A Summer Foray
Last week we met up with our dear friends Mike and Donna at the Jalama Beach County Park, about an hour from here, and we went into the Jalama Beach Store and Grill, of local lore. Owned and operated by Don Eittreim and his family since 1978, it sells chips and chowder, candy and camping supplies, soda and beer and even boxes of Hostess “Donettes”…tiny yellow donuts iced with chocolate. Most famously, of course, there is the legendary Jalama Burger, and we each ordered one of those because, well, when in Rome…right? The burger, nestled between buns replete with lettuce, onions, and so-called secret sauce, formed a high stack on a paper plate, and we felt pretty good about it. It was cool and foggy at the coast, and it seemed a perfect day for indulging in grease and frivolity. Donna even ordered a cold can of beer, and we settled in to enjoy the lunch and ambiance.
The soundtrack was pop music from decades past (the kind you wish they hadn’t played because now it’s in your ear all day) and people of all ages, newly unmasked, were lining up in their swim suits and coverups to buy whatever they deemed necessary to make their beach or campground parties complete. The walls were adorned with yellowed newspaper clippings about local folks and long-ago shipwrecks, and on a shelf above our table there stood a fierce stuffed bobcat ready to pounce and a wizened old fox, the work of some taxidermist in ancient times, frankly creepy but somehow fitting. It’s a quirky, retro, unpretentious place, earnest and unexpectedly happy, and it reminded me of a camp store in the mountains or some county park on Long Island.
However, what was most evocative to me were the smells, as smells tend to be. It smelled like a teenage summer in there, that’s for sure, and suddenly I was remembering Lake Ronkonkoma, a body of water I hadn’t thought about in decades. Long Island’s largest and deepest lake, it was formed by retreating glaciers, a kettle lake, so deep it was often described as bottomless. This fact did not deter the crowds who perceived it as a recreational area, and I too went along on more than one occasion, an early case of FOMO, I suppose. In those days it was about seeing one’s peers, and I probably had a crush on some male of the species. The boys used to think that throwing girls into the bottomless lake was a cute form of flirting, but I couldn’t swim, and I can still recall the terror I felt when some aspiring young he-man scooped me up and carried me, screaming, to its edge. But I digress, and this is what smells do. First, they immerse you in the moment, then grab you and take you away. You are abruptly deposited somewhere in your past, which you briefly re-experience with stunning clarity.
And here we were at the Jalama Beach Store, the air filled with the aromas of frying onions and hamburger and salty air and damp wetsuits and cloying sweets and carbonated drinks and suntan lotion, while people padded in and out on sandy flip-flops, and the music was the hits you might have heard on the car radio on your way to nothing that would ever live up to your expectations but you didn’t know it yet.