Welcome back to the Lovecraft reread, in which two modern Mythos writers get girl cooties all over old Howard’s sandbox, from those who inspired him to those who were inspired in turn.
Today we’re reading Shirley Jackson’s “The Summer People,” first published in 1948 in Come Along With Me. Spoilers ahead.
“I’d hate to leave myself,” Mr. Babcock said, after deliberation, and both he and Mrs. Allison smiled. “but I never heard of anyone ever staying out at the lake after Labor Day before.”
Summary
The Allisons’ country cottage stands on a grassy hill above a lake, seven miles from the nearest town. For seventeen summers now, Janet and Robert have happily endured its primitive accommodations—well water to be pumped, no electricity, that (for the neophyte city sojourner) unspeakable outhouse—for the sake of its rustic charms. And the locals are great people! The ones they’re acquainted with, you know, the tradespeople in the town, “so solid, and so reasonable, and so honest.” Take Mr. Babcock, the grocer. He could model for a statue of Daniel Webster, not that he has Webster’s wit. Sad how the Yankee stock’s degenerated, mentally. It’s inbreeding, Robert says. That, and the bad land.
Like all the other summer people, they’ve always gone back to New York right after Labor Day. Yet every year since their children have grown, they’ve wondered why they rush. September and early October must be so beautiful in the country. Why not linger this year?
On their weekly shopping trip to town, Janet spreads the word she and Robert will be staying on at the lake. The merchants are laconically amazed, from Mr. Babcock the grocer and old Charley Walpole at the general store, from Mrs. Martin at the newspaper and sandwich shop to Mr. Hall, who sells the Allisons butter and eggs. Nobody’s stayed out to the lake past Labor Day before, they all say. Nope, Labor Day’s when they usually leave.
Not exactly an enthusiastic oh, stay as long as you like, but Yankee dourness can’t compete with the seductions of lake and grass and soft wind. The Allisons return to their cottage, well pleased with their decision.
Their satisfaction wanes over the next few days as difficulties arise. The man who delivers kerosene—Janet can’t remember his name—says he doesn’t deliver after Labor Day. Won’t get another delivery of oil himself until November. Didn’t expect anyone would be staying on at the lake, after all. The mail is getting irregular. Robert frets at how tardy their adult kids Jerry and Anne are with their weekly letters. The crank phone seems crankier than ever. And now Mr. Babcock can’t deliver groceries anymore. He’s only got a boy delivering summers. Boy’s gone back to school now. Oh, and as for butter and eggs? Mr. Hall’s gone upstate for a visit, won’t have none for you for a while.
So Robert will have to drive to town to get kerosene and groceries. But the car won’t start. His attempts to ring the filling station are fruitless, so he goes for the mail, leaving Janet to pare apples and watch for dark clouds in a serene blue sky; it’s in herself she feels the tension that precedes a thunderstorm. Robert returns with a cheerful letter from son Jerry, but the unusual number of dirty fingerprints on the envelope disturbs Janet. When Robert tries to call the filling station again, the phone’s dead.
By four in the afternoon, genuine clouds turn day dark as evening. Lightning occasionally flashes but the rain delays, as if lovingly drawing out the moments before it breaks on the cottage. Inside Janet and Robert sit close together, their faces illuminated only by lightning and the dial of a battery-powered radio they brought from New York. Its city dance band and announcers sound through the flimsy walls of the summer cottage and echo back into it, “as though the lake and the hills and the trees were returning it unwanted.”
Should they do anything? Janet wonders.
Just wait, Robert thinks. The car was tampered with, he adds. Even he could see that.
And the phone wires, Janet says. She supposes they were cut.
Robert imagines so.
The dance music segues into a news broadcast, and a rich voice tells them about events that only touch them now through the fading batteries of the radio, “almost as though they still belonged, however tenuously, to the rest of the world.”
What’s Cyclopean: This week’s language is sober and methodical, like Mr. Walpole’s package-tying.
The Degenerate Dutch: Physically Mr. Babcock could model for Daniel Webster, but mentally… it’s horrible to think how old New England Yankee stock has degenerated. Generations of inbreeding, that’s what does it.
