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A small island in the sun

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It's unusual to be able to take the same steps I first made when I was a child — particularly when such a passage was once such a wonderful part of my summers.

For decades, there was a lovely raft floating off the shore of Hewlett Point Park beach in Bay Park, East Rockaway. It was roughly a 12-by-20-foot float in the heart of the bay, constructed simply of wooden planks secured safely to pilings, with its posts rising out of the water, the other end driven into the floor of the ocean below the salt-water climes.

As children, it became a sign of one's swimming proficiency and parental trust when we were first allowed to swim to the "small island in the sun,” or “the dock,” as we called it — but under the watch of several lifeguards, of course!

During the last several years, it’s been a new delight to watch the latest generation of youngsters swim out to the landmark, having fun. I remember when we were younger, we’d climbed its short, sturdy ladder, where we'd sometimes pretend we were on a pirate ship, or just ascending from a submarine.

Jumping off that raft, splashing into the bay, remains a remarkably specific joyous memory. Just standing along its guardrails, absorbing the beauty of the sands, or looking out toward the horizon where the sea meets the sky, leaves me with a feeling of serenity beyond measure, and one unique to our South Shore.

One special, fairly recent memory is when, one August, I found myself on the dock, alongside a few teenagers and a father and son, when we suddenly saw a man in his 80s swimming toward us. After the lifeguard helped him up the ladder, we discovered that he was a retired cardiologist, who then regaled us with a couple of poems he had once written for his wife, with whom he had first come to Hewlett Point 60 years earlier. Suddenly, the dock had become a living bridge between the ages!

During Hurricane Irene in 2011, the raft was damaged, having been lifted up in the air and then hurled back down into the water. One of the pylons crashed through a couple of the planks, but the steel chain moorings held, keeping the raft suspended sideways in the brine. By next June, however, it had been thoroughly repaired.

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