By Biddle Duke
The Southampton Press, The East Hampton Press, The Sag Harbor Express
I am standing where the mess hall used to be at my uncle’s camp on Three Mile Harbor. It is all brush now — not even a hint of the kitchen, or the cement floor, or the brick fireplace, or the cabins that used to be here. Nothing but grass and bushes.
Yet, I am swept up in a memory of the camp’s aspirational work and its humanist founder, my uncle Tony Duke, and of brotherhood, and nature’s magic.
Right here, some 50 years ago: My older brother Dario is holding a small plastic shovel and a cup. Campers are gathered around.
“We’re going exploring,” he explains to the group, a handful of boys 10 to 13 years old. Dario is the “outdoor education” counselor, a camp favorite. It’s early morning; breakfast has just concluded in the mess hall.
“Exploring?” a kid asks warily.
“Yes,” Dario says, “a walk in the woods to the creek.”
“We gonna see the Lagoon Man?”
The “Lagoon Man,” or the “Swamp Monster” — both were used — is a camp legend, much feared by the youngest campers.
A ghost at this point, the legend sprung from the presence of a squatter who lived in the woods along the banks of Hands Creek. When Tony bought the land in 1951, the squatter — just a guy, locally known at the time as “the mayor of Springy Banks,” who hunted the land and fished nearby waters, and slept in a makeshift shack — stayed on, with Tony’s blessing. From that emerged the tale of the Lagoon Man, the lagoon being that thumb of water known as Hands Creek, in the southwest corner of Three Mile Harbor.
Everyone liked Tony — a master storyteller, a fabulist with a twinkle in his eye and a mischievous streak. By Tony’s frequent telling, the Lagoon Man was the ghost of a bitter British Revolutionary War soldier who resented the British surrender and escaped to Hands Creek after the Revolutionary War to forever haunt the descendants of his American foes. Tony taught all the campers a special song that would keep the Lagoon Man at bay.
“We might see him,” says Dario.
“Oooooh!” chorused the kids.
And off my brother trundles into the oak and pine woods, with about a dozen campers, and me, in tow.
I am about the age of the campers, but I am an outsider. Home for them are tough streets of East Harlem and the South Bronx; many are from broken homes or barely homes at all. They know hunger, drug abuse, adult rage, desperation, deaths.
They’ve seen life in ways I will never see. Home for me are the quiet, prosperous, manicured streets of Southampton.
“You’re Mr. Duke’s nephew?” kids ask. “Man, you’re lucky.”
All of Tony’s own children, and my brothers and sisters, at one time or another worked at the camp. I would, too. But on this day I am too young. I am a guest, tagging along behind my brother, who has let his black hair grow down to meet his scruffy beard and shoulders.
Tony Duke had started what would become The Harbor decades before — he’d launched it before his World War II service as a landing craft commander, and restarted it after the war — to give inner-city kids a summer camp experience: sports, nature, games, swimming, boating, cookouts, overnights at Cedar Point Park.
He was a decorated and proud veteran who saw brutal combat, a businessman, a father, a leader of our extended family. But his overriding mission in life would be giving young people with seemingly everything against them the kind of shot at life that every person deserves.
Within a few years in East Hampton, he learned that a handful of weeks in the summer was not enough, so he launched an after-school and scholastic and arts enrichment program in New York City.
It was a challenging, brilliant, lifelong endeavor. The Harbor thrived, transforming thousands of lives. Harbor graduates would go on to be leaders in law, business, education, government, and the arts, and many would forever say of Tony Duke, “He was like a father to me.”
After a half century, the summer camp in East Hampton became a footnote to the organization in the city, and the camp’s land on the South Fork was too valuable, simply worth more as cash to drive the operation in New York.
Tony’s original parcel was hundreds of acres. Over the years, he built his own home there and sold off pieces. He sold the 26 acres that remained of the camp land in 2011. It is now a park, Boys and Girls Harbor Park. The Harbor itself is now called Scan-Harbor, the largest youth services provider in Harlem, East Harlem and South Bronx.
On that day on Hands Creek 50 years ago, my brother Dario is about 17 or 18, which to me makes him an oldie who carries more information in his brain than I ever will.
Walking slowly and pausing occasionally, he points out trees, birds, bugs, and says their names, sometimes even in the Latin. White pine, scrub oak, hen-of-the-wood mushrooms, and, along the creek bank, lady fern and cinnamon fern growing in abundance. This was a time when deer were less abundant and leafy ground cover could flourish.
Dario finds toadstools and holes in the trees where animals leave evidence of their homes. He has us all rapt.
We follow the sound of a woodpecker’s knocking until we spot it.
“With his beak?” a boy asks, astonished at the tock-tock-tocking.
There are wild blueberries, and the kids eye them suspiciously in Dario’s outstretched hand.
“You eat ’em?” one of the kids asks, “just like that?”
“You can. Just like from the grocery store, but better,” my brother says, and he throws a few into his mouth.
“That’s crazy, Dario, man! You’re gonna be sick.”
At a place where the bank is tall and steep and glistening with patches of moss, my brother bends over and begins to dig in the dirt and sand at its base. A tiny pool of water forms, until it is deep enough for him to fill his cup.
“Fresh water,” Dario says. “Spring water.”
He sips.
The reality that drinkable water surges from the ground is beyond belief. It must be a trick, or just Dario mischief.
“You’re joking, Dario — no way,” a boy says. Others exclaim in astonishment.
My brother takes another sip. “Best water you’ll ever drink!” he says, with a genuine thrill. “Who’ll have some?”
No takers.
I push wordlessly through the group, clasp the cup and take a sip. One of the kids follows, and another, and another, until we have to fill the cup several times to give everyone a chance to taste the sweet spring water.
Later, before lunch, Uncle Tony appears at the mess hall, and our group rushes over.
“Mr. Duke! Mr. Duke! We drank water from the ground!”
“You don’t say!” he replies with a big smile. “You found that secret spring. That Dario — he knows all the magic around here.”
Then he adds: “Only one other person knows that spring.”
“Who? Who?” the kids ask.
“The Lagoon Man!”
The group squeals in unison at the mention of his name.
A few weeks ago — five decades on from that day with Dario — I venture along the east side of Hands Creek with a shovel and a cup. The spring is easier to find than it is in my memory.
I dig a small basin. It fills. I scoop up a cup of water and drink.
Later, back at my parked truck, the phone rings, and, in one of those inexplicable wonders, it is my brother, who doesn’t call all that frequently.
He is in the mountains near his house in eastern Washington State, where he is now a veterinarian. He still has more information in his brain than I ever will.
We marvel at the timing of his call and remember those “outdoor education” walks.
He has called to tell me with that familiar thrill that he is in a snowstorm, so rare for late April.