Mythos Making: Step outside the neat boundaries of your civilized world, and you’re going to regret it. Especially in rural New England.
Libronomicon: The Allisons’ son sends a letter… unless he doesn’t. Something about it doesn’t seem… quite… right.
Madness Takes Its Toll: See above; Mrs. Allison comments rather dismissively about Mr. Babcock’s mental state. That he might not be feeling entirely cooperative with a couple of Summer People never does occur to her.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
Buy the Book
Deep Roots
First, I have a confession to make, as a now-expatriate native of a Cape Cod tourist town: this is totally what happens to people who fail to cross the Sagamore Bridge in an orderly fashion by Labor Day.
I assume so, at least. I haven’t been back for a while; I’ll have to ask my folks what everyone decided at the last town meeting.
There’s horror on both sides of the weird symbiosis/hate relationship between host community and temporary visitors. This place you visit, where half the population is people like you and the other half are trying not to lose their tempers from the other side of the overcrowded fried clams counter—what mysteries do they perform on the deserted beach after you go home? Those Summer People, wafting in from parts unknown to rearrange your world and turn all ordinary rules of conduct upside down—what secret plans and cunning arts do they practice after they return underhill?
We’re not always good at welcoming, are we? Sometimes we’re not so comfortable being welcomed, either. Even—especially—when Locals depend on Visitors’ gifts to keep their community thriving, we suspect resentment hiding behind those masks. And all too often we’re right. But the tourist/town relationship is ephemeral. Everyone involved knows it will blow away as vacation season ends—so the fear and resentment and mystery can afford to remain unspoken. Unless you’re Shirley Jackson.
Jackson’s Lake Country distills all this anxiety into a sort of inverse fairyland/Brigadoon. Stay past dawn/Labor Day, and you’ll never return to ordinary life. But this isn’t the simple narrative, either, of being forced to stay in the world where you tarried too long. Instead the town’s welcome, its services, even your ability to travel to and fro vanish out from under you. Never say you weren’t warned. And never mistake those warnings for simple Country Manners.
And then… Jackson doesn’t need to complete the circle. She doesn’t even need to provide a clear implication about what happens next. All we need to understand is that it’s bad. Worse than an Autumn without heat or cooking oil, worse than a sabotaged car or cut phone line.
In much of horror, Lovecraft included, even a short visit to a rural New England community is fraught with peril. Plan a day trip and you could get stranded in a cursed house, or be subjected to an unpleasant monologue from a cannibal who won’t shut up. A longer stay may teach you more about local genealogy than you wanted to know—or more about your own. “Summer People” is definitely more on the “gambrel” side of fearful communities than the “cyclopean” side, and heading towards the unexplored-by-Lovecraft “I guess it has a roof” end of the spectrum. Different sorts of residents, and different sorts of fear, lie behind all these diverse facades.
Different types of vulnerability, too. Lovecraft’s protagonists are often drawn by curiosity, the desire to learn what’s behind a community’s mask. Poor Mr. and Mrs. Allison, though, never even suspected there was a mask. Out of all the motivations leading to all the bad ends in all of horror, the simple desire to look out over a beautiful lake seems particularly distressing. It’s one thing if you really, really, wanted to seek out Things Man Was Not Meant To Know and copy out passages of the Necronomicon. It’s another if all you want is to join the landscape and community that you’ve come to love.
Anne’s Commentary
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Fathomless
Oh yes. Anyone who has lived in a community with a tourist-driven economy will recognize this uneasy dynamic: We need you to come and spend, and you come and spend, and so we love you. Until you realize we need you to come and spend, and expect subservient gratitude along with service. And then we hate you. The dynamic grows uneasier still in a community that depends more heavily on seasonal residents—people who own property in the community but occupy it only occasionally, when the weather’s nicest. People richer than us. People more sophisticated than us. People more important than us. People who know it, too, don’t be fooled by their condescending talk about us being the salt-of-the-earth. They don’t use salt-of-the-earth. Only the finest turquoise-flecked sea salt from Fiji is good enough for them!
