My family bought our Chappy farm in 1949, 40 acres down a dirt road where Chappaquiddick Road turns left out to Wasque. We spent our summers there until the early 1980s. Two of my sisters were born on the island.

Our property ran along a good stretch of Katama Bay. We reached Wasque by Jupiter, our sailboat, or by my father’s army surplus Jeep. In the summers we took picnics to Wasque by either of these means every day it wasn’t raining. If there was any other vehicle or person on the beach while we picnicked we were horrified, unless it was any of our friends and neighbors, of which there were only a few families: the Sands, the Quans, the Stevens, the Bells, the Packards or the Barnes. Those were pretty much the only families besides the Siebels that inhabited that end of Chappy. My dad drove our Jeep along the shore, careening through the sand, occasionally one of us flying off the back.

Sometimes we had picnics into the night, and everyone skinny dipped and then warmed themselves by a huge bonfire. There was never anyone there to tell us we could not drive, skinny dip, burn logs or anything else. Life was free, and so very beautiful.

Reading that the cars allowed numbers in the hundreds fills me with a deep sense of nostalgia for a time when everything was simpler, more open and free. I only write this to let everyone know that there was this magical time in the past that existed, and it was beautiful. I only visit Chappy occasionally now, but I will never forget a wide, wild sand beach, with no one on it but us.

Barbara Siebel Thomas

East Hampton, NY