Oak Beach and Dreams of Another Time and Age

I remember my great-grandfather's house on Oak Beach like it was yesterday.

The deep, dark-paneled wood walls. 

The ancient whaling harpoons over his fireplace mantel, setting my vivid imagination afire and making me believe he had been like Captain Ahab on the high seas, spearing massive whales from the bow of some imaginary wooden ship, salt spray in his face.

The warm, embracing scent of his ever-burning pipe, putting one at ease, in sharp contrast with the often unwelcomed smell of cigarette smoke one seemed to find everywhere 40 years ago or so. This old man's smoke made one feel at home again.

The great, hulking antique ship's lanterns like the eyes of sentinels as you walked in from the sandy dunes... the sharp sting of sea grass as it scraped your bare legs when you raced barefoot along the wooden-slat walkways.

The art studio with mountains of rolled up tubes of paints and paint brushes by the arm load inserted in every imaginable jar, decanter or old beer stein... the paintings of ancient ships at sea or drawings and sketches of people I did not have time to inquire about and whom I did not know... the large, five-gallon buckets of loose pocket change filled to the brim and running my hands through piles of Indian Head pennies and Buffalo nickels as if time stood still here and these were a king's riches.

This was a child's paradise... for any boy who had been raised on tales of cowboys and Indians and soldiers and navy battles and whose entire life up until those moments in time had been punctuated with utterances and whisperings of of valor and stories of Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle and yet... asking questions was not permitted.

But I had so many and at each turn, down each hallway, past each flintlock pistol hung upon wooden pegs on the wall, the questions rose in my heart and mind as if I was reading a living, breathing book and is if this man, my great-grandfather, was like some long forgotten King nestled amid the dunes along the sea, biding his time in a sort of museum-like sanctuary, a perpetual caretaker of all things cool.

If I had been asked if I'd like to move in and live there I would not have hesitated to say yes. If one could create a place where one of every single item that interests a small, inquisitive, tow-headed bow about the world of men, and place those items one on top of each other in an organized way reminiscent of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Harvard, then this was the place.

The endless, ancient hardcover books lined up like so many treasure maps leading to the world's answers were enough to see in and of themselves ... had that been all there was to see and smell and touch... the antique green-glass netted mooring buoys dangling above... the black and white and sepia-toned framed photographs of movie stars and fancy-looking folk, sailors and sports icons, all served to create a whirlwind of imagery in one's eager, absorbing and impressionable mind that has lasted a lifetime and at times I've wondered to myself if the impact of this place has not in fact replicated itself in who I am and in the home I live in and where I live.

Yet this ancient old pipe-smoking man of the sea, with the perfectly groomed graying goatee and freckled, bespectacled face and deeply freckled arms and hands, seemed fearful of this wildly inquisitive, inability to remain silent boy. And, as in any museum or similar place, or in this case, a museum-like home, one would not be inappropriate to be fearful of small, racing wildly untamed boys.

If you could take every boyhood fantasy and imaginary moment and suddenly thrust them all into one setting, imagine the sensory overload a child would experience and thus, so it was with this old man's house.

To me he was a king. An admiral. A war medal-chested, pipe-smoking bard of tales I had yet to hear but wanted so desperately to hear, but never got the chance to.

And I have spent my life haunted, but not in a dark way, by his visage, as if like the shadow in Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan and The Journey to Ixtlan, this old man of the sea is peering always over my shoulder, watching my life pass by and grow and develop and wondering always what he would think about this or that or the other thing.

For most of us, our good childhood memories become embellished with time, the tales always a scant bit greater when told again and again.

But for this old, bearded man, in his rare case, and in his unique and incredible lifetime, those tales could not for one sentence be embellished or in any language articulate the often heroic and even grandiose truth of his life and its accomplishments, reflected in every knotty, pine panel of his museum-like home nestled amid the white sand dunes and choppy waters of the Great South Bay.

Everett Walsh (1903-1976) had once been called in a Long Island newspaper story "that great South Bay skipper," and in no way had this statement been feigned, unwarranted or off-the-mark.

And if one day that time inevitably comes when Castaneda's proverbial shadow taps me on the shoulder, I can only hope that it is his and we can sit down and, without simultaneous and mutual fear and awe, ask the questions left long ago by the sea and for so long intertwined in the dreams of a once small boy.