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Montauk, New York
I can claim the dreamer from the dream
One advantage of over documenting your travels is that, with a little research, you can quickly go back to answer your own questions. For example this trip was a rare solo overnight road trip, but exactly how rare? First some qualifiers. I have flown (and even taken Amtrak) to rental car road trips, sometimes covering long distances like Denver to Las Vegas, or one day epic driving adventures in places like North Dakota or the 3C + D (+ T) corridor in Ohio (I added Toledo). And the word "solo" in my original question was also doing some heavy lifting- meaning that I wasn’t counting driving my father to Maine in 2021 or going with family to Arlington National Cemetery last year. So, with that out of the way, I had to go all the way back to August 2011 and an overnight drive up to MASS MOCA for my last solo overnight trip. And to go even further back, the last time I drove by myself up to Maine was way back in September 2001. So that’s makes this my third solo road trip in fourteen years. During those fourteen years, I took 268 different overnight trips (I counted), so looking at the stats, that's just under 99 percent flying/rail trips versus just about 1 percent solo road trips. That’s not all that frequent when you think about it.
This previous lack of driving trips really is at the root of this slideshow. There are places to see nearby, many too close to justify a flight and too far for a day driving trip, all places that I just hadn’t been to before. And that starts right here at Montauk.
My road trip started with an after work drive to an overnight stay at a casino right off the LIE in the middle of Long Island, perhaps the most Lawn Guyland place on earth, although to be fair, I might say that about anywhere on the island where some drunk women were really into singing along to “American Pie.” From there it was only two or three more hours to the very end of the south fork and Montauk Lighthouse.
This is the lighthouse, where (as long as you pay admission) they let you walk right up and stare face to face with the light part of the lighthouse. If the clouds (or the sea) seem somewhat ominous in the pictures, there was nothing to worry about that day other than some on and off drizzle. It was all part of an extremely stubborn coastal storm that taunted me for most of this trip, something I’d experience first hand later.
I had a packed day, and in the middle of that packed day I had just enough time to see Longhouse Reserve, a garden with sculptures as opposed to a sculpture garden. My time was limited and I almost skipped it altogether, fearing it wouldn’t be as nice as it ended up being. Of course I was totally wrong about that, I could easily have spent twice as much time as I ended up spending there and I imagine it would be a focus for whenever the next time I decide to voluntarily drive all that way out to the very end of Long Island.
One of the reasons that my time at Longhouse Reserve got crunched was that the lighthouse opened up at 10:30am and my tour here at the Pollock-Krasner House started at 2 pm with a 1:45 pm check in. And as much as I enjoyed the Longhouse Reserve, the Pollock-Krasner house was at a completely other level.
The Pollock of the Pollock-Krasner House is Jackson Pollock, and the tour guide- one of Jackson Pollock’s cousins- was one of the best tour guides I ever had. He also had something amazing to show us. You may have noticed the floor in the previous picture, which is Pollock’s studio where he painted most of his most famous paintings. After his death, his wife Lee Krasner (also a well known artist) took over the studio but, after deciding she wanted a fresh floor, she covered it with masonite panels. After her death they were surprised to see the 1956 floor intact, with splattered paint everywhere (Polllock painted on the floor) and you can even identify where he painted specific paintings due to the colors and splatter style. Today they let visitors wear booties and walk anywhere they want. As a Pollock fan, it’s a pretty awesome experience and definitely a shrine worth visiting.
The tour is more than just the studio, even if the studio is (by far) the real highlight of the tour. Also included is the somewhat modest house, which was left (or possibly restored) to be exactly as it was way back then. The books on the bookshelves were theirs, the records and record player were theirs, and even the phone number is still the same. I guess it’s comforting to think that in the unlikely case a time traveling Peggy Guggenheim shows up from the past that when she tries to give Pollock a call at least she’ll get to talk to a docent who knows who she is.
I wasn’t done with the art, and after a 13 mile 45 minute long drive (driving out there is an exercise in patience), I found myself at Herzog and de Meuron’s wonderful Parrish Art Museum, which still looks great after all these years and pound for pound may be their best building.
I had to make sacrifices, and one of them was missing the big duck, or, to be more specific, missing the inside of the big duck. By the time I got to Flanders after all those stops and all that traffic, the duck was already closed. Maybe next time I can go inside (it’s a gift shop) and just like almost every gift shop I ever visit, I’ll leave without actually buying anything.
I left Long Island the best way possible, on a ferry to Connecticut that thankfully avoided driving more on the island- although the north fork driving experience was far, far better than the other more popular south fork. The car ferry (from Orient Point to New London) was ok, even though it made me think of Billy Joel’s Downeaster Alexa as we were cruising through Block Island Sound (there are giants out there in the canyons, and a good captain can’t fall asleep). I also ended up thinking of The Wolf of Wall Street, because that offshore storm definitely ended up producing some noticeable chop. It was nothing like the chop in the movie, although sometimes as the boat shifted significantly in unexpected directions, it was just enough chop to make you think about it.
