Summertime
Bernard Quetchenbach
August. Rochester, New York. Another day of haze, temperature in the 90s—the twelfth time this year (The average is nine, six when I was growing up). At Ontario Beach Park, the pier stirs the smell of decaying algae into the calm, dark opacity of the open lake. No shelf of dried scum like there was a few decades ago, just a gently pulsing green soup. Bulldozers prod seaweed into dripping heaps. Caspian terns wheel while ring-billed gulls plow the shallows, picking at zebra mussels. No sign of the West Nile virus or the avian botulism working its way over from Lake Erie. In short, summer as it is now, in the 21st century.
Well, today the beach is open, the bacteria count having dipped to acceptable levels. I walk back through the elegant 1939 bathhouse. The county is showing movies on Saturday nights, a bright banner slung bravely across the main entrance announces (though a looming fiscal crisis threatens to close all of the county parks most of the week). Across Beach Avenue, an endless construction project has been reconstituting the beach parking lot as, apparently, a beach parking lot, but fancy enough to suit the hypothetical new waterfront, the centerpiece of which is the proposed ferry across the lake to Toronto.
There was a ferry at one time, reaching into my mother’s memory, a “working boat” bringing both merchandise and passengers between a then much glitzier Charlotte (sha-LOT) waterfront and Cobourg, Ontario, 60 miles east of a then much smaller Toronto. Now, Rochester is adrift in the long-term doldrums of the rustbelt, with a slightly upscale, “light industry” twist. Toronto, of course, has bloomed into Canada’s modern metropolis, complete with major league sports and more than two million people. A beautiful city, to be sure, clean, modern yet interesting, pedestrian-dominated—“friendly, familiar, foreign, and near” as the Ontario tourism boosters used to have it. And Rochester, ah, well, that’s the rub. There is, in short, not a blessed reason on God’s green Earth why anyone but a desperado (and most of those would be going the other way) would pay for the boatride from Toronto to Rochester, beyond cussed curiosity or a frustrated nautical impulse.
When I was in college, my friend Charlie and I envisioned—purely for fun—a similar project. Because our ship was imaginary, we had considerable leeway in solving this problem. Still, the best plan we could come up with was to Shanghai unsuspecting Canadians and force them to visit our fair city, presumably charging to take them home. Of course, our boat was not, and was never intended to be, real. But the current plans (the ferry godmother?), along with the movies, the open beach, the endless revitalization project, are—what? An act of faith? Faith in the resilience of the blighted world, or in our own ability to come to our senses. Faith in change that is really more like flux, a return to past glory, another round on the historic carousel packed with merrymakers, Canadians this time. Progress, grinding inexorably in its tired old snake-oiled track, taking on all comers with the same old answers. The devil we know. (During the spring of 2004, after this essay was written, the "fast ferry" across Lake Ontario was finally launched. The business failed within a few months, and the city of Rochester is now attempting to operate the service itself.)
On the way back to the apartment that my parents have rented for the last 20 years, I’m cruising in the big red 1989 Pontiac Bonneville bomb they bought used when their sensible Taurus could no longer be sustained with duct tape patches. The tape covered ordinary rust and the not so ordinary mysterious disintegration that leaves rings of corruption like bedsores on the roofs and hoods of Rochester cars. The Taurus’s failure, however, was mostly internal. I’m working the radio, exploring the steering-wheel-mounted controls, one of the features that the folks make a point never to use. But there’s nothing worth listening to, the NPR station on pledge break and everywhere else a wasteland of irrelevant, repetitive local news (ah, yes, the county is still broke) and equally repetitive right-wing commentary. Finally, out of ideas and having rounded the dial more than once, I hear an old song just interesting enough to listen to under the circumstances. When the song ends, the station proudly announces itself as none other than WBBF, the hoary Top 40 (once Top 20) station from my youth, before I was sophisticated enough to move on to the “album rock” of WCMF in high school. WBBF was typical of its ilk, with loud DJs who marketed themselves as local celebrities (one, Jerry Fogel, later a TV sitcom actor, even styled himself an “emperor” and urged his many fans to send for a publicity package including buttons featuring a photo of his majesty in vaguely Napoleonic pre-Sergeant Pepper getup). And the music—everything from bubble gum to British Invasion to Motown, a cross-section of mid-60s popular songs, each under four minutes long. And now, well, I confess that the song that has arrested my aimless radio scanning is the Strawberry Alarm Clock’s “Incense and Peppermints” undoubtedly introduced in the same frenetic style as it would have been in 1967. At least right now, WBBF is playing the same songs it did when I was a kid, which strikes me as some sort of revelation. Of course, there is a difference: The station is no longer considered “Top 40” but has matured into the “Classic Oldies” genre that has become as ubiquitous as country or right-wing talk all over America, zeroing in on that great baby-booming mass that still secretly wants it to be the 60s.
I don’t mean the die-hard hippies who seem to think that, with a little luck, it might still be the 60s, at least in small isolated places (though there were a few of them, complete with flowing gray David Crosby locks, ambling out the pier, as I was, on a Monday morning, but probably without the precautionary sunscreen). They, it seems to me, have already rejected an unrecognizable present. I’m talking about my fellow beachgoers, the drivers of most of these other cars, conscious of their luck at having the day off, the mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers taking the children to swim in the overheated, bacteria-nurturing waters of Lake Ontario, just as we swam in the equally dangerous water of our youth 30, 40 years ago. People who need the world, including its changes, to be the same world it’s always been.
And that means, of course, everyone, or at least everyone who reaches what might be called the “age of nostalgia,” which is probably currently somewhere in the forties. Thus, the “good old days.” And I suppose I’m well on my way to assuming my place as a classic old grump, grumbling about the changes in the world and bemoaning all of the things that only people my age care about and remember, like, say, weather or evergreen forests or New England autumn colors or the streets of New Orleans or—Well, this is a problem then, isn’t it? These are not things like bellbottom jeans or even the Beatles, though we tend to mix them all together in our middle-aged muddles, these people listening to the Zombies or The 1910 Fruitgum Company or The Supremes on WBBF while driving to and from the beach with the air temperature at 92 and the lake temperature pushing 80 and the bulldozers carting loads of algae in and out of the water, slimy green wakes trailing after them.
We need the world to continue to be the world, whatever that means to each of us. Yet we also need to change the world. And this is not just an inspirational slogan aimed at boosting ourselves up the socioeconomic ladder or even toward some admirable incremental goal like eliminating poverty from a neighborhood or extending the vote to a disenfranchised minority. No one to save with the world in a grave. We need, it seems, to replace an entire culture and we can’t even complete the renovation of a parking lot.
Later, in the relative cool of evening, I walk out from my parents’ apartment complex, overpriced and growing slightly shabby from the neglect of the tired-out management, toward our old house, where I lived between the ages of four and 20, where, therefore, I grew up. It seems a little like the scene near the end of My Ántonia when Jim Burden returns to Black Hawk and wanders around looking for a town that existed years before, finding new and vaguely hostile people in all his old haunts. Progress. Here, though, Jim Burden notwithstanding, not much has really changed. The neighborhood is pure 1950s-60s suburban-tract Americana. Most of the streets were laid out by a single builder, Alfonso DiNardo. Certain architectural features, the slightly jutting upper story, the recessed front doorway and underslung garage, repeat in various combinations all along Alfonso Drive, Laura (DiNardo) Drive and Sharon (DiNardo) Drive. Our house, for some reason, was not a DiNardo house. Perhaps it predated DiNardo by a handful of years. This was always a source of pride. We were different. Our house was a very very very fine house. If it was really as cookie-cutter as the others, at least the cutter pattern was from a different set. In our own minds, our house provided the same kind of distinction as the fact that my father didn’t work at Kodak.
I’ve spent the last five days listening to the neighborhood, its sounds and overheard conversations—talk of families, jobs, the weather. Does my voice have that flattened a, that occasional rasping rise? Do I sound like that? Well, I don’t think that I’m the same as everyone else. But I am like my Rochester friends who sound like, who are like, everyone else here. When I’m going to the lake, I say “downt the lake” like everyone else. My nonrochestarian wife and son say they can always tell when I’m talking on the phone to someone from Rochester. So this is me, then, reflected in the mirrored sunglasses of the shirtless car washers and the wading pool supervisors and the bike riding adolescents I pass along my way. I think of my current home in Lakeland, Florida, in a neighborhood about as much like this one as the differences in local culture and geography afford. I’m beginning to suspect that something in the life we grow up with—call it the tone or the atmosphere (color would be a good word if not for the unintended racial connotations that lurk inevitably in any mid-20th-century suburban context)—exerts an inexorable and mostly unconscious pull on those of us scattered across the country, living the pointless diaspora of the post-World War II “mobile society.” Three thousand miles I roam, Otis Redding whistles from across the continent, just to make this dock my home. Or this tentacled crossroads collection of chain stores, convenience gas stations, franchise restaurants. And there we are again, stuck to the velcro of the familiar in a world that desperately needs change.
Of course, things are not what they were. The world does turn, something that, in the 60s, was considered a source of hope. There’s a whole generation, with a new explanation, after all. Nothing like that, as it turns out. The wars and oil companies that seemed already to be inevitably falling before the onslaught of the Age of Aquarius are still with us. The changes that are manifest are not the kind to put a mind at ease.
At Braddock’s Bay, a new boardwalk leads through tall cattails to an observation deck, where if I perch on the railing I can look over the reeds out into the open water at a family of mute swans—European transplants, aggressive harassers of native waterfowl—with four cygnets, resting placid on a bar. Farther off, a less successful pair serenely lead a single cygnet against the backdrop wall of cattails. Cormorants—native but relatively new here—hunch against the large barkless snag that marks the bay’s mouth. A quick resonant plunkle close at hand reveals a large fish, hopefully not one of the fierce seven-foot predators rumor has it are currently invading the lake—more likely a carp, another Old World transplant, the most common large fish in the shallows. A purple martin swings over. A green heron cuts the thick air. Still the haze, but here, in the cover of the deep green reeds, past the droughty yellow of Braddock Bay Park’s picnic table grass, it seems cooler, bearable, normal.
Not that normal’s necessarily good. The Great Lakes haven’t been really normal in my lifetime, and in some ways, are as healthy now as they’ve been. In 1998, according to a United States Geological Survey press release, several deepwater sculpins were caught by scientists, the first on the American side since the 1940s. And there’s even some room for optimism concerning lake trout, which seem to be breeding in the lake after years of failed reintroductions. Last year, I saw a fisherman catch several smallmouth bass from the Ontario Beach Park pier, although bass may be newly threatened by the appearance of the exotic round goby, an egg-eater. I remember the bass—black bass in the local parlance—but the trout have been missing from the lake since before my time. They have no place in my memory of Lake Ontario.
In their article “The Rise of the Double-Crested Cormorant on the Great Lakes: Winning the War Against Contaminants,” Canadian researchers D.V. Weseloh and B. Collier trace the early 20th century eastward expansion of cormorants from the Lake of the Woods to Lake Superior and beyond. But soon after the birds arrived on Lake Ontario in the 1930s, DDT and other toxins virtually wiped them out. So cormorants have little claim on the memory of my grandparents’ generation, my parents’ generation (lake dwellers all, at least seasonally) or my own. I know them now as common, widespread waterbirds I see almost every day, but I still find them exotic, thinking first of pictures of Chinese fishing birds in grade-school social studies texts. I remember as a near-eidetic image the first one I saw, in typical wing-drying posture on a buoy in the lower Penobscot River in Maine in 1968, when I was 13. Since the late 70s, responding to reduced DDT and PCB contamination, cormorants on the Great Lakes have recovered so dramatically that they are now sometimes seen as nuisances. Perhaps their immigrant status has contributed to their unpopularity on the lakes, where newcomers—zebra mussels, round gobies—are generally bad news. Cormorants are easy to blame when the fishing goes bad; in July 1998 Lake Ontario’s major breeding colony on Little Galloo Island was ransacked by xenophobic marauders who shot 800 adult and fledgling birds, leaving nestlings to starve.
I’m not one to pretend that everything’s okay. The “good old days”?—eutrophication, DDT, suburbs spilling into the wetlands to the vapid strains of bubble-gum pop. There’s still something important out in the lake, down in the secret passages through marshes where I paddled adolescent canoes. But I can’t stay here. Here might not even be able to stay here.
