Other times on Bertrand’s Island Dec. 28, 1985
I have almost no memory of coming to Bertrand’s Island with my family, although I’m sure I did.
My visits here came later originally with Hank, who assumed
that the aging amusement park in the middle of nowhere would be a great place
for us to pick up girls.
Hank did not fully comprehend how rural that backwater part
of the planet was and how unreceptive locals might be to the arrival of two
long-haired hippie types from the edge of Manhattan,
Our brief sojourn to local pubs filled with rednecks soon apprised
us of the circumstances but did not stop us from wandering into the amusement
park itself where we might have had a beer and hot dog before moving on to
better hunting grounds elsewhere.
Although my family had talked about the place, the fact that
it had survived as long as it had actually surprised me. All the other lakes in
the area had been taken over by invaders from Mars – those yuppie types that
spread out from New York City like locus, following newly constructed superhighways,
recking ruin as they came.
Perhaps it was the remoteness of the island. While there was
an exit off Route 80, the winding road discourage easy explorations.
I was much more familiar with amusement parks nearer to New
York such as Palisades Amusement Park, and the more distant, yet easily
accessible entertainments of places like Sea Side Heights.
The lake areas, while legendary, took greater effort to
conquer, a battalion of engineers armed with bulldozers to flatten out,
straight out, or otherwise completely disseminate anything that made those
places unique, and by ruining them, made them acceptable to the yuppie mob.
Hank had spent a lot of time in Greenwood Lake when New York
still offered drinking to 18 years old while New Jersey did not.
But this lake was different, a throwback to an era rapidly
vanishing off the planet everywhere, a kind of carnival and county fair rolled
into one, filled with families who had grown up near here or at points west.
During our first visit, Hank said the place was very old,
but didn’t know much else about it except what his father told him and that
wasn’t much.
We came later in the company of Pauly and got drunk on the
other side of the lake and arrived at the fairgrounds in that condition and
dared to drive in the bumper cars that way, Hank determined to keep bumping
Pauly’s car until Pauly got pissed and quit. A while later, we climbed the hill
behind the park into a small neighborhood of one-storied bungalow-like houses
in search of a summer house our friend Rick’s family owned and to which Pauly
had once visited (and where he currently lives with Rick after his moving out
of Passaic last summer.)
This might even have
been the reason for our going to the lake in the first place, I don’t recall.
While walking along one of the roads, a huge dog leaped out
at us from one of the driveways. Pauly and Hank both tried to jump into my arms
at the same time. I wasn’t hardly in the condition to save them since the dog
also terrified me.
Much later, we came here fairly frequently to spend summer
holiday nights with Rick, who had moved in. We sat on the patio behind the
house and looked up at the sky through his telescope. This was the first time I
ever saw Saturn and Jupiter with its moons hanging around it. I remember
thinking how it was up there all the time, that people hadn’t lied to me about
the solar system, that any of us could look up at them at any time if we had
the right place dark enough to do it.
One of the more meaningful visits came on July 4, 1982, when
after meeting with my ex-wife and my kid after nearly a decade estranged, I
brought them back to New Jersey pausing at Rick’s place for a party – which my
ex-wife found boring and a bit too intellectual, at which point, she, my
daughter, Pauly, Rick, Garrick and others made the trek to the park, much more
to the liking of my daughter who got to play games of chance, and my ex-wife
with whom we went in search of “real food,” as oppose to the healthy crap Rick
and Pauly offered.
I remember the strange sense of newness and oldness
surrounding the whole affair, this reconnection with my past as well as a past
of something that had stood here for generations before me, both doomed to fade
away, a fact I knew at the time, but still clutched as if knowing this was a
magic moment in my life I needed to hold onto and remember.
I thought of that moment this week when Pauly and I wandered
back to the park which had already closed down, the ruins of the buildings
still there along with a number of signs that Woody Allen had filmed there.
This idea of losing the past for some illusion of a better future
disturbed me deeply, and I guess always will.
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