(HOST) During the holidays, commentator Ted Levin took a trip to visit his childhood home, and here’s how he says it looked – from thirty five thousand feet.
(LEVIN) Seen from my seat on the southbound jet, Long Island stretched below: the sweet salt air; the greenbelts hemmed by malls and office buildings that passed quickly into endless rows of houses; Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean, with their attendant islands, deepwater harbors, and bays. It awakened ghostly images of the Long Island landscape of my youth.
From the air, Long Island looked like a long, narrow fish, perhaps a mackerel, what we called “mossbunker,” swimming southwest. This is not an original observation. Walt Whitman stated it first, and in my fourth-grade local history studies, the point was driven home that Long Island is fish-shaped. On a map this fishiness is quite apparent. From a plane window, seeing it was a personal triumph.
Along the north and south shores, two terminal moraines left by the glaciers rise from the sea. These are long, low ranges of hills formed by unconsolidated boulders, gravel, sand and clay – bits of Vermont and its neighbors, actually – and they provide Long Island with its only topographical relief. Twenty thousand years of erosion and deposition have filled in the south shore, adding a wide, sandy outwash plain.
I grew up on that outwash plain, thirty-five miles from Manhattan; four miles from the ocean, where, one sunny September day, I saw more than ten thousand flickers and five thousand hawks pass my sand dune perch.
Another day I estimated one hundred thousand tree swallows in one boiling flock. Each fall, monarch butterflies fluttered above the outer beaches en route to Mexico, as well as red and hoary bats, whose flights petered out by dawn.
I grew up there, four miles from where fish schools measured by the acre traveled unseen beneath the gray chop, and sea turtles as big as compact cars stranded themselves on the beach.
I grew up there, four miles from salt marshes where horseshoe crabs and diamondback terrapins came ashore to lay eggs in the sand. On the way to Jones Beach I could smell the marshland, like a seafood store with a gas leak.
I grew up there, four miles from all that wondrous life, and not once did I visit the beach on a school field trip. The closest I got was in second grade, when Mrs. Roweworth took us to the pet shop to buy guppies for the classroom fishbowl. If we had continued another half mile south, we would have reached the threshold of the Great South Bay.
I pressed my face to the plane window to watch Jones Beach and Fire Island run below me, wild and fragile, in long, thin, luminous streaks bound by gray water.
From my seat on the jet, Long Island raced below me, the remnants of wildness and memory — the pernicious press of suburban growth.
When Thomas Wolfe wrote, “You can never go home again,” he may well have spoken those words directly to me, for down there the salt sea breeze caressed an increasingly alien landscape.
Ted Levin is a writer and photographer and winner of the 2004 Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing.