The summer that just began is, inexplicably, my 21st living in New York City and soaking up the pure joy that this season brings to the Northeast. Back in 2003, near the end of my first, a group of friends and I drove out to the Catskills, found a random trailhead, and staggered into the woods in the twilight under the weight of the gear we’d purchased at Kmart. After going half a mile or so up the hill we identified a clearing a few hundred yards off the trail and set up camp there. Somehow we got a fire going and wolfed down undercooked burgers. We were passing around a bottle of whiskey afterward when the air above the tree canopy was suddenly filled with thunderous noise and bright lights. We all thought it was World War III (remember, this wasn’t so long after 9/11), until we finally realized that it was just a Labor Day fireworks display at a nearby high school. Later, one of my friends whacked another on the head with his shoe when he drunkenly tried to climb into the wrong tent; in the morning we awoke to find that the tent had collapsed on top of him.
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I’ve gotten better at doing summer in the Northeast since then. But though I’ve had so many fun and memorable summer trips over the many years since—to actual campgrounds, friends’ (and friends-of-friends’) houses, rentals and Airbnbs, motor lodges, spa hotels, luxe resorts—until recently, I remained convinced, as so many native Californians are, of the innate superiority of everything on the West Coast to the rest of the country, including summer. And look, I’m not going to lie, it’s taken me till these last few years after the onset of the pandemic, driving around upstate New York and New England with my kids, to finally get it, really and truly: When it comes to summer, nothing beats the Northeast—not even the West.
For one thing, unlike in California and so many other parts of the country, it’s an actual season here, one that more closely matches the unofficial Memorial Day-to-Labor Day definition of summer than just about anywhere else in America. You feel summer’s approach as the spring days get longer, as the countdown to the last day of school gets shorter, as everyone starts showing a little more skin. And then suddenly it arrives, and from the Jersey Shore to the Poconos, from the Adirondacks to the Delaware Water Gap, from Western Mass to Midcoast Maine, everyone gets swept up in the elation of the season and surrenders to its rituals. Even when the thunderstorms roll in, even when you’re swatting away mosquitoes, even when it’s so muggy you want to shower five times a day, you still never want the season to end.
For me, summer really comes when the summer foods come. The season has become irrevocably wrapped up in the smell and taste of Jersey-grown basil and fresh corn and Brandywine tomatoes. The snap peas and asparagus show up around the same time, and so do the watermelon and strawberries and stone fruit. The flavor of summer is also in the Original Tomato Pie—nothing more than crushed fresh tomatoes, mozzarella, basil, Pecorino, garlic, and olive oil—cut into three-bite squares at the original Frank Pepe in New Haven, Connecticut, where I always insist we stop when driving home from Vermont. It’s in the slightly-gross-but-sooooo-delicious fried clam strips at Johnny’s Reef on City Island—one of those places you go on a beautiful summer day in New York City when you can’t get out of town. It’s in the small, bright, briny Atlantic oysters, paired with a glass of ice-cold rose, anywhere you can find them—including at Island Oyster on Governors Island, a fancier place to leave town in the summer without leaving town. It’s in gorgeous seasonal produce simply utilized at scores of unassumingly excellent restaurants, from Gaskin’s in Germantown, New York, to the dining room at Nebo Lodge on North Haven Island, Maine, a short ferry ride from Rockland.
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And of course it’s in the beautiful, sweet lobster rolls—a phenomenon I was utterly unfamiliar with before moving east—everywhere from the classics of Long Island’s East End, like Duryea’s in Montauk and The Lobster Roll (better known as Lunch) in Amagansett, to the dozens of summertime gems in Maine, like Shaw’s Fish & Lobster Wharf in the village of New Harbor. Or, if you prefer Connecticut-style (warm with butter, as opposed to the more common Maine-style, served cold with mayo and some combination of piquant greens and herbs), there is Captain Scott’s Lobster Deck in New London, Connecticut.
So many of those foods come from the ocean and are commonly consumed near it. I do love the beach during those prime summer months—who wouldn’t? That can mean New York’s Rockaway on a summer city day (Coney Island is a joy for the rides, the aquarium, the hot dogs, and the nostalgia, but not for lying on the sand), or the beaches of Cape May, New Jersey, or Ditch Plains in Montauk, though the one I know best in all the Northeast is Ocean Road Beach, a pristine strip of sand backed by a helical wooden fence, dunes, and multimillion-dollar homes in Bridgehampton, New York (not too far from Lunch), which my family visits at the beginning of each summer.
But even more than the beaches, what really spells summer for me in this part of the country is the woods. I grew up with the majestic grandeur of California’s redwoods and Washington’s evergreens; the forests out east are more modestly scaled and diverse—the maples and the oaks, the beech and the birches, and once you climb a bit the spruce and the pine—but somehow have come to feel for me like the platonic idea of forest. They feel mighty but kind, and so very American—after all, these are the woods that gave us such essentially American cultural artifacts as Walden and the poetry of Robert Frost and Music From the Big Pink. My memories of the last 20 summers here are filled with lazy tube rides down Esopus Creek near Phoenicia, New York, with Town Tinker Tube Rental, threading a corridor of plump hardwood trees, gazing up at the carpeted brow of Mount Tremper; of cycling among the leafy Norman Rockwell villages near Northampton, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires; of wandering the wooded trails year after year on land my friends own near Brattleboro, Vermont, on the edge of the Green Mountains; of climbing the famous Cadillac Mountain in Maine’s Acadia National Park with my wife on our babymoon, well into her second trimester.
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And then there is the sense of Americana, so pervasive in this part of the country at this time of year. When you go to a place like Bar Harbor, Maine, just outside Acadia, or Saratoga Springs, New York, or Newport or Cape Cod, you feel like you’re visiting one of the sacred sites where Americans learned, in the late 19th century, what it meant to go on summer vacation in this country. So many of the natural wonders that rose to prominence during that era, like Niagara Falls and Howe Caverns, are today swaddled in a blanket of kitsch that I find more charming than anything.
There are also human-created wonders, masterworks of American ingenuity and obsession. Two of my favorite weekend summertime destinations, both within a couple of hours of New York City, are oases raised from the ruins of abandoned quarries: Manitoga, near the Algonquin Trail in Garrison, New York, is a tranquil modernist home and Japanese-inspired woodland garden curated over many years by the industrial designer Russel Wright; Opus 40, about five miles from the house where Big Pink was recorded in Saugerties, New York, is a graceful bluestone environmental sculpture painstakingly assembled over nearly four decades by Harvey Fite, a professor at nearby Bard College, that rivals the great earthworks of the West.
For more “official” art, here are two different twinned art pilgrimages that both make for excellent summer weekends. In New York, a little ways downstream from Opus 40, on opposite sides of the Hudson River lie Storm King, a collection of magisterial modern sculptures by the likes of Alexander Calder and Richard Serra, Louise Nevelson and Maya Lin, tucked among the swells and furrows of a beautiful swath of the Hudson Valley, and Dia Beacon, a converted Nabisco box-printing plant that houses an extraordinary assortment of postwar minimalists and conceptualists (Andy Warhol, Agnes Martin, Donald Judd, more Serra). Further north in Western Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (better known as Mass MOCA), also in a converted printing facility, showcases a dizzyingly eclectic array of modern and contemporary art, sculpture, installation, and performance work; a 15-minute drive away, near Williams College, the Clark Art Institute holds one of the finest collections of 19th-century European work (Monet, Degas, Renoir, Rodin) in America in its stately original marble exhibition hall and a sleek Tadao Ando-designed addition, with a recently established contemporary sculpture garden sharing space with cows in the pastures outside. In the neighborhood are more cultural attractions like Tanglewood, the beloved summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra; numerous picturesque trailheads; great antiquing; and marvelous restaurants like the Prairie Whale in Great Barrington. The design-forward nouveau roadside inn Tourists is an ideal home base for doing it all. It’s one of the most paradisiacal parts of the country to post up in for a long summer weekend.
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Since that flailing first trip, I have accumulated most of the tools you need to make car camping easy and fun. I’ve been on many memorable trips with friends, my wife, my kids, my brother, and my dad, but here’s one truth I do have to acknowledge: the campgrounds in the Northeast usually aren’t that great. The sites are often meager plots consisting of little more than a driveway, a picnic table, and a bear box—nothing like the arcadian refuges I grew up visiting in Northern California and the Cascades. After I had kids, every trip reminded me anew of how much stuff you need and how much work you have to put in. And let’s face it, I have a lower tolerance for discomfort at 45 than I did at 25. But then last summer we finally tried glamping for the first time, and as much as I dislike the name, I found I love the experience. It’s everything that’s great about camping, only without the labor, the dirt, the sore back, and the car crammed to the ceiling with gear.
We stayed at the recently opened Huttopia Adirondacks, near Lake George, New York, another of those iconic Northeastern summertime towns; it evinced none of the bougieness you might associate with glamping, but did have a delightfully whimsical French touch. It was probably the most successful trip we took last summer: The kids got S’mores, hang time in the woods, and a pool, while their parents got real beds, a gas grill, and a restaurant serving Nutella crepes and Croque Monsieurs when they didn’t want to have to deal with cooking. And all of us loved every minute of our off-site fun, from the thrills and chills of whitewater rafting with the family-run Sacandaga Outdoor Center to the 18 swashbuckling holes we played at Pirate’s Cove Adventure Golf in the heart of Lake George. After checking out, we drove north to Natural Stone Bridge & Caves, another family-run operation that claims to be the largest marble cave entrance in the Eastern United States and has a delightfully kitschy gift shop that carries enormous glittering geodes and Adirondacks coffee mugs that appear to be deadstock from the 1970s.
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We look forward to trying out some of Huttopia’s other properties, including the one in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, which I have never explored, as well as some of the other companies in the space: Under Canvas has a location near Acadia, for example, and the Airstream brand Autocamp has a spot in the Catskills, my most frequent summertime stomping grounds. Twenty years on, I’m still finding out just how wonderful summer here can be.