It’s Otherdom based on class, on one’s place in the economic pecking order, on one’s social prestige. Factors like race and gender certainly enter into these complex equations, but they need not. I think it’s reasonably safe to assume that all the characters in Jackson’s story are white, but the Allisons dwell on a hilltop in more than the literal sense. Not only can they afford that hilltop over that lake, they can afford an apartment in New York City! Their normal lives must be awfully soft for them to enjoy roughing it in the cottage during the easy summer months! They must think themselves pretty woke for their era, not yelling at the delicate country bumpkins the way they can yell at the tough city help and allowing that they’re fine physical specimens, even if inbreeding has weakened their wits.
You know who else dwelt on a hilltop? HPL, that’s who. Back in the day, when the Phillips were quite well-to-do, thanks. That wealth didn’t endure into his adulthood, but there may be no gentility that shrinks from the lower classes with more visceral shuddering than genteel poverty. The mongrels of the Providence waterfront and Red Hook were bad, very bad. A little less so, perhaps, were the Italians on Federal Hill. But not to be let off were the indisputably Caucasian denizens of so many rural locales in Lovecraft’s fiction. I doubt he’d have joined Janet Allison in her praise of countryfolk, for he wrote: “The true epicure in the terrible esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.”
That’s from “The Picture in the House,” whose fiendish bumpkin is a carnivorous old man, or I should say anthropophagous. Dunwich hosts a fine nest of backwoods degenerates, of course, though the porous landscape around the Martense manse might harbor even worse. I’d like to suggest that when the storm breaks over Jackson’s cottage, lightning will open a fissure beneath it, and white ape-like mutants will swarm out and drag Jackson’s summer people to gnashing doom in the fetid earth of their tunnelings.
Jackson would never do that, though. However, she might allow the town merchants to ring the cottage with knives drawn, ready to filet these pesky city people for the Beast of the Lake, even as It rises swaying and ululating in strange blue-green lightning flashes.
No?
Yeah, no.
Jackson is going to let us imagine what ends this particular battle in the class wars. I think it’s going to be terrible when the radio batteries die, and the Allisons hear the concussion of heavy rain on the roof, or fists at the door, or both.
Next week, Mariana Enriquez’s “Under the Black Water” looks at what horrors really taint a river. Translated into English, you can find it in her Things We Lost in the Fire collection.
Ruthanna Emrys is the author of the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots (available July 10th, 2018). Her neo-Lovecraftian stories “The Litany of Earth” and “Those Who Watch” are available on Tor.com, along with the distinctly non-Lovecraftian “Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land” and “The Deepest Rift.” Ruthanna can frequently be found online on Twitter and Dreamwidth, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.
Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com. Her young adult Mythos novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory.
I’ve never lived in a small tourist town, but I have lived in a tourist region and a small town. Of course, Los Angeles tends to be a little more sanguine about the tourists. They have no idea how to drive in LA traffic, but otherwise don’t really stand out in the masses. And while their money’s nice, it isn’t vital to the survival of the area, so there’s less resentment.
Now, I’ve lived in a village of 800 or so people for over a dozen years (OK, it’s not isolated, the next village is only a couple of miles away and the town all the villages belong to is only about 5 miles). Everybody’s friendly and I know lots of people to say hi to from walking the dog (and that friendliness may have been the biggest adjustment for someone who grew up in big city suburbia). But I also know we got accepted a lot faster because my wife was from not too far away originally. And I know that I will always be something of an outsider. I occasionally become aware of connections between people that are not easily perceptible, and someone will know something about me that I’ve never discussed with them or someone I’ve never even seen will know my name.
Anyway, I can combine those two experiences and extrapolate a little to see both sides of this tourist/local dichotomy. The fact that this story hadn’t already been told a hundred times by 1948 shows just how little the summer people ever really think about the locals or see them as more than window dressing or staff. Welcome to Westworld.
As for what happens to the Allisons, they may softly and silently vanish away. Or perhaps they’ll be assimilated pod people/Stepford style. Move there permanently, take a place in town. After all, the kids are grown. They don’t need that big place anymore. And they’ll become just like the locals. A loss of self and class (for the sort of people for whom those two things are tightly intertwined). That may be the scariest thing of all.
