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By Root 2319 0

yet isolated the circumstances that help a child grow whole and independent, but they were present. At some point in a town’s evolution, houses and fences grow dense enough to form a connected barrier. When that critical point is reached, movement is mostly restricted to public streets. In Far Rockaway boys and girls still percolated through the neighborhood and established their own paths through backyards and empty lots behind the houses and streets. They were autonomous and enterprising in play, roaming far from their parents’ immediate oversight, riding their bicycles without accounting for their whereabouts. They could wander through fields on the way to the shore, and then they could rent boats and row them up and down the protected inlets. Richard walked to the library and, sitting on the stone steps, watched people go by in all directions. Distant as New York seemed, he felt bound enough to the great city to look down on the outsiders living a few blocks away, in Cedarhurst, Long Island. But he also knew that his neighborhood was a place apart.

“When I was a child I thought we lived at the end of the world,” wrote another New Yorker, the critic Alfred Kazin; he grew up in Brownsville, a Brooklyn neighborhood a little poorer and almost as remote, another district of Jewish immigrants and children of immigrants occupying that unusual boundary between the urban and the rural. “There were always raw patches of unused city land all around us filled with ‘monument works’ where they cut and stored tombstones, as there were still on our street farmhouses and the remains of old cobbled driveways,” he wrote—“most of it dead land, neither country nor city… . That was the way to the ocean we always took summer evenings—through silent streets of old broken houses whose smoky red Victorian fronts looked as if the paint had clotted like blood and had then been mixed with soot—past infinite weedy lots… .”

For Ritty Feynman the beach was best of all—the long southern strand stretching almost unbroken to the far east end of Long Island, framed by its boardwalk and summer hotels, cottages and thousands of private lockers. Far Rockaway was a summer resort with beach clubs for people from the city: the Ostend Baths, Roche’s (for a long time Richard thought this was named after the insect), the Arnold. There were wooden pavilions and changing rooms for rent by the season, with shiny locks and keys. For the local children, though, the beach served its purpose the year round. They splashed in the light surf, attenuated by a long breakwater pale beneath the waves. At the height of the summer’s crowds the pink and green of bathing suits dotted the sand like gumdrops. It was his favorite place. He usually rode his bicycle the four thousand feet from his house (a distance that expanded in his later memory to two miles). He went with friends or alone. The sky was larger there than anywhere else in the city’s confines; the ocean tempted his imagination as it does any child’s. All those waves, all that space, the boats crawling like apparitions along the horizon toward New York Harbor, Europe and Africa lying far beyond, at the end of a long uninterrupted vector curving downward below the sky. It sometimes seemed that the things near the sea were the only things that were any good.

The dome of the sky stretched upward. The arcs of the sun and moon crossed directly ahead, rising and falling with the season. He could splash his heels in the surf and recognize a line that formed the tripartite boundary between earth, sea, and air. At night he would take his flashlight. For teenagers the beach was a site for social mixing between boys and girls; he did his best, though he sometimes felt gawky. He often swam. When he was forty-three, setting out nearly everything he knew about physics in the historic two-year undergraduate course that became The Feynman Lectures on Physics, he stood before a hall of freshmen and tried to place them mentally at the beach. “If we stand on the shore and look at the sea,” he said, “we see the water, the waves breaking,