Recent Great Lakes water levels—at least in the upper lakes which are less manipulated and thus better reflect the overall water supply in the basin—have been unusually low, as John G. Mitchell notes in the September 2002 issue of National Geographic. Since Mitchell's article was published, lake levels have risen somewhat as drought conditions have eased, but the upper lakes remain well below their historic averages. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, any attempt to force constant water levels onto the lakes’ poorly understood hydrologic fluctuations leads to environmental disenfranchisement of one sort or another. Newly distanced from the beach, resorts may go broke, but shorebirds are having banner seasons on extended mudflats. Bad is good. Unfortunately, good is also bad. A combination of warmer winters and the easy pickings provided by all those millions of zebra mussels has brought unheard of numbers of scaup—greater and lesser—into the lower lakes (Erie and Ontario) in recent winters. But these ducks are experiencing an overall decline in numbers and, apparently, productivity. Why? A strong suspect, according to Scott Petrie and Michael W. Schumer’s “Waterfowl Responses to Zebra Mussels on the Lower Great Lakes” included in the August 2002 issue of Birding, is selenium and other toxins that zebra mussels are especially adept at concentrating. Good is bad. If the earth continues to heat up, lake levels could be altered permanently, and if that happens, all bets are off. Except of course, for those of high, dry beach hotels on the sands of Lake Michigan, where the results are serious and predictable. The cause of the current low water level is a series of hot dry summers and mild dry winters, exactly what climate change is predicted to bring to the basin. Maybe we should believe we’re on the eve of destruction.
A few winters back, Rochester enjoyed a year with virtually no snow cover. This was the cause of much thankful conversation. No shoveling, no boots, and little use for heavy coats. But the joy was thin, covering an uneasy knowledge that winter is, after all, part of this world, that, minus the boots and scarves, it isn’t the same place. On the phone, my parents recalled snow peering through living room windows and the year the lake froze. Without admitting it, maybe without knowing it, there were, I’m guessing, a lot of people harboring secret wishes that the next year would feature high drifts and a shelf of solid surface ice reaching far out toward Canada.
I haven’t been to Rochester much during the winter in recent years. My work schedule generally leaves summer as the most open, as well as the most convenient, time for me to travel. But once I was able to fly in for a few days at Christmas, and I remember seeing a golf course—still green—as the plane circled in to land. For people for whom winter has traditionally been long and hard, there is a certain pleasure in such things. As long as they don’t happen all the time, which, it seems, they might. And then there’s August.
We know that climate change threatens winter. This is logical enough. But summer also has something to lose. Summertime. Long hot (but not so very hot) days by the lakeshore, the water well, not clean, but better than it was, sure, and so cool. Black terns skim along the shore. Ospreys will be back, only a matter of time, since DDT has just been banned. And so much time. Out of school, lying back with the transistor radio, WBBF tossing out “Day Tripper” and “The Kids Are Alright” along with harmless fluff like “Incense and Peppermints,” as lampreys sail in on the St. Lawrence Seaway, waterfront houses pop up faster than cattails around Long Pond, the war in Vietnam inches across the years toward my 18th birthday. But for now, sings Janis, the living is easy.
Returning to the source offers a chance to “Be whole again beyond confusion,” Robert Frost says in "Directive," one of his last major poems. But it isn’t the same. It can never be the same. Time passes, our children’s world is not our own. We have what we’ve made, and not so much of what made us. We’ll have to live with it. But let’s not get too comfortable when we sink into our climate-controlled cars and bury ourselves in the “classics” on the way downt the lake, our trusty DEET in the glove compartment, for the beachfront showing of—what should it be—To Sir With Love? Woodstock? The kids are alright? Why would they be? Are we?
While we brush off the uniforms of Emperor Jerry Fogel’s army, the kids are deliberately scratching the vinyl we guarded from stray fingernails and bad needles. One way or another, time, it would appear, is most definitely not on our side. At least the movie won’t get rained out; not even the radio holds any hope for an evening storm to break the heat. We’ll have to get ice cream at Abbott’s, still the best; there’ll be a long line. The temperature’s rising and the juke box is blowing a fuse. The Strawberry Alarm Clock is ringing.