And what happens if they are multi-generational summer visitors . I know a family that has been going to the same place for over 130 years. Admittedly it has got the trappings for a good horror story (or a good children’s adventure); small island only accessible by boat off the Maine coast, lighthouse, Victorian house, nearest neighbors on the next islands (the township is a cluster of islands).
My family’s never had enough money to be “Summer People.” My aunt and uncle used to take their daughters to Myrtle Beach every summer, but from what I’ve heard from year-long residents, in Myrtle Beach the resentment towards tourists tends to be limited to the mess they make of traffic and going to the grocery store. But Myrtle Beach isn’t exactly a small town.
I’ve lived in small towns all my life, apart from six years in Indianapolis, but these are the kind of small towns that are supported by coal mining, agriculture, the nearby grain processing factory (on hot days when the wind is right, the whole town smells of beer or cat food). Everyone knows everyone else’s business. Personally, I vastly preferred the anonymity of city life. Being a woman with Asperger’s Syndrome, my greatest fear used to be meeting someone I knew at the grocery store, because then I’d have to talk to them.
I’m back! *bwahaha* (I’ve still been following this read, but haven’t had time to post much, because life.)
I ADORE Shirley Jackson and this story resonates more with me now then when I first read it over a decade ago. As I believe I have posted before, I was born in Pennsylvania but grew up in New England. Then I moved to NYC over a decade ago. Last August, my partner (who spent a lot of his life in New Hampshire) and I took a weekend vacation to Old Orchard Beach in Maine. I SWEAR, it was like I had “New Yorker” tattooed across my forehead for the entire time (side note: I do NOT). We arrived at the B&B later than we’d reported because my partner got sick and we had to stop on the way to let him rest before he could safely drive again. The woman who ran the B&B was obviously upsetted about that. Then, the next day, I headed out to get some medicine for my partner (who had apparently caught a flu just before we left) and everyone I asked apparently found it kind of funny and confusing that I was looking for a pharmacy by the seashore. The nearest Walgreens was about a mile away up a terrible steep hill (and I wasn’t feeling so well myself by this point and it was about 90 degrees out) so I tried to call a cab but NOPE. No cabs, no Uber, no Lyft. I landed up hiking up that horrible hill and bringing medicine, orange juice, and water back to my partner.
The thing is, I’d BEEN to Old Orchard a bunch of times before when I lived in New England. But last year was the first time that I really had the experience of being an “outsider” there. Again, I felt like I had “I am from NYC” tattooed on my forehead or something. So I can relate to Shirley Jackson’s narrative in “The Summer People” and some of the insularity of New England towns. (Please note I’m not JUDGING anyone for that, but it can be a little off-putting and creepy.) My partner and I left at the end of the weekend (he felt much better on the way home while *I* got really sick on the way home, but what might have happened had we stayed past the end of the summer? *shiver*
I lived in the vicinity of Bar Harbor, Maine, for four off-seasons at college and then three tourist seasons as an Acadia National Park ranger. There truly seems a world of difference there between the tourist-packed summer and the winter when half of the businesses close, though I was a bit sheltered from the extremes on my college campus and my housing in the park. But I loved my job, loved assisting and informing tourists (or anyone else). I have an odd type of love-hate relationship with tourists — I love them when they’re asking me questions but get ruddy frustrated being around them when they’re not. When working at the Finger Lakes National Forest in upstate NY, it drove me up the wall to spend my workdays loney at a ranger station/visitor center where too few people knew to go, and then go hike in the nearby but much more famous Watkins Glen State Park amid lots people who didn’t know I was aching to talk with them. Now I live in my hometown of Ithaca, NY, which I adore, but right now as the local tourist season gears up (and later when new students arrive at the local colleges) I desperately wish I had a job where I could get a piece of the action. I want to walk around with a sign that says “I’M A LOCAL. ASK ME ANYTHING.”
That rant got away from me. Anyway. At the same time, in Maine, I was keenly aware that I wasn’t a real local. I wasn’t born there, I had no family there, and I kept to my other communities. I wrote a poem once about feeling isolated, like a sea urchin in a deep tidepool high on a rocky shore.
There are a lot of lakeside cottages here and throughout the Finger Lakes region, and many of them are unoccupied in winter despite being near larger towns. My family has one in Ithaca, and its thin walls make it uninhabitably cold in winter. In the warmer seasons of recent years, it’s mostly rented out to short-term tourists. Neighbors who stay in their lakehouses year-round, dealing with wind and a frozen water source and ice on the cliffs above or below them, seem hardcore.
From the mention of Mr. Hall going “upstate,” I thought this story might be set in the Catskill Mountains of southern NY. But you say it’s New England. Do other states have that upstate-downstate distinction?
At the mention of a lake, I hoped this story would feature a lake monster or three. No such luck.
@Aerona,
The lake monster is waiting its turn, just offstage
Aerona @@@@@ 5: Mrs. Allison says they’re degenerate New England stock. I suppose they could be degenerating in Upstate New York, along with the Dutch…
Stingy author. To a reader, offstage monsters are good for nothing but headcanon fodder. Now to choose from the many headcanon options…
It is always strange when American call colonial towns “ancient”. I grew up in a tourist town that was important in the middle ages and moved to another that was important in Roman times. Both aren’t really small towns (they both have a university), but the village next to the one where my parents live (down by the lake) is half empty in winter when the tourists leave the holiday houses. On an island that is a tourist destination someone who moved there decades ago is still considered new by those who have lived there for generations. When I first moved here I lived in a village that mainly consists of wine tasting restaurants.
@AeronaGreenjoy: Last summer at Old Orchard was the first time I kind of realized that I wasn’t a “real” New Englander anymore. Although, to be fair, for most of the time I lived in New England my family weren’t really considered “real” New Englanders either because we mostly come from the Lehigh Valley and are Pennsylvania Dutch (I was born in Allentown). I remember one of the students with whom I went to elementary school just north of Boston had documented relatives who came over on the Mayflower. I SWEAR, every year I was in school with her she gave a report about that and the teachers praised her to the skies! While Lovecraft is definitely very problematic for a LOT of reasons, IMHO he DID tap into some of the insularity of New Englanders who have lived there for generations (like the “Boston Brahmins”). And, from what I know of Jackson’s personal life, she wasn’t very happy living in Bennington, VT, because she also felt isolated from a long-established New England community.
(However, I live about 45 mintues by train from Orchard Beach in the Bronx, and it’s supposed to be over 90 degrees this coming weekend, so I plan to go swimming there this and check out the tide pools for crabs and fishes! (It is also a major site for horseshoe crab mating late in the summer, which I have seen, and which is kind of simultaneously cool and weird.) Orchard Beach is down the road from City Island, which is MUCH less insular than many New England beaches, despite kind of resembling a New England coastal town.)
Don’t get me wrong; I still like New England and my mom lives there, so I visit often. However, I feel as if Jackson and Lovecraft really picked up on the idea of “outsider-ness” that I’ve felt since I moved away. My mom has lived in her house for over two decades, and she is still kind of “new” in the neighbourhood. See also “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” by Jackson.
@birgit: Forgive me if I’m wrong, but are you from the U.K.? I’ve been to Scotland once and England three times. A few years ago I was in Plymouth and it really was kind of humbling to realize that so much of what I was seeing was there long before anything in the U.S. (In fact, when I talked to some of the locals, they seemed pretty amused that I grew up not too far from “Plymouth Rock” in the U.S.!) I currently live in a building that is considered “old” because it’s “pre-war” – as in, built before WWII. But travelling to England and elsewhere HAS given me a sense of age that those of us who are U.S.ians just don’t have. Maybe that’s part of the reason why the parts of the U.S. that are older than some others are so insular? (And NO, Boston will NEVER be London, no matter how hard it tries.).
@10. Orchard Beach is down the road from City Island, which is MUCH less insular than many New England beaches, despite kind of resembling a New England coastal town.
Bronxtucket! I spent much of my childhood swimming in those filthy Pelham Bay waters.
