The Power and the Glory

Hermine tracked by wunderground.com

Hermine was stagnated off the Northeast. Tropical storm warnings had been issued from Virginia to New England; at the very least erosion and riptides lay in the offing. However on Sunday of the Labor Day week the sun was shining in the town of East Hampton. In fact, contrary to some earlier reports the weather was particularly gorgeous. Nevertheless residents of the resort community lined up on Main Beach occupying benches and tables in front of the gray shingled snack bar famous for its freshly baked chocolate chip cookies and clam chowder to watch the rising waters. The onlookers gazed out with the serenity that derives from watching an increasingly angry sea. It was the kind of scene that merited the talents of a nineteenth century painter like Thomas Eakins who captured the community of emotion surrounding emblematic events. Thomas Struth who photographs museum goers looking at paintings might also have made something of the mesmerizing effect the churning tides were having on the assembled crowd. At one point the iconic white lifeguard's chair was shifted from its normally secure position and a gaggle of strong young bodies immediately raced out onto the sands, turning the cumbersome structure on its side, then effortlessly portaging it further inland as if it were an aluminum canoe. Going to the beach is generally a selfish pursuit aimed at satisfying the "oceanic feeling." However, what was going on Sunday morning on Main Beach was a little closer to worshippers reciting the Lord's Prayer, a mile or two down the road at St. Luke's Episcopal Church. People were experiencing the kind of awe that’s manifest when nature’s power and glory are imminent.

Connecticut River Valley Journal II: Return of the Secaucus 7

 Thomas Eakins, albumen photograph; Hallie Cohen, digital photograph 

John Sayles’s Return of the Secaucus 7 is a nostalgic look back at a group of sixties radicals. There’s a wonderful skinny-dipping scene that takes place at a swimming hole and recalls the famous Eakins painting The Swimming Hole (1885), a work that also integrates the notion of primal innocence. The luddite radicals that Sayles depicted sought a kind of innocence that had been stolen by the world of conglomerates and military industrial complexes. Both the Sayles film and the Eakins painting hearken back to the self-conscious pursuit of something like Eden, which by definition has been disappearing from the world ever since Eve ate the forbidden fruit. Can such consciousness and innocence coexist? If you are ever passing through the town of Norwich, Vermont, in the Connecticut River valley, go north on Route 5 for about a mile, then ask one of the locals where the local swimming hole is. You will come upon a setting that seems lost in time. A raft sits in the middle of a pond and parents and their children dive off the dock and swim in the icy water. The light is dappled through the trees, and despite the occasional scream when a body first touches the water, there’s a silence that makes you feel as if you’ve fallen down a worm hole—it’s your own Secaucus Seven or Swimming Hole, in which the pressing world outside is temporarily held at bay.