Relay

Carissa Katz

Central Pennsylvania is nothing like the South Fork.

The first time I visited here, it was on a side trip to Montauk from my grandmother's house in Merrick. We slept in our Volkswagen camper at Montauk Point and Hither Hills. It was the longest time I had ever spent at "the shore," as my friends in Pennsylvania called it, and I loved it.

I got a Lighthouse T-shirt and planned to show it off to my landlocked classmates at home as I told them stories about my exotic weekend at the beach.

So, when the clutch broke on the Volkswagen and we had to stay in Montauk all week waiting for the part, I couldn't have been happier. "Do you think you could live in Montauk?" my parents hinted. I didn't pick up on the clues.

The clutch was fixed, we went back home, and some months later they dropped the bomb.

We were moving. To Long Island. Wasn't I happy?

I was devastated and recall crying for most of the day and every time they so much as mentioned it. I pleaded with them to change their minds, asking how they could possibly do this to me. No tactic went untried. Visiting was one thing, but moving! We wouldn't have any friends! What about the house? And the dog? The school year wasn't even over! I could move in with family friends and visit Mom and Dad for a few weeks in the summer and on holidays. I would take a job so we could stay in Pennsylvania. I'd be old enough to live alone soon, and could watch the house and dog while my parents got this Long Island thing out of their system. Lots of people would look out for me!

All pleas were useless and in 1981 we moved into a house in Springs, leaving our dog, Cosmo, with neighbors and closing up the Woodward house. I believed there was a chance we'd be back.

Moving to "the Hamptons" from Amish country is sort of surreal. One day you're watching the horses-and-buggies pull up to the local post office/general store and getting your milk by the gallon jar from the dairy farm, the next you're counting Rolls- Royces and ogling the gourmet baked goods in Dean and DeLuca.

It felt like we were in a movie. Something foreign. My family and I were the only main characters and everyone else, strangers still, was an extra. Things seemed to shimmer more.

I was a cultural outcast at school. Before coming here, I'd never heard of Izod, or seen a mansion, or had a friend with an in-ground pool. I didn't even know what soccer was!

In Pennsylvania, we'd talk about seeing Michael Landon or Blondie at the Millheim I.G.A., but it was altogether different from the very real possibility of bumping into Paul and Linda McCartney at the East Hampton A&P.

"This isn't the real country," I'd tell new friends at school. I started to fantasize about running away to the mountains and living in a hollowed-out tree like the main character in "My Side of the Mountain," which Mrs. Finger, the school librarian, was reading to my class when I arrived in Springs.

I found my way into this new world by exploring, slowly getting to know what was what and who was who. I'd spot an interesting area from the school bus and ask my mom to take me there after school.

Very soon, we discovered the joys of the estate area. It was enough some afternoons to drive around streets like Lily Pond Lane and Further Lane just gawking. Look at that big one! Imagine having a driveway like that! Whose feet do you think those were? Paul McCartney's?

It kept us busy, but at the time, I still would have taken a farm in Pennsylvania over an estate on the ocean, any day.

When friends came to visit from the old country, we'd treat them to the same drive-by tours. We had memorized details of certain houses, heard stories about the inhabitants of others, and in the process become rather skilled as tour guides.

At first I imagined living in the very biggest houses and inviting the friends I'd left behind to live with me. We'd paint every room a different color and breed unicorns in the backyard. And, of course, there'd be a habitable tree house in one of the stately elms on the property.

In reality, it was the tree house that interested me most, or the guest house. Mansions were fine, but in the end, they weren't really for me. I liked the spots where size was maximized and there was something necessary in every little nook and cranny.

Before my brother was born, my parents built a wooden camper, placed it atop a 1937 Dodge flatbed truck, and drove with me from Pennsylvania to Arizona, slowly zigzagging from state to state. We called it the house truck. It was small for a house, but big for a truck, with every inch of space used to its maximum potential. It gave me a taste for small spaces.

It's been a long time now since friends have visited from Pennsylvania. I'm so used to all the estates that it takes something really astounding to make me look twice, and I drive down Lily Pond Lane like it's any old road.

What gets my attention these days are the little cottages. When I did an assignment on small houses for The Star's Home Book, I started those drive-by tours again, only this time in search of the tiny. When people were home, they usually invited me inside. I was offered cookies by one couple, invited to use the kayak at another cottage.

The assignment is over, but I find myself mildly obsessed with finding more and more of the smallest houses around. I'm driving slower, and when friends from New York visit, I go out of my way to show them the tiniest house I've located.

Carissa Katz is a reporter for The Star. Her piece on "Good Things in Small Packages" appears in the Home Book, a supplement to this issue.