A century ago, my Framingham-born, first-generation American grandfather pooled his money with some friends and bought a cabin on a ‘great pond’ in the middle of Maine, once the field office of a lumber company. Every summer, we’d pack the car and go up to camp to rough it without electricity or plumbing for a week or two, humping jugs of spring water five miles down the dirt road. We were summer people, but we knew generations of locals, and my uncle always hosts them when they come down to the NY metro area. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve been there, but I always stock up on Moxie when I visit.
I actually work in Sleepy Hollow, formerly North Tarrytown until 1996, when the village put the name change up for a vote after the GM plant which formed the base of the economy closed. The village still hasn’t figured out whether or not it wants to embrace this two-decade old tourist-attracting identity… one occasionally runs into a ‘FOREVER NORTH TARRYTOWN’ bumper sticker. You can’t even find Headless Horseman shotglasses on the main commercial drag of the village. Nevertheless, people come- when the Sleepy Hollow TV show was new, flash mobs would come up from Manhattan, but there was nothing for them to do when they came to the village.
@jaimew: While visiting the Delaware Bay shore of New Jersey early this May, I saw horshoe crabs crawling up on the beach in ones and twos, a precursor to breeding. When I waded into the ocean, amazed at its warmth compared to the always-frigid Gulf of Maine, I found the muddy seafloor was covered with them. It will be up to 99 degrees here this weekend, too, and nearly as hot for the foreseeable future after that. I hope to swim in Cayuga Lake, and wish I could go live in it.
@AeronaGreenjoy: Sounds like we have the opposite problem. Maybe we should go together, so people will talk to you and leave me alone? ;)
@9 birgit: You know that saying, “In America, 200 years is a long time; in England, 200 miles is a long way”? There are some “ancient” things in the US, but you usually have to go out west to find them; for example, the Pueblo cliff houses in Mesa Verde in Colorado. They’re something like 800 years old, and elsewhere there are Native dwellings even older than that.
You know, it just occurred to me, I actually have been to a resort town. I went on a class trip to France back in high school, and we stayed in Biarritz for a few days. When we first arrived at our hotel, an old lady leaned out of her window a few floors up and started yelling at us (I guess we were making too much noise?). That was the only “unfriendly” experience I remember; most people seemed perfectly congenial, especially considering how poor my grasp on the French language was.
Where I grew up (the Cotswolds) there’s not one particular tourist time. We get lots in the summer, but they keep turning up even in the winter. It’s more that there’s some towns which are very much on the tourist trail (Stow, Bourton), and the other smaller places only have the odd holiday cottage, but are pretty much left alone. So we don’t have the same quiet off-season going on. (I say “we”, I’ve not lived there for 10-15 years now, but I still think of it as ‘home’, it’s funny how places leave their mark on you).
Oh Shirley Jackson! This isn’t my favorite story of hers, but I still love it. As much as I also want to imagine supernatural monsters, knowing Jackson, the Allison’s fate is more likely deprivation to the point of starvation, their gentility degraded to a threadbare remnant before they receive their oil shipment or find a passing stranger to give them a ride. They’ll then straighten themselves up, brush off the dust and return to New York. They’ll talk about going back next summer, they left those lovely dishes, after all! But maybe it sounds nicer to visit the kids, yes, and perhaps let Mrs. Allison’s sister use it this year, maybe next year too. It’s a lovely place, but June and Bob can’t afford a summer home on their own, it would be such a treat for them. The Allisons can go back next year, or the year after. There’s no rush, the summer home will be there.
That or they continue to go back each year, talking less to the locals and leaving promptly on Labor Day. Never speaking of what transpired.
I’m from Germany. Old is stone age or bronze age, everything after the middle ages is recent. If you want to build something new in the city, it is normal that you have to wait until the archeologists are done securing the remains of older buildings.
Is this stone age / bronze age village aquatic enough?
I think what makes Shirley Jackson such a genius is the way she conveys quiet horror (the opposite of torture porn horror like the Saw movies), when people discussing something safe and ordinary suddenly realize that their life is neither, and that the world they’ve taken for granted has horrible things hiding just behind the curtain.
@birgit: My partner was born in Germany and he is also kind of amused by U.S.ians calling things “old.” And that picture is gorgeous – I want to go to there!
