Reflection

           I wanted to put another valuable part of me onto the page, and when I ruminated on my life thus far, my experiences at Jones Beach as a small boy stood out. I remembered so clearly the first time I ever went to the beach, from stumbling out of that red station wagon to walking on sand for the first time, to smelling the satly air, to plunging head first into the mysterious environment we call the sea...

And all the stories my Uncle Renny told, still clear in my head, made this a clear choice to reflect upon when considering how one area, more than any other, had changed my life. 

Joseph Cavera
Professor Cynthia Davidson
WRT 303 The Personal Voice
February 14, 2012

Shores of Infinity


           Many of my earliest memories are of an old, shackled house in New Jersey. In this house, everything was huge, and much was out of reach. In this small environment, however, every object was definable; the couch was a soft, fluffy seat, the cabinets were wooden and were where food was kept, and so forth. In my home, I felt defined, part of a created space; safe. One summer, earlier on in my life, all of that was blown wide open, for better or for worse.

              I was curious as a young boy, and I’m fortunate to be able to say that some of the earlier, happier times of my life have not been lost to me in their entirety. A few years into my life, I was formally introduced to my mother’s side of the family. They were arguably more sophisticated than my father’s side, and were also considerably larger in number. One year, when I was around 6 or so, my family drove me to some place that was wildly new, and crazy vast- the beach. Wobbling out of the car after a long one hour trip, I stepped down onto a wide black strip, intersected unevenly by a lot of white lines, with more cars than I could count covering the unfilled spots in between some of them. There came a distant roaring noise from beyond tall fences at the edge of the black surface, like someone had been crushing and contorting far off winds. I smelled an unusual, rousing scent, surrounding me, and growing as I followed my parents.

          Slowly, the black surface became covered with a soft, tan material, pleasant to both the touch…and to the eyes. It was hard to walk on, and, after trying to jump on it, I found it was not that painful to fall on either. The first time I ever fell, but did not cry, was that day, on the soft ground by the crystal blue fountain. “Are you all right?” my brother Robert said. “Yeah...I think so.” I replied. Pulling myself up, I felt my world change a little; no longer did I have to cry in agony every time I fell to my knees, or backwards. Proud that I learned a little more about myself, I walked on, into a long, connected row of old wooden huts.
     

       Further in, just past the area with the fountain, lay an assemblage of long vertical rows of shacks, behind a sign in red lettering which read “DISTRICT 4”. Despite my momentary accomplishment, the sense of uncertainty looming over me could not be shaken. Who were the people who lived here, in this strange place? Why were there other people like me removing, replacing, and molding the ground? What were those small, fluttering things up in the sky in the distance? And why was the low bellowing growing louder? All quandaries left me at the sight of an old, smiling man in a straw hat, tropical tee shirt and shorts, who was now waving his arms like I used to when I was trying to fly. “Uncle Renny!” I shouted excitedly, “Uncle Renny!!!” “Whoa whoa, hey kiddo. Oh, you three are gonna be able to take me down pretty soon huh?  How are ya!” he said, smiling.
       

          We walked into one of the small wooden lean-to shacks, and sat on small benches around a brown, marked up table. The shelves were full of small trinkets and items from what I could tell, even back then, was a time long before mine. He let me run over to his fridge, and grab coca-colas for my brother and sister. Sipping and savoring what was not permitted back at home, we listened to Uncle Renny talk about his time sailing with his friends in the 60’s and 70’s. He’d tell us how he dove off the top of his boat into deep waters, pulled his friend up who had fallen over the side, and taught him how to fish all over the course of a day out at sea. “Well it was a good thing God gave me the chance to drag him back into the boat,” Uncle Renny said, seeing me confused. “Well nothing makes a man trust you more than saving him, and learning, especially to fish, takes a good berth of trust, and an insurmountable deal of patience.” Trying to imagine the tale for what it was, the closest I could come to recreating his story in my mind was a choppy sequence of grayed-out scenes, based off of the few photos he had of him and his buddy sitting on one of the lower shelves of the cabana walls.

      After listening to Uncle Renny talk for a bit, we all changed into softer pairs of shorts, and began walking towards the rumbling, and the source of the strange, salty smell. I crossed the small plank path, and climbing over the dune, I felt my world grow.

     I stood there for what felt like hours. I could not look away, or look down. The new place was exciting, frightening, fascinating, enrapturing, and even impossible to define. What once was in front of me constantly moved, never the same for more than a few seconds. My father walked with me into the water. Seeing I was scared, my Dad lifted me above the dark green slosh, and after watching me pick myself up over the waves, took me further out. Letting go of my father’s hand, I fell beneath the waves, and opening my eyes, I saw a rush of green, animals scampering all around me, and then a hard rush of black. Coughing a little, I found myself on my back, washed up on the shore; afraid of what had just happened, but more curious than ever.

