On the Open Road
Katie Lee Joel
During the summer, my husband, Bill, and I like to spend time in the Hamptons. By August, the crowds overtake our peaceful escape and we find our stress levels climbing. Last year, after a particularly crowded weekend, we needed a getaway from our getaway. We tossed around a couple of ideas: Rhode Island, or perhaps Maine? But we didn’t really want to go through the ordeal of packing and traveling. Bill finally came up with the perfect suggestion – a motorcycle day trip to show me the North Fork of Long Island for the first time.
Bill is what you’d call a true motorcycle aficionado. He loves to ride and spend most of his free time in the garage, tinkering with his collection, polishing the engines, and redesigning the body work. I, on the other hand, what you would call a “scaredy-cat” when it comes to motorcycles. I’ve been a passenger a few times, but I usually prefer a spin around the block to any long-distance cruising. So I was, you might say, filled with trepidation at the prospect of spending an entire day on a bike. But Bill persuaded me to be adventurous… and it did sound romantic.
For our trip, he chose his 1999 Kawasaki Drifter; he’s dressed it out with skirts (motorcycle lingo for valances on the fenders) to look like the much-vaunted 1940s-era motorcycles manufactured by Indian. I hopped on the back and we set off for the Shelter Island Ferry, with me white-knuckling it all the way. From Shelter Island, we took the North Ferry to Greenport, which looks like an image lifted from a postcard of New England, not the Long Island fishing village it is.
As we cruised out of Greenport, the bike and my surroundings made me feel as though I had entered a time machine and stepped back to the 1940s. Suddenly, I was Carole Lombard with my arms wrapped around Clark Gable. My fears lifted as I inhaled the sweet smell of lavender drifting from a field bursting with the lovely plant, and felt the wind whipping around my body. We passed rows and rows of sunflowers, farm stands boasting roasted corn and fresh baked berry pies, and old-fashioned motels with names like the Blue Dolphin and the Shady Lady. The homes were mostly colonial cedar shake or old Victorians.
I had the feeling we were in Small Town USA. As we drove through Southold, I saw a banner advertising the town ice cream social; in New Suffolk there was the bright red New Suffolk School House, not to mention the harbor that hosted the first successful launch of a submarine. In Nassau Point we passed a house that was briefly home to Albert Einstein, and the place where he wrote his famous letter to FDR – the letter that outlined Germany’s plans to develop the atomic bomb. Bill, a life-long resident of the Island, told me this was the Long Island he remembered from his childhood.
In Mattituck we stopped to walk through town on Love Lane. We had coffee on the front porch of Patti B’s, sampled the cheese at the Village Cheese Shop, and browsed provincial antiques at La Ferme de la Mer. We rode back toward Greenport, decided to go on to East Marion, and then took in the water view from Orient.
Later, as we boarded the ferry, I knew that we were leaving our time capsule. When we returned to the Hamptons, I had a sense of sadness, but also of hope – a hope that we can preserve our farmlands and small towns, not allowing them to be overtaken by commercial development and factory farming. It is important to take a break from the sometimes-frenetic pace of modern-day life and take a glimpse of the way life used to be. We have much to learn from our past.