@Kirth Girthsome: Hey, the Pelham Bay waters are a LOT cleaner now! (However, you may take this with a grain of salt, as I also go swimming at Coney Island. AND I always shower afterwards. But I grew up swimming at Hampton Beach, NH, which isn’t exactly known for its cleanliness either. As long as it’s water, I’m happy to be in it.) :P
@AeronaGreenjoy: I’ve swum in the ocean in Maine too and it is ALWAYS freezing! *shiver* My partner and his family used to go to Short Sands (York Beach) each summer and stay in a hotel run by someone they knew. But now, because of money stuff, the woman who owns that hotel rents it out on a monthly basis and doesn’t rent rooms for a weekend or a couple of days to “tourists” anymore. So we can’t really go back there. That was one place I felt more “at home” and less like one of the tourists in Jackson’s story because my partner’s family had been going there for so long. But again, I do think Jackson tapped into the insularity of New England. I’ve lived in my NYC neighbourhood for about 10 years (I think?) and my partner and I are considered “fixtures” in the building and neighbourhood. And, as I’ve said, my mom has lived in her house in New England for decades and is still “new.”
The absolute best place I’ve ever swum is off the coast of Isla Mujeres, which is a ferry ride away from Cancun. That translates to “Island of Women” and I’ve written about Mexico and Isla on this read, so I won’t repeat myself. But I’ve gone snorkeling (the Garrafon water park offers that, and one of the reasons that people settled on Isla is because it is kind of a nexus of fishes) and seen INCREDIBLE fishes, including some I can’t identify (and I once wanted to be a marine biologist), and including a barracuda. (I sort of swam into him and we looked at one another. And then we both swam away, VERY QUICKLY.)
(I can’t figure out how to post an image of the Isla beaches but trust me, they are GORGEOUS! And Lovecraft’s mixed feelings about water are interesting to me, especially because Providence IS and WAS a tourist town, and it’s hard to live in the Northeast without being near at least SOME body of water. However, if we want to get Jungian, water is often a female symbol, so…)
Maybe I’ll go to the pile dwellings museum again this summer when I visit my parents. It’s on the other side of the lake, but it’s no problem to go there as a day trip. There are no longer any full-time fishers at the lake because the water has become too clean. When it was less clean there were more fish.
@jaimew: I visited Isla Mujeres once, but the only beach I tried to swim at had heavy surf. I had an easier but brief time at Isla Contoy, and have been blessed to experience great snorkeling elsewhere in the Caribbean and one spectacular SCUBA dive in the kelp forest off the California Channel Islands. But I don’t know if or when I’ll see or feel an ocean again.
@AeronaGreenjoy: That happened to me once on Isla as well. While the waters are usually very warm, clear, and calm, if there has been a recent storm, the surf can get pretty heavy in places and you can’t see anything while snorkeling. If you go back, my advice is to head to the beaches around Punta Norte, where the Ultramar ferry from Cancun docks. I haven’t been back in several years and I understand a lot of resorts have gone up since then *SIGH*, but at least the last time I was there, those beaches were mostly public and almost always had calm waters
I am not SCUBA certified and I’d love to be; something on my “to do someday” list. And I’m sorry you can’t make it back to the ocean any time soon – do you at least live near inland water, like lakes or rivers? I remember a lake I once visited and swum in up in New Hampshire, and it was just wonderful.
Circling back around to Shirley Jackson, I think she really captured a particular kind of “insularity” I’ve only seen in New England. I’ve visited a number of “tourist” towns and many of the inhabitants are (understandably) less than friendly to seasonal tourists, I’ve experienced more veiled hostility in some of the New England tourist towns (like Old Orchard Beach) than I have elsewhere.
Yes, Ithaca is beside Cayuga Lake, in whose waters I hope to spend as much time as possible in the near future. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere that wasn’t near a major waterway.
