Patricia A. Miller
Ocean View
I didn’t recognize it at first. When my brother stopped the station wagon, I told him we must have missed it. I told him we had to keep going down the gravel road. This couldn’t be it. A field, with evergreens and cedars in places I didn’t remember.
But it was. We stumbled over the hard, shale-studded northwest Jersey earth. We walked quickly passed the “No Trespassing” sign. We ran almost, back to where I thought the pool used to be. It was cold. The October wind sifted through the swamp maples and oaks that bordered the site. All else was silent.
It’s said that to meditate you need to go to a cherished, peaceful place.
I go back to this place. I go back more than 40 summers ago, to the summer I turned 16, to a modest little swim club tucked away in the middle of the Great Swamp on White Bridge Road in Millington, New Jersey.
I go back to Millridge. This is an elegy to a place I loved.
It wasn’t much. A 25-meter pool, picnic tables and grills, shuffleboard and tennis courts, a large cabin-like building called “The Mill” with pool tables, Ping-Pong and a jukebox. “Gloria” and “It’s My Life” boomed constantly. The bar on the other side was for the grown-up parties on the weekends.
It couldn’t compete with the other country clubs – Springbrook, Pennbrook, Raritan Valley and Morris County – in the Jockey Hollow Swim League. Millridge didn’t have a golf course or a fancy club house. The rich kids from the other clubs called the pool “the bathtub” because of its rounded walls.
To me, it was the happiest place on earth.
And when I go back, it is always a warm, dry July day, with a cerulean sky so blue it makes your eyes hurt. It is right after swim team practice, right after an hour of laps, sprints, the coach’s piercing whistle, then the shout “go!” as we thrust ourselves off the diving blocks into the cool, crystal water, over and over again.
I swim slowly after practice, the cool-down after the heart-pounding sprints. My tanned arms arc through the topaz water. I feel like I was born here. The sun is a caress. The pool filter hums from the little filter house. A single-engine plane takes off from the Somerset County airport down the road, and drones slowly overhead. To this day, whenever I hear a small plane, I think of Millridge.
My friends and I eat at the snack bar. Mrs. Kent cooks countless hamburgers, hot dogs and French fries. Later, we fling our towels on the grass and bake in the sun. We stay there until someone says “want to go in?” and we head back to the pool.
What is it that draws me back to that place and time? My family only belonged for four summers. It was just about 12 months of my life. I was really the only one who went much. I went every day. I went when it was raining. I can still feel the lilt in my heart as my mother’s Chevy crunched down the stones in the club’s wide driveway.
Millridge was my refuge. It was a place where I carried around my baby sister Mary and showed her off to my friends. She clung to my neck, that sweet little girl with the light-brown ringlets, and smiled. She followed me everywhere.
It was the scene of my greatest athletic triumph. Millridge versus Morris County. It was the summer the Jockey Hollow Swim League championship came down to the girl’s freestyle relay, the last event of the meet. Fred Dauth had pulled me from my age group to swim butterfly in the medley relay and anchor on the freestyle relay. We needed the points to win.
Linda Speir was the anchor for Morris County. She stood about 5 feet 10 inches. I was barely 5 foot 2 and weighed about 105. The freestyle relay did not start off well. We were behind at least a length by the time Tish Strang took off on the third leg. Linda and I stepped up on the blocks. I could hear people screaming, but kept my eyes riveted on my goal, the other end of the pool.
She took off before me. I hit the water about four seconds later. I didn’t take a breath the entire length. My hand slapped the edge of the pool, a split second before hers did. Tom Strang grabbed my hand and pulled me out. He smiled. We won.
I have replayed that scene many times. I will never forget it.
I went back once after the trip with Johnny. I went back alone this time.
It was a clear spring day. I walked back to where I thought the pool used to be and sat on a log in the sunlight. I could almost hear kids laughing, the starter gun going off, the thunk of someone’s cannonball hitting the water.
It was a peaceful scene, but I felt almost a physical pain. Robert Frost called it the “ache of memory.” My mother, my father, my sisters Susan and Mary, grandparents, aunts and uncles all still breathed during those Millridge years. They are all gone now.
I miss them all. And I miss this place.
“It shall be no trespassing
If I come again some spring
In the grey disguise of years
Seeking ache of memory here.”
Millridge belongs to the federal government now, part of the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. I can still come here and sit once in a while. The land has been returned to nature. No one can build on it.
But I can always come back to a warm, sweet summer day in the mid-1960s.
Patricia A. Miller is a managing editor with Greater Media News-papers.