly there are enough rooms here that you could bypass the main ones and still do well by yourself.)

In the third floor rooms, Ed shows me the fire station and doll house his father and aunt played with as children. On one wall I see war helmets hung by the window. Which war? The first? The second?





We go out on the roof. Slate – Ed shakes his head. Who uses slate anymore. I'm thinking -- these slates sell for a lot at Crate & Barrel. As cheese plates.





The reality is that there is no future for this house. Too big, too old, too costly, sitting here in a depressed rural community – a beautiful, aging misfit.


Down the hill, the Button House is in far worse shape. The walls and ceilings in some rooms have given up and crumbled to the ground. The furniture is in place, the dishes here, too, are still in the kitchen cupboards, but it’s as if someone chased the inhabitants out in the middle of a meal. And then poked holes in the house. The shell is damaged even as the rooms are left alone. The ancient TV, the crank phone, the old clocks, books, Currier and Ives prints – still there, as if waiting for the family to return.



We walk through the former gardens, past grape vines, the apple orchard, past the buckled pool, the shattered greenhouse. You should have seen the care my grandmother took with the gardens. My aunt too! There were flowers everywhere. And as I’d run up from one house to another, I’d pass relatives sitting on the porch, always with a question for me, a good word.

But here is the brutal truth, the bottom line, really: these houses, untouched for all these years, must eventually be stripped and taken apart. Just as rebuilding the spa hotels seems like a wistful and ultimately futile endeavor (for whom? for what reason?), so, too, investing in these mammoth houses makes no sense at all. Not here, in the little village of Sharon Springs.

And it is so sad for me to see this. Being raised in Europe, I have always missed the mixing of the old and new here. And now, I am walking through a village with a remarkable and rich history and that village is about to lose its markers of a fascinating era. It'll have a clean slate, eventually to be filled with more practical homes and convenience stores, or in a worse scenario – by nothing at all, so that the entire village will have moved on. To Florida or Texas maybe.

Even though it is so pretty in this upstate New York region!






We eat dinner at one of the old, boarded up hotels – the Roxboro.





The place has been taken over by a local couple. Even though there is already one restored hotel in town, they're full of optimism for this one as well. Thus far, they've reopened the dining room. Three courses for $9.95 if you come before 6. An old woman and her son sit at a table at one end of the room. We are at the other end. The silence in the room is palpable.

If they reopen the hotel rooms, who will stay here?





We drive to the edge of Sharon Springs. At Dairyland. Ed orders a vanilla milkshake. We take turns sipping it as we return for the night to the cousins' house.

from Sharon Springs, NY

We sit in an empty dining room, waiting for our pizza. A rotary banner is leaning against one wall. Each of the dozen or so tables has a small American flag stuck in a cup of gold and red sparkly streamers. Paper placemats advertise local businesses. The rooms looks much like it probably did when it first opened for business, almost 100 years ago.

We're in the village of Sharon Springs. A place full of good childhood memories for my occasional traveling companion, Ed.


(On the approach:)
















His great grandparents picked this location (some 200 miles north of NYC) to build a summer residence. They were part of the wave of immigrants from Eastern Europe who must have been used to the custom there of taking curative sulphur baths. Sharon Springs has such baths -- once so fashionable for the vacationing community, now closed up. The habit never really caught on here (even as in Poland, people still travel to resorts that boast curative waters).





You could say that Sharon Springs rocked, for about 100 years (say 1870, until maybe 1970). Hotels sprung up. Musical events took place in (quaint to my eye) gazebos. The Sulphur Springs created vapors for inhaling, waters for bathing, mud for spa treatments. Saratoga Springs, the competing New York destination for those inclined toward sulphur spring treatments flourished as well, but Saratoga Springs discriminated against Jews (and eventually against communists – Polish nationals were not permitted to visit during my childhood years in New York) and so the immigrants and their families settled in Sharon Springs. With rail access to New York City (back then), it was a magnificent vacation spa village!



the Roxboro: now closed, except for the dining room




the American Hotel: closed for a while, trying to capture now the b&b market




Inside the American: remembering the glory of the Springs


Ed’s family residence here is vast. Several rambling houses, each more than 100 years old, with wrap around porches on some and more rooms than I could keep track of. On summer week-ends here, the rooms were full of cousins, aunts, uncles.


But eventually, the fortunes of this vacation village declined. Sharon Springs still drew Holocaust survivors here after World War II, but in time, the hotels faced a dwindling tourist base. And, too, the custom of building large family vacation homes for all those sons, daughters, cousins diminished in popularity, as cousins, sons and daughters and their children and grandchildren embraced a new freedom of movement, choosing instead to vary their travels: to warm climates, overseas, anywhere. Sadly, the old homes of grandparents and great grandparents stand mostly empty now.





