Our cover photo this issue shows a building that is no more but may still live in the hearts and souls of those who camped in their younger years at Hither Hills State Park, in Montauk, New York. The park, set on the Atlantic Ocean and still very much there, is one of the toughest in which to secure a camping reservation for a week during the summer. Try it and find out for yourself. We gave up about ten years ago. At the time, you needed to go online at eight a.m. exactly eleven months prior to your first day of stay, and register. You would be placed in a queue, and ten minutes later a message would appear saying all sites were booked.
In the 1930s, campsites at Hither Hills were claimed for the whole summer by families typically living in New York City. In the spring, they would drive out to the tip of Long Island for the day and place a rock on a site, designating it as theirs for the entire season. In the 1980s, reservations were taken by phone, managed by a third party based in St. Louis. Sometimes you would hear the receptionist there ask you what was so special about the campground, that they get an exorbitant number of reservation requests and are curious to know the reason why.
To those who were lucky enough to make Hither Hills their home for the summer or a precious week, the Bathhouse that is no more was their sanctuary, their respite. On hot summer days, snacks, hats, and suntan lotion were sold through its windows, and kids and grownups alike would take a short break under its overhanging roof, free from the blitzing sun and sand, before setting back out to the surf. This photo, taken in June 2001, may be one of the last to have captured its quiet resplendence.
Erin Murphy, Poetry Editor of The Summerset Review, has published a new collection of documentary poetry on labor and employment issues. Human Resources, released by Grayson Books in early June, features poems about global, national, and historical labor matters. Poet Brian Turner calls Human Resources "a love song to the profound work of survival, the labor required to see it done. These poems praise without glancing away from pain or difficulty, all that is messy and fully human. There are portraits here that examine social and environmental injustice—while also illuminating the tenacity housed within the blood and bone of people who rarely make it into verse. Murphy's poems ask the crucial questions for our time—questions that for far too long have been left ringing in exhausted hands." You can order Human Resources here: https://a.co/d/1OIBRce