    I returned the following year, finding the waves to be a bit less insurmountable (though they still knocked me over), and the shore to be more friendly. Passing the decks near the cabana rows, I came across two holes, both leading underneath the decks, into the underside of the pier. One was a bit higher, and blocked by wide pieces of wood, but one smaller hole to its left was wide enough for me to pass through. I headed through the lower hole, into a long area with much light coming in from above. I had found another small world; it lacked footprints, its sand touched only by the wind. Walking underneath, I saw small shadows occasionally block the light, and returning to the outside area, I saw floating diamonds above, attached and guided by string. I watched what I learned to be kites overhead, and tried to outrun the waves along the coast. They caught up, but I did not give up, even after falling into the waves, and then into another boy’s sand castle. This year, we saw planes release small clouds of white smoke, spelling big words in the light blue sky. Seeing the light abyss reflected above the ocean before me, I, for some time, believed the sky above me to be an ocean unto itself.

For years, I used to take these trips to Jones Beach to visit my Aunt and Uncle at their cabana in District 4 of the housed area adjacent to the shore, spending hours there, digging in the sand, swimming out to the deeper part of the sea with my father, and running along the coast’s edge. I can still remember his old shack to this day, small as it was. My uncle stocked it over the course of the decades he spent there with small knick-knacks, flooding the old wooden shelves with old clocks, small cartoon figurines, and corny signs that affirmed to all walking by that we were beach bums of the most awesome caliber. Every year, we’d try to get our hands on a kite to fly out over the sea, and tie it to the castles we’d build, like it was protecting the fort. The sea that our small white and red kites flew over had grown darker, and greener. 

Whenever my uncle would speak of his times at sea, I’d picture the winds and tides, green and grey as they were then, to appear just as I saw them there, in his life. As I grew older, his stories of his time at sea and with his friends began to weave together. From the times I spent with my uncle, laughing at his old stories from years so far back I wasn’t certain I could imagine, to the days I spent with my godmother and family, running around without a care in the world, I spent a great deal of my life there, on those sands.

        Growing up on videogames, you often come to apply in-game logic to real-world experiences. In many cases of games, you can’t discover everything there is to discover in an area on your first visit, requiring you to come back later when you’ve grown in skill, or developed or discovered a new ability. I’ve always been analytical, but my ability to thoroughly process all the experiences and discover all the areas of Jones Beach was insufficient when I was a young boy.

      I’d had more memories than I could count at this sandy platform than I’ve had in nearly any other place. As with all good things though, they eventually came to an end. About a decade’s worth of summers passed before Uncle Renny was gone, and just a few years after that, my godmother passed on as well. Each time I returned to these shores, I’d find myself caught replaying various memories from the summers past, and exploring another section of the beach. I found myself again by the two sections underneath the boardwalk that had small holes in them, where some animals (deranged gulls, I’m certain) had torn through. When I was younger, I could enter the lower hole, because my body was small enough to fit through, but never the other, because part was blocked by a heavy board. Returning when I was older, I was no longer able to fit through the smaller hole, but I was strong enough to pry off the corroded, mossy plank, and explore the other underside of the pier. This section wasn’t as easy to navigate through as the other area was, as there were fewer holes for light to spill through to illuminate the way. It seemed like less people had gone this way. Unlike the last time I had been there, however, I wasn’t afraid to head deeper into the darkness. Much like the levels in games I had been so used to playing, I was rewarded for my exploration, uncovering a small, silver heart cage that had fallen through one of the holes in the planks, sitting there in the light near the end of the decks.

       A sand-swept floor, gizmo-less shelves, and bare shack walls were all that remained of the cabana years after he was gone. Just a few pictures of another family, a new group of settlers, could be seen now. Like the tides I now watched, in my recent years visiting that beach, I saw that the disappearance and reappearance of life was constant.

Coming back to this place, I saw an empty cabana, where an old man in a straw hat once sat, laughing thunderously, telling us of the life he had lived.

            The pulse produced by a life reaches into the great bay that is our world, and leaves the premise of boundless exploration in our environment. The shore that had had no breaks, and a horizon ran on without end, now became seeming finite, and measurable. Through all the science and oceanography courses I had taken over the years, I was made to understand that as vast as the open ocean was, it was measurable. Our perspective of the Earth we have been put on, like the tides which permeate and circulate throughout her, oscillate over time. What began as an immeasurable view had shrunk, with knowledge, into a large sink for biological species and matter. The deeper we dive into our world, however, the more we discover how truly endless it is. The scope of our environment is one that changes with the passage of time. What often begins as small glance into dimly-lit room expands infinitely into the ever-growing world into which we are so abruptly thrust. The longer I live, the further out to sea I’m swept, ravaged by waves of chaos and winds of change.