One of the family buildings here, however, is still used by Ed’s cousins and the caretaker opens it up for us as we pull in late in the evening.





A shame the other houses are so neglected, the caretaker mutters. They were once so beautiful. But, no one wants to come to Sharon Springs. Not much to do here. It’s no Cooperstown (!). No work here, either. People drive to Albany (fifty miles away) to find jobs.

The waitress at the restaurant where we wait for our pizza is young.
You like it here in Sharon Springs?
It’s my mother’s restaurant. I’m just helping her out. But all my friends have moved away. Just today I found out that my best friend is moving to Texas! Texas! I cried for two hours!
So you think you’ll stay here, with your mom?
Uh-uh. I’m finishing up some school work. I’m thinking of moving to Florida. My brother’s there.


Earlier in the day, Ed and I work through eighteen crates of family belongings, stuck in storage in Brewster, just outside NYC. Neither he nor I are big keepers of stuff and to sort and segregate family belongings is enough to make you want to run home and throw the last of your own junk away.

The supervisor at the moving and storage company is patient with us. Occasionally I go to his office room to warm up. I lean against the door for a few minutes and study the numerous commemorative army photos from Vietnam and Iraq. The man also likes guns and I am half tempted to look through some of the gun magazines piled on top of his cabinet. On the wall he has a poster announcing his strong feelings for Jane Fonda (kill the bitch) and for Woodstock (the only Woodstock that I recognize is my rifle). He goes in and out of the office, giving orders on which crates to bring from where and we go through another, and another (looking for boxes with tiny green stickers on them). My hands are dark with the dust from another life.

In one crate, I find several boxes of family photos and I spend some time looking through these. Ed doesn’t have photos at home and the people I’ve heard about in the years that I have known him have been faceless for me for a long, long time. Don’t you want to take some home? They’re not mine. He answers briefly and continues methodically opening boxes, and packing them up again.



It’s cold now up here, in Sharon Springs. (Our work in Brewster is done and we’re here for several days to take stock of the place.) I think the growing season is close to that in Madison. Maybe even a week behind. A far cry from the Carolinas, or even DC. The caretaker shows us where to turn on the heat. I wander through the rooms – twin beds in most of them, as if a family with a dozen kids once lived here.

Tomorrow, I say to Ed. We’ll explore the other, more neglected houses tomorrow.
I used to walk down to the general store and buy a paper. He tells me as we spread out our sleeping bags. I remember plates of corn on the cob and fresh string beans from the garden...

passing through

We are in DC for less than a day. With a long drive ahead of us on Sunday, we shouldn’t linger.

But we do. It’s a sunny, warm Sunday, a holiday for families. If beaches are at their best when empty, DC is best when the vast green common spaces are filled with families.

Ed and I leave an apartment full of still sleeping people, pick up a latte at a café (where, too, people watching is completely satisfying...)





…and proceed toward the Mall.

At the Museum of American History, he gets lost in the exhibits. It is at once sweet and frustrating to be with him in these places. The classic cereal box reader should not be let loose in rooms full of informational tableaus. But I find that of all the museums here, this one is such a perfect match to what’s outside. Washington is the one city in America that, in my mind, wears its past openly, at every turn. A tumultuous past, sad and thrilling, all in one fell swoop. And so I am again looking at meticulously put together exhibits that churn through communities, inventions, presidents, inaugurations – like packed pages of a thick, bold, colorful magazine.


Outside, the day is equally dazzling. We do a shortened stroll past my favorites – up the hill with the Washington Monument, down to the Monument to the Second World War, and finally, along the Reflecting Pool toward Mr Lincoln. All the while watching Mother’s Day unfold on this magnificent spring day.






















We meet my daughter and her visiting friends for brunch – a late, long, wonderful brunch which cannot end because when it does, Ed and I have to find our truck, pack it up and head north.

One more minute, just one more story from across the table, one more bite, a swallow, a glance her way…





… and off we go. Six hours later, we unload in Danbury, Connecticut. We’re here for just one night, so that we can go back to Brewster and look through Ed’s family’s storage unit again. The old truck is holding up well. It’s time to load it up and slowly meander back toward the Midwest.

from the Outer Banks: the last laugh

We wake up to someone cranking his van outside our motel door. Motel life. I’d forgotten the quirky bits and pieces of it. [I actually love our place on Hatteras Island (Cape Pines Motel). But you have to give up on the idea that a room should have a view. The best views are toward a tiny swimming pool. Our window looks out on the power station. And of course, on the nose of our pick up truck. But, oh, is this place a bargain! And is it ever clean! But it's the location that really pushes it to the top of the heap for me. Here, at Cape Pines, you feel the pace of island life.]

