Unlike a number of my friends who grew up here or in similar rural settings, I have no familial history in nature, and that may be one reason that I was hit so hard when I first encountered the beauty of Cape Cod some 53 years ago. My personal roots are urban.
My father grew up in Troy, New York, his father having died in 1924 when he was 11. His mother, my grandmother, lived the rest of her life in city apartments. When I knew her she lived with her spinster sister on the top floor of a triple-decker tenement in an old section of Troy, where buckets of coal for their stove were hauled up on a pulley.
My mother grew up in Kearny, New Jersey, a small city that was part of the Newark metropolitan area. Her parents had immigrated separately to Newark in the early 1900s from Hungary and Slovenia and lived in an old wood frame house on Davis Avenue. My mother’s father ran a tin shop with two other immigrant friends, but he was a compulsive gambler and lost his interest in the business in a poker game and worked for his two former partners, whom he outlived.
For my first twelve years I lived in North Arlington, a working class suburb of Newark on the banks of the Passaic River, which then had the distinction of being one of the ten dirtiest rivers in the United States. My childhood experiences in a natural habitat were minimal: The first and only ocean beach I ever saw as a child was at Asbury Park, a resort town on the Jersey shore where I still possess a vestige of a sensory memory of being lifted by gentle swells as tall as my small shoulders.
In my childhood summers my family took occasional day trips to the lakes of northwestern New Jersey, and there were two week-long visits to northern Vermont when I was 9 and 10 when our family was invited to our landlords’ summer farmhouse in Ripton. There I swam in the gelid waters of a fast-moving mountain river that ran on the other side of the road (we were banned from the local lake because of a polio scare), and I was fascinated to discover that our hosts had live trout swimming in their stone-lined well (“They clean the stones lining the well,” they explained, “and provide easy fish dinners”).
Mostly, though, my childhood landscape was composed of pavement and brick, burning marshes, and glass-littered and oil-slicked rivers. If you’ve ever seen the opening credits of The Sopranos - those working class neighborhoods that Tony Soprano drives through? - they are literally my neighborhood – I know those buildings.
So I had little background to prepare me for what I experienced when I first came to Cape Cod in that magical summer of 1962. Its overwhelming natural beauty and sheer sensory pleasure rolled over and under and around me like otters at play, and my life changed forever. What do I make of all this? Well, if nothing else, I suppose my personal history may go to show that even someone as annealed in urban armor throughout childhood as I was may still be receptive to and be fundamentally changed by immersion in such extraordinary natural magic.
