The Chappaquiddick Community Center potlucks this month are on Wednesday the 5th and 19th. Appetizers start at 6 p.m. Dinner starts at 6:30. Please bring a dish to serve six.

I came upon some photos that I took from an airplane in 1968. You can tell from the aileron brackets on the underside of the wing that it’s one of the former Martha’s Vineyard-based National Executive Airline’s DeHavilland Twin Otters. We used to fly to Boston to get on the Eastern shuttle to fly down to New Jersey to visit our cousins. The usual route was Martha’s Vineyard to Nantucket then perhaps to Hyannis then on to Boston. That gave us a chance to fly over Chappy. My photos are stamped OCT 68 on the back. My camera was probably an Instamatic with a film cartridge. I snapped away after we took off over South Beach. I used up all 24 exposures by the time we were over Nantucket. The Katama opening was still very wide and had not yet eaten into the Wasque bluffs. After the several houses on Wasque Avenue, the only structures farther out were the Leland camp and outbuildings.

The half dozen roads that forked out across the Wasque barrens all continued right out onto the beach down gently sloping blowouts in the dunes.

I was 16 years old at the time. A lot on Chappy has changed during the half-century since then. My personal frame of reference of the island began a decade prior to that. I have looked down at it from the air a hundred times since then. As intimately as I know Chappy on the ground, my perspective of this island has always been from above it — high enough up so that I can see all the way from Cape Poge to Wasque to the ferry.

Along with this intentionally sweeping physical view of a changing landscape and shoreline, I endeavor to keep a broad historical perspective as well. Some of it is what I have seen for myself. Some of it is what I have read or heard from others. Looking back on the adults that I knew as a youngster on Chappy, all of them are gone now. I have very clear memories of those folks as I knew them during a very impressionable time in my life. I am grateful for the interviews of the old timers that have been written down.

I felt a personal responsibility to record the history of the Chappaquiddick Ferry in picture and narrative while the people who lived during its earlier evolution were still around. Tom Dunlop and Allison Shaw wrote and photographed The Chappy Ferry Book for me. Occasionally I page back through it to remind me that I am entrusted with operating a living piece of Chappy history. The existence of the ferry has played an integral part in creating and maintaining the many unique aspects of Chappy which are so important and held so dear by many. Over the years, as the older generations diminish in number, there are fewer folks who seem to understand and appreciate the synergy between the ferry and the Chappy aura.

Those of you who remember ferry captain Nelson Smith will recall hearing his many remarks and viewpoints. His keen observations often included a bit of personal advice. One in particular that I often heard when a recent settler to the island complained about the confinements and inconveniences of living her: “Don’t get mad at the ferry. Get mad at the water. The ferry is what gets you across that water.” Of course, he said it much more colorfully.