More noise. Ed asks if it’s raining. I look outside.
No… I think you’re hearing the wind.

It’s the wind alright. Positively howling by the time we’re up and moving.

It’s our last day, not even a full day, and I want to go up to the top of the Hatteras lighthouse. Tallest in the country! No. Too windy. The National Park Service staff is insistent. You have no idea how much stronger the winds are up there!

I believe them. They are forceful enough even at the base. You could push a plane into the air with this kind of a gust.

We're satisfied to poke around at the visitors' center. We watch a mom take a group photo of high school kids on a field trip. How many photos were framed over the decades in front of this candy striped tower? Will these kids look quaintly clothed to their grandchildren, thumbing through an album fifty years from now?





I suggest we hike to the elbow bend of Hatteras Island. I read that it's the most south-eastern tip of the country. A funny characterization. Not southern enough, not eastern enough, but put them together and you have a winner!

We step out on the beach and we are hit by sand. Needles stinging every exposed part of your body. The day is slightly hazy, I admit it, but I swear you can see the movement of air as the wind pushes sand back into the water. Who is the powerful one now -- the ocean, or this blast of air that makes us look down to avoid a direct hit? Today, the wind has the last laugh. Even the birds appear to be struggling against its force.










We’re at the truckers’ entrance to the water. The fishermen are here, even though, I’m told, the fish aren’t biting today.











And because it’s the week-end, their families are here as well.





But we can’t hike down to the bend. The beach has been closed off just there. The National Park Service has determined that there are reasons to keep people out of the southeastern most tip of the country. It’s breeding time for a number of birds. Sea turtles, too. We're awed by these natural habitats. We're intruders. We turn around and head back to our truck.

We can hike down a path to the cape and bypass the protected beach area – I say to Ed.
The path isn’t hard to find, but at its end we encounter the same closures. Ah well. You could say that here, just at the edge of the beach, I am standing at the southeastern most part of the US. Bur for where the turtles and birds mate and reproduce.





Again we retreat. The birds and animals watch us leave.






The warm wind and moist air make us feel clammy and hot. Ed is more than ready for a swim. But I resist. It’s as if there’s too much to watch out here on this, the most beautiful beach on the continent. No, not people watch. Even on the week-end, the place is nearly empty. But the blowing sand, the movement of gulls, the dazzling waters of the Atlantic – they all grab my attention. As Ed plunges in grinning with pleasure, I stay satisfied with letting the waves crash against my legs, washing off the layer of fine sand.

Again the birds watch our antics and retreat if we move too close to their space.





And now we feel truly satisfied. We are done for now. The Outer Banks aren’t discoverable, really, not by people who breeze in and out like we do. Yet, in just four days, the islands have presented us with wildly different images of what it’s like to wake up to a spring morning here. We've tasted so much! Brilliant sunshine, stormy clouds, gentle breezes, gusty winds – we’ve had them all. Time to head north.






We leave Hatteras Island late in the afternoon. Our drive takes us past Kitty Hawk (still on the NC Outer Banks, but further north) and Ed suggests a quick stop at the memorial to the Wright Brothers, who launched the first heavier than air powered plane from here in 1903.

The monument is beautiful – perched high on a sand dune (stabilized by local grasses), much like the sand dune that was here a century back. I watch a boy run up to get a closer look.





The brothers came here from Ohio because the Outer Banks offered all that they needed for their experiment: a good wind, a soft, sandy base and vast open space. And as they launched their successful flight, a local photographer caught the moment.





There is a replica of the plane here. Indeed, you can stand behind it and put yourself back in time, camera poised, pushing your windblown hair off your face, waiting to see if this time, the plane will stay airborne...

Ed wants to study the exhibits inside the visitors' center. But I nudge him to hurry. We have a long drive ahead of us. And we have yet to eat a meal today. Still, we are the last to leave. As the guard gets ready to close the door after us, I ask him – why did one of the Wright brothers die so young? Typhoid. He ate some contaminated seafood. But not here. Further north.

We drive on as the sun sets somewhere toward the Midwest. We stop only for a minute -- to
pick up some fruit at a roadside market (becasue, of course, Saturday is market day!).






