Letter from Georgica: the very private pleasures of history
At cocktail time during the week for a good part of the year a group of people with connections to the Hamptons meet at one end of the Tiger Bar at the Princeton Club of New York. Appropriately, it is the east end of the bar. The gathering is usually not deliberate, just people who know one another stopping by for a drink. One evening, Pam Blackman, who lives in the Hamptons and is on the program committee, suggested the club should do something to celebrate the 350th anniversary of East Hampton.
Pam asked me to give a talk on East Hampton history, and being an amateur historian in search of credentials, I of course said yes. While the club is decidedly not the university, speaking there appealed to my academic wannabe side, the part of me that dreams of being a scholar. We decided to combine my talk with our “Best Tables in Town” lecture series (which I chair), so I asked Jeff Salaway of Nick & Toni’s to speak about the phenomenon of that restaurant, to be followed by a dinner based on the Nick & Toni’s menu prepared by Georges Zidi, the club chef. It all takes place on June 4th.
The current issue of Club Notes came in the mail and there’s an awful lot written about Nick & Toni’s and celebrities and the rich and famous, and it urges us to make our reservations for the evening. It suggests in passing: “before dinner come listen to a bit of history”. It does not mention my name. Oh, well. We all know what draws, even in the Ivy League. Maybe I should get out of this history riff into something a bit more glammy.
There is a certain irony in our celebrating 350 years of history at a time when East Hampton and the Hamptons in general are in the media for being so au courant, so full of today’s news or, frequently, gossip. I think it’s good for us to look back now and then and put our lives in some perspective. All this history is there not just for the old local families. (All families are innately old, aren’t they? It’s just that some have moved less than others.) History belongs to all of us who take the time to read and observe, and it rewards us with a special sort of pleasure.
I found such a reward on a cool, sunny day recently while exploring the area around Northwest Harbor. It was striking in its beauty. The many wild dogwoods (more there than any other place I know) were in peak bloom, the dazzling white blossoms in sharp contrast to the surrounding oaks and feathery white pines. From 1663 on, a small port and village prospered here. Whale oil and bone came from offshore whalers in Mecox and Sagaponack via Merchant’s Path and were shipped to Connecticut and other colonial settlements, and locally bred horses were exported to the West Indies. On return trips, timber and cider were received from the colonies, and sugar, rum and molasses from the Caribbean. The port gradually declined after trade shifted to the Long Wharf in Sag Harbor in the late eighteenth century, and the community disappeared by the end of the nineteenth century.
I stopped at Buffalo Wallow, an unspoiled tract of wetlands and brush, close to where the Northwest schoolhouse had once stood. The name dates back to when a herd of buffalo belonging to one of the Gardiner family used to graze and stay cool here during the summers. It seemed deserted and silent at first, but I did not feel at all alone. When I listened, there was the buzz of nature, not noisy, not intrusive, but not silence. In my mind’s eye I saw the buffalo wallowing. I saw enormous happy beasts shambling along, having a bang-up time in the salt meadow and marshes. History, behaving like an adroit and wise lover, had given me a sublime moment.