The story I’ve read that most aspires to epitomize ‘insular New England hostility’ is The Wooden Nickel: A Novel, by my college professor William “Bill” Carpenter. Its ‘protagonist’ is a foulmouthed, foul-minded lobsterman who hates…most people in the world, including some locals, but especially tourists and summer residents. Bill was trying to create his “shadow self,” an older man like him who lives in a similar place and time but has an entirely different personality (except the dirty mind), and I’m unsure how far it strays toward caricature. But it was inspired when he was aboard a friend’s sailboat and a lobster boat with an angry pilot swooped in to deliberately side-swipe them with its wake. The book contributed to my discomfort as a temporary resident from away, though I felt some sympathy for its characters in my first tourist-inundated summer.
Once, when talking with someone at the Maine Fishermen’s Forum on a class field trip, I mentioned that I was from Ithaca, NY. He said “Is that some little town nobody’s heard of?” I thought: No, but I’m flattered that you think so.
@denise L: I’m visually impaired and tend not to recognize someone’s face unless I’ve recently seen them often, sometimes not even then if it’s in an unfamiliar context. Living in the small city where I’ve spent most of my 30-year life, this means I can scarcely go anywhere without encountering someone friendly who knows me but who I don’t recognize. Always awkward unless they know to identify themself.
@AeronaGreenjoy: I will certainly check out that novel – thank you! :)
I have never been to Ithaca, but I’ve been to Poughkeepsie more than once because my partner’s family is from upstate. I have NEVER had a good experience in Poughkeepsie. One time we got stuck there in a terrible snowstorm, and another time we got suck there after a wedding when the MetroNorth had stopped running and there were no trains going back to NYC.
However, I’ll freely admit that upstate New York and the Hudson River Valley can be really beautiful!
(Funny story about horseshoe crabs: the last time I was on Isla I took a snorkeling tour that went to Tortugranja, the turtle farm. (From what I understand, Mexico is trying very hard to preserve their sea life.) After seeing many cute baby turtles, I went back inside the aquarium. In there, a kind of not-nice guy (who, in his defence, may have been completely frustrated with tourists) was scaring some U.S.-looking female-presenting tourists with a horseshoe crab. When he kind of shoved it in my face, I said, “Oh wow – I’ve seen a lot of these where I come from.” He seemed disappoint.) :P
Also, while I am only slightly near-sighted, I think I have some degree of “face blindness” or something. There are some minor non-neurotypical things that run in my family. For example, I have trouble with the numbers 6 and 8 – if I owe you 8 dollars, I will give you 8 dollars. But if I’m writing down a number I am about as likely to write 6 as I am 8 (the only way I can explain this is that they are both “even” and close together). I also have trouble with G and J. The way I remember the difference is that my name (Jaime) begins with a J, not a G. But I sometimes have to stop and think when writing And while I KNOW who people are, I am beyond *terrible* with names. I call my students by the wrong names sometimes. That doesn’t mean I don’t know who they ARE – I just can’t always match the face with the name. I think this may be hereditary because (and I am NOT making this up) my mom has repeatedly called me by my two sisters’ and even the dog’s name! :P
I got snowbound in Poughkeepsie too! Late December 2010. My cousins had taken the train up from NYC for a family visit partway between our homes, and a blizzard confined us to our hotel for an extra night. Ithaca got hit by a deep freeze instead, and we came home to an ice-cracked water pipe.
When I encountered educators talking about horseshoe crabs at MotE Marine Lab in Florida, I too showed off that I already knew that stuff, while thinking resentfully that I wished I was the educator talking about. Eventually, elsewhere, for a while, I was.
PSA: We’re going to have a previously unanticipated break for this week, due to an unfortunate confluence of Dayjob and Health flares. We’ll be back with “Under the Black Water” next week!
I’m pretty faceblind as well–it seems to be common in fannish circles, and my whole household has it except for the three-year-old. It’s really weird when any of us get haircuts. I can report from talking with other parents, however, that calling your kids by each others’ names and the dog’s seems to be pretty universal!
Note to self: must write a story built around the terror that is meeting someone in the grocery store who clearly knows you well and expects you to recognize them.
I do not know if you need suggestions but I just ran across this.
The Elder Sister-Like One Vol. 1
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074Z6H437/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Sort of Lovecraft meets Ah! My Goddess.
Writing that reminds me of an old webcomic as well. http://owmysanity.comicgenesis.com/d/20091225.html