I discovered the fountain of my youth today. I had gone painting with my friends Anthony and Jane at the tidal marsh inside of Caumsett State Park on Lloyd Neck, Long Island, NY. It only took about an hour to get my painting to where I wanted it to be and, as Anthony and Jane were still working on theirs, I decided to take a walk.

I grabbed my water bottle and started to follow a path that headed west. After only a few minutes I found myself thinking back on the last summer vacation I took with my parents and younger sister to Cape Cod. The house we stayed at was out on a spit of land that was a couple of miles down a sandy road from a small town. I was in my late teens and was heavily involved in my first “relationship” with a girl who’d promised to “write to me every day that I was away”. So I faithfully, and with great anticipation, walked to the post office every day in hopes of the promised correspondence. Innocence, as you shall see becomes a central theme of this journey.

The air was quite warm and the sun had come out, but the most outstanding feature of the day was the sky. Mammoth white summer day cumulous clouds were boiling up over Long Island Sound. They were not the kind of clouds you get to see every day: so white they cast a bright reflection on the Sound and so low that an innocent young boy might have felt he could jump up and just swat the bottoms of these giants with his fingertips. I confess that this no longer quite so innocent adult considered making this irrational attempt.

At some point the sandy path was replaced by a rough-hewn timber walk as the surrounding area lowered to meet the marsh. I thought they looked like telephone poles that had been milled from round to square. All I could smell was the heavy scent of creosote and my mind drifted further back into my past, and the dock at Fair Harbor on Fire Island, which was of a similar construction and smell. When I was even younger my family used to vacation there over the last two weeks in August. A young boy filled with innocence and wonder could spend entire days swimming, fishing, exploring, and flying kites at the ocean. I would leave our rented house first thing in the morning and not see my family until it got dark. I still feel that I lived like Tom Sawyer over those two weeks. No adventure was left unexplored. The same innocent boy could also have his first summer romance: a kiss and timid sexual experience on that same beach in later years. In hindsight, the inevitable move away from the innocence.

A rabbit darted out of the brush along the side of the path and hopped away from me, stopped and turned to look at me as I slowly approached. He let me get to within a couple of feet of him before I stopped and we stared at each other. He did not seem to fear me. Perhaps I appeared to him not as a middle-aged man who has lived better than half of his time but a young boy filled with innocence. The Alice in Wonderland connection only occurs to me now. Did I follow him down the rabbit hole?

The sand replaced the timber walk and the path was lined with flowering cactus. The marsh approached the path and I stopped to admire a large number of fiddler crabs working busily along the shore. How often does the less than innocent adult stop to take the time to simply watch nature do what nature does? It will never again escape me that, as a landscape painter, I am blessed that this is part of my job. Observe and portray, observe and portray.

The path ended at a salt-water pond that is accessed by an inlet still ahead of me. The spit of land I have been walking on is narrowing, my journey is coming to an end and I sense some imminent climax. I turned to my right and walked, my legs tickled by the tips of the dune grass, toward the Sound. I went up over a small rise and down to the beach. It had been too many years since I had taken off my shoes and socks to walk the beach and I was immediately reminded of just how hot the sand can get! As if by some final trial, some act of contrition for my abandoned innocence, I tried my best to bear the pain of walking on the rocky beach. There is only another fifty yards to the end. To my left is a rope, which keeps people out of a federally protected Piping Plover nesting area. It suddenly appears that the beach is getting up and moving toward the sea as scores of the Plover, whose slate gray color is the perfect camouflage to blend with the rocky shore, scatter in front of me.

I reach the end and stand barefoot and ankle deep in the water, like a participant in some old time Baptist baptism in the Deep South, waiting to have my sins washed away. I look in every direction and feel as if I have returned to some time before my innocence escaped me. I feel myself sinking, losing height, as the receding waves take the sand out from under me. I wonder if I am getting shorter, if my hair is reverting from its “school of hard knocks” gray to the dark brown of my youth. The wind blows, the clouds tower in surreal columns and every color is clear and vibrant and I am finally emotionally overcome. All that comes to my mind is forgiveness, forgiveness of others and myself. I feel rinsed, cleansed, and for just that moment, innocent.

But then an adult thought occurs to me. Anthony and Jane must be waiting and it is time for me to be getting back and, as if on cue, my cell phone rings and a cloud moves to block the sun.