Bay View Pines may have been what was termed a working-class neighborhood once upon a time, but good luck with that characterization now. Still, it was a neighborhood, meaning a place where you could walk or jog without taking your life in your hands, as we do here in Noyac with the Audis and Range Rovers speeding to tee times.
It was a place where kids could ride bikes free and unfettered, as we Gen Xers did in the 1970s, and as you don’t dare do here along the major rushing artery that shoulderless Noyac Road has become.
Not to sound ungrateful, but, economic difficulties for us mere mortals aside, it’s hard to fully appreciate an area where a trek to the bay, let alone across your own front lawn, comes with a risk of illness by tick. In Bay View Pines, though, it was a straight shot down Long Neck Boulevard past houses appropriately sized on their small lots to a sandy beach on Flanders Bay.
I once met a retired mail carrier who years after the fact could still rattle off the side streets in alphabetical order as you head that way. Ours was King, north of June and south of Laurel. It was quiet, safe for play. Our children, little at the time, would take their sock monkeys outside to watch a group they called “the Basketball Kids” gather at a curbside hoop for a shoot-around.
But nothing’s ever that simple. While all this was on the positive side of the ledger, to which you could add the cute two-bedroom house solidly built in the 1950s and, yes, “affordability,” on the other side was the school district. And if you don’t go all in for quality, thinking that kids will find their way regardless, that they just need to be sure to go to the library and watch PBS documentaries, then that makes you something of a nature-over-nurture determinist, does it not?
We became nomads. We started renting in Quogue so the kids could attend the school there, then moved within that village, then moved again.
What was it Chrissie Hynde sang? Something is lost, something is found.