New Jersey
Less Than a Country Club, but Much More
by Debra Galant
September 13, 1998
EVERYTHING has its season and now that the children are tucked away in school, we have finally re-entered the Season of Productivity.
Although I spent half of August yearning for this, I now see that I should have been enjoying every last drop of the Season of Idle Lounging at my favorite idle lounging spot, Fernwood Country Club in Roseland, in what may have been its final season.
I would be lying if I described Fernwood -- which is as much a country club as I am a supermodel -- as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. But I would not be misrepresenting things if I described it as one of the wonders of my world. My husband and I have been describing it for years as feeling like a tired Catskills hotel, comfortable but down on its luck.
In fact, it was originally built as a fresh-air camp for children and mothers from Newark. It is a place of grass and trees, sagging lounge chairs and ramshackle white buildings, a place so relaxed that the tennis courts often have large cracks with weeds poking out, and buckets of patching tar spend the season watching every game from the sidelines.
It is the place where both of my children learned to swim, and where paperbacks and the papers usually go unread in favor of endless conversations. It is a place so homey that even on the first day of summer none of us feels the least bit self-conscious about the overabundance of pallid flesh.
It is, in fact, an anti-resort, like what I imagine America must have looked like before interstate highways and national franchises. There is a wonderful snack bar, with orange-and-yellow chairs, where you can buy a cup of home-brewed sun tea for 50 cents and where a sign warns that no card playing is allowed.
The signs. They alone would have been worth the price of admission. The somewhat cranky, generally dire, almost always witty warnings of Fernwood's owner, Bunny Dockrell. A sign in the ladies' locker room warns not to leave possessions unlocked because ''we have villains.''
Members are advised, on a rule list, to eat neatly; leaving behind ''a pile of peanut shells can get you a severe reprimand.'' And Mrs. Dockrell's wry humor has been evident in other ways. One day, leaving the pool, I realized that I had forgotten to sign in. Mrs. Dockrell suggested I do so even though I was leaving because, she pointed out with a mischievous smile, ''You never know when you might need an alibi.''
But I wasn't quite ready for the most recent sign, which I spied in the ladies' locker room a few weeks ago. It referred, obliquely, to the persistent rumors of the past few years that Fernwood was up for sale.
''In view of the uncertainties of life,'' the sign read, ''we ask that you take your chairs, tubes and wretched noodles with you on your last day here.''
Over the years, I have listened to hundreds of complaints about everything from the condition of Fernwood's lounge chairs to the temperature of the water and the spiders in the mens' locker room. Most of the whiners have left, graduating to fancier and more expensive pool clubs and lakes.
Those who have remained have become my closest friends. I didn't realize this until I was invited to a Christmas party a few years back and, looking around, discovered that I was much more accustomed to seeing the people there without their clothes.
In the last few years, driving to Fernwood for our first swim, we have noticed the land nearby sprout enormous homes and vast townhouse complexes. Mr. Dockrell died a little while back and Mrs. Dockrell has had her own health problems.
Although she seems ageless to me -- her posture always perfect and her white hair always cropped to a neat unvarying length -- I know that she is tired. And it doesn't take a Nobel laureate to know that the land our well-worn piece of Arcadia sits on is worth a mint.
The rational part of me knows that sooner or later, Fernwood will probably go the way of many other small private pools that once dotted New Jersey, to be replaced by some 21st-century version of progress. When that happens, the little societies that have built up over hundreds of lazy Sundays of Scrabble and communal picnics will fall apart. We will scatter, in different directions, like ants from a toppled mound of earth.
And so I guess it is as with anything that is worth loving.
Unlike a faceless corporation, which would just bring in a new management team and raise prices, Fernwood is a place that lives and breathes and so, maybe, dies. Until then, we cross our fingers and, despite the warnings, leave our wretched noodles as totems of hope that we will get one more season at Fernwood.
