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.



 1985 Menu

 


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