Beneath the Surface of the Long Island Sound: How a (Once-hated) Body of Water Gave My Novel Depth

I. The Seventies

At age eleven, years away from reading The Great Gatsby, I associate the Long Island Sound not with the glamorous Jazz Age parties at its shore or the green light of Daisy Buchanan’s dock, but with these three things:

- Beginners, the level of Instructional Swim at Camp Pine Tree from which I will never in four summers graduate. Among the requirements for moving up to Advanced Beginners is swimming the crawl to a counselor while keeping oneself parallel to shore. “Crawl,” alas, turns out to be an apt name for my rendition of this stroke, as I end up beached, sand scraping into my bathing suit and hands and knees, the tide pushing me to shore as I stroke (flail) and kick (splash) with my eyes squeezed shut against the burn of brackish water.

- Jellyfish, the supposedly “harmless” type known as Moons that look and feel like congealed Vaseline when I’m fishing them out of my bathing suit and hair (along with several pounds of sand) after beaching myself.

- “Creeping Crud,” a parasite/fungus/rash/myth that counselors at Camp Pine Tree swear campers will catch if they do not shower thoroughly after Instructional Swim–whether or not there is hot water and whether or not someone has stolen my Suave Green Apple shampoo. Though I never actually observe anyone afflicted with Crud, I am certain of its existence, convinced it will turn me into a leper should I not adequately scrub the Sound off me.

Because after summer number four I stop going to sleepaway camp (instead attempting to learn to swim at day camps with clean, still pools–where I still don’t pass Beginners), and because my home is not near the Sound, I don’t think about it for years. Until…

II. The Eighties

When I read The Great Gatsby in high school, I don’t recognize the Long Island Sound that Fitzgerald describes. Fitzgerald’s Sound is safe, still, even “stagnant in the heat,” a small boat “crawling slowly” across it. Gatsby’s guests swim in it at night and dive into it from his dock during the day, none of them plagued by jellyfish or errant tides.

It is a romantic place, a site of longing, a body of water across which Gatsby stares at the green light on Daisy’s dock. It is a place for contemplation; Nick Carraway sits on its shore after Gatsby’s death, looking out at it and thinking about metaphorical currents–not real ones that drag sand into bathing suits–that keep us from escaping our pasts.

I decide I must have misremembered something. Maybe everything. Nobody in Gatsby catches Crud.

III. The Nineties

Years after high school, having read Gatsby several more times, I find myself working as a teacher on the North Shore of Long Island, the setting for Fitzgerald’s novel. I give little thought at all to The Sound, though it’s right there. It is but backdrop–the place where land is not. From the window of a car or a waterfront restaurant, it is scenery. Crud-less scenery. From a window, it looks still.

IV. The Aughts

I am living three thousand miles away from the Sound when I decide to set a novel on its shore, in a fictional third “Egg” that Fitzgerald hadn’t mentioned. Because the Sound is backdrop for my characters, as it was for me a decade earlier, I’m only concerned with what it looks like from shore. My characters sit near it, talk near it, look out at it. It is like scenery in an elementary school play. I decide the problem–the flatness–comes from not having seen it for myself for so long.

To remedy this, during a trip east, I take my camera (and my then-two-year-old daughter) to The Sound, convinced that if I can just describe the view better, the sense of place in those scenes will come alive. As I’m shooting photos of the water and gulls landing on pilings, and views, my daughter keeps bending to touch things washed up onto the sand: leaves of bright green seaweed, tufts of something maroon that looks like hair, mussel shells, a horseshoe crab carapace.

Which is when I realize I’m taking pictures of the wrong things. I’ve been writing about the wrong Sound. This Sound beaches things. This Sound contains an entire world I know nothing about.

When I begin researching it, I learn that there are indeed currents and tides. I learn that it’s an estuary–a place teeming with life, an intersection of salt water and fresh. For the first time since I was eleven, I think about what is beneath this water’s surface.

I change scenes to let my characters interact with The Sound instead of just look at it. I let it nearly drown one of them. And finally, it graduates from backdrop to symbol: like many of the characters in my novel, its surface belies what exists below.

(P.S. — In case you were wondering, my research turns up nothing about Crud. Nothing.)

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Bio: Tanya Egan Gibson is the author of How to Buy a Love of Reading (May 2009 – Dutton), a novel about a nouveau riche parents who address their teenage daughter’s professed hatred of books (and the possibility that their community thinks their family “anti-intellectual”) by commissioning a book to be written just for her, moving its author into their mansion, and dubbing themselves “the Medicis of Long Island.” Tanya lives with her husband and two young children in the San Francisco Bay Area. She would love you to visit her website, http://www.howtobuyaloveofreading.com/, and share a story about how reading changed–or even saved–your life.