Sitting on a heavy stone bench with a friend on a warm September day in the sunken garden at the Gardiner Brown House — the Ladies Village Improvement Society headquarters on Main Street, also still known among the stubborn as "the Bargain Box," despite the L.V.IS. 's attempts to rebrand its store under a more elegant name — she pointed to a nearby tree, a weeping elm (or camperdown) with an umbrella-shaped, drooping canopy of leaves: In her youth, she said, she and a neighborhood boy would creep under its hutlike branches to hide and do the things teenagers do when hiding in shrubbery or other darkened crawl spaces.
Nowadays, under the L.V.I.S.'s care, the skirts of this particular camperdown elm no longer extend all the way to the lawn to create a handy-dandy, igloo-shape hiding place; it's been hemmed, so to speak and to mix metaphors egregiously, at ankle-length or midi-length, making it very spiffy-looking but no longer a suitable clubhouse for ne'er-do-wells.
Do teenagers still trespass under cover of darkness onto neighbors’ property to make a private clubhouse out of the shrubbery? Maybe the bolder ones still do?
This remark reminded me of other outdoor hiding places frequented by bored adolescents in the 1980s, those years when parental supervision was so famously lax, the revolutions of the 1960s had dissolved into moral nausea, and there was little to do indoors on a black autumn night when nothing good was on HBO and you’d grown bored with the charms of the Presto air-pop popcorn maker. Mind you, I was never the teenager smoking the weed under the camperdown, but, still, I was there among the in-crowd to observe the other kids doing so.
(It’s not that I had a moral objection to pot, as we called it then, or was any less hell bound and enchanted with punk-rock dissolution than your average combat-boot-wearing fan of the Stooges; it’s that pot disagreed with me and, further, I had observed that doing drugs made many of the teenagers of my 1980s generation behave like drooling idiots. I had no intention of being a drooling idiot. My main source of pride — the anchor of my emerging sense of self — was an awareness that I had a good brain, and this gave me an aversion to any substance that might damage my powers of cognition. It was pride. So when a 14-year-old passed around a Quaalude or tab of acid, I passed it right along to the person sitting cross-legged to my left. And if you think I’m exaggerating the degeneracy of the 1980s, well, I am not.)
But there’s a spot — there was a spot — at the Nature Trail, between David’s Lane and Huntting Lane, that used to be even more popular with delinquents (heads, punkers, surfers, Dungeons and Dragons players, members of the East Hampton High School bowling team) than the camperdown. Perhaps you remember the back 40 of the Nature Trail, where there is (was?) a stout tree surrounded by a circular wooden bench, where dark-green moss softens the grass and lame ducks congregate in a back channel of the creek (the dreen?). When I was small, I had always thought of this back area of the Nature Trail as “the duck hospital,” because the sadder ducks — those with a lame webbed foot or a gimpy wing, or missing many feathers — gathered there in twos and threes, keeping themselves quietly away from the rowdy fowl who made such a noise in the open water of the main duck-feeding zone by the parking area at the front of the reserve.
This was Back in the Dayz, when you weren’t threatened with arrest if you fed white bread to the ducks, and no one freaked out that there were white Pekin ducks and hybrid birds of brown and white amongst the mallards and wood drakes, and it was always called the Nature Trail, not “the duck pond.”
Anyway, hidden under what used to be a magnificent canopy of wisteria in this back reach of the Nature Trail there was a sort of room or chamber in the undergrowth — opposite the flowing water of the “duck hospital” — where, on beds of moss and skunk cabbage, teenagers would drink beer in cans, smoke Camels and other things, and occasionally discard their underclothes. The village police were aware of this sneaky hiding spot — an outdoor clubhouse for the children of the village, in that faraway time when the village housed children year round in numbers large enough to create juvenile society — and would occasionally raid it, startling the red-eyed kids and hastening them out from the undergrowth with their flashlights.
Not to give any of you readers ideas, but I was told decades ago that certain boys of my acquaintance would travel northward from Town Pond via the underground aqueduct formed by cylindrical drainage pipes that carried water from behind Hook Mill down toward Hook Pond. I’m sure this isn’t possible any longer, and, honestly, I’m not sure how far you could actually go. I never saw this with my own eyes. Deeper into the past, and relying now on police reports in the archival pages of The East Hampton Star from the 1930s and 1940s, the children of the village in the generation before that were, while not corrupted by illegal drugs, naughtier still. When the snow came and the Chamber of Commerce bought Douglas fir trees from a tree farm in Ontario to string cheerful lights in red, blue, orange, and green beside Main Street and Newtown Lane, the cute little rascals in their knickerbockers would roam out at midnight to pull the Christmas-light bulbs from their branches and smash them on the pavement, scampering away laughing. This, apparently, was children as young as 5 and 6, putting the weed-smokers of the Motley Crue generation to shame. My dad — so he told me — once got up onto the roof of the Presbyterian Church, tied a rope to the bell, and rang it in the night, waking everyone.
People will tell you it isn’t true, but it is true: Times are tamer now. What couch potatoes and conformists we’ve all become.