Five hours later, we're in Washington DC. We grab a late night pizza at a favorite U Street eatery and crash at my daughter’s home for the night. Happy Mother’s Day indeed! Now if only my youngest one wasn’t so far away!

from the Outer Banks of North Carolina: the ocean and us

Sometimes, here on Hatteras Island, I think – we get it. The ocean is powerful. We are mere grains of sand. It can move a village in a day. It takes us years to build one. Yes, mere crystals of sand.

Other times, I think we don’t want to remember. The ocean is our toy. We work hard year round. We come to its shores to release all those tensions. Water is cool. This is our playground.

On the Outer Banks, the further north you get, the more of a playground feel there is to the islands.

On the southern end of Hatteras, where we are, you don’t see it as much. People fish, sure. Trucks with fishing rods stuck to the nose are as common as SUVs are in America's suburbs. At the coffee shop, the salesclerk talks about going out to fish that afternoon. The weather is warm, sticky even. The winds have died down. Good fishing day. But this isn’t merely play. It’s a way of life.





Ed and I head up north a little ways, because that’s where the rentals are. He had wanted to take out a Windrider (a trimaran) – to try it out for possible future use. But the boat got sold and so we were left to check out the just opening rental shops that are putting out their windsurfers and the occasional Hobie Cat for the summer people.

In the village of Salvo, we find a Hobie Cat, ready for sailing. Or, at least, this little person is ready to let us take her out.





But her dad comes in and tells us the boat is spoken for, at least for the next couple of hours. Come back at 3. In the meantime, you can hang out at the Atlantic beach, just at the pier. You're lucky, you know. It's been too windy. This is the first day that I'm launching the Cat.

This baffles me. Ed worries about too little wind. The island person worries about too much.
You want your boat to come back. Ed tells me. Too much wind for him is too dangerous.


We find the pier alright. But it charges a dollar for a walk and ten for a fishing afternoon and so, after watching someone nail a tail to a post, we move on.





Salvo has many, many holiday rentals. All built on stilts so that the mad stormy waters can take their anger out on the sands and leave the structure alone. In the Midwest, we hide from storms below ground. Here, they run away by building up.





Every property has a for rent sign and many have a for sale sign. The prices are steep and the bragging is bloated. “Ocean view” – for any place that shows even a speck of water, no matter how obstructed.

The sands are forever shifting here and the beach is slowly taking over the first row of homes. Instead of shoveling snow, you shovel sand off your driveway.





Sand. Everywhere there is sand. The breeze kicks it up. The humidity is high today. The sand sticks to you. Inside the houses, they must surely have given up. Sand in the bedroom, sand in the kitchen.





Too close! What price for that water view? So that the homes will someday look like this forest that once stood here defiantly?





We walk for several miles up the beach and back again. The wind is picking up again and the surfers are out. Here’s a water enthusiast, sitting at a spot where civilization and oceanfront collide.





The water pushes forward, moving, crashing. Bringing to shore fantastic large shells -- a conch, the pearly oyster. I leave them behind. I’m not a collector. Besides, these look beautiful here, on the beach, where the water gently washes their form again and again.













On the other side of Highway 12, the sound side, the water is calmer and here is where scores of windsurfers come to play in the wind. I tell Ed he should do this. Someday. Next time? For now, we are happy to go off in the catamaran. We are not above playing in the sea. We are summer people.





The wind is perfect. In Brittany, where we last sailed together, the puffs of wind made the boat go from a crawl to a gallop (can you tell that I’m basically a landlubber?) in just seconds. Here, the speed is consistent and the sail sets well the entire time we are out. The water is so warm that I let my feet soak as we zip around the buoys marking traps for crabs (I'm guessing here). We lose our bearings briefly, then find our markings on the shore again. Out from the water, land appears very insignificant.

Ed never stops grinning.


We bring the boat in and Ed pauses to chat to the owner. They winter down in Costa Rica and rent boats here in the summer. They have been doing this for 23 years.
If business gets better, I’d like to split the year half and half (they home school their girl to make this work).
How is it so far this year?
Too early to tell.

Oh, the ever optimistic islanders! They think and work in ways that we can only pretend to grasp.

I know that Ed would like to swim, but I’m hungry and so we put off more water play until the next morning. We head back to the Captain’s Table and we eat our last dinner here. North Carolina clam chowder (it’s a clear broth), a glass of North Carolina wine, North Carolina shrimp and North Carolina crab cakes.









On Saturday we think we should pack up and head north. We did all that we set out to do here. Maybe it's time to get moving. Maybe.