It was just too hot to think last week so I just sat around with a dead brain remembering silly things, which is a lot easier than some of the other stuff I think about.
I was asked to go to Chilmark to interview Jane Slater at her antique shop in Menemsha about an upcoming art show and sale of original ink washes by Adolph Dehn, a Chilmark summer visitor during the 1930s and a regionalist painter. Recently a large body of his work became available to include his Chilmark period, and will be shown for sale at her shop from July 12 to July 14.
My wife is from Tennessee and before serendipitously landing on the island where we met, to her a boat trip was something you took on two aluminum pontoons, a platform covered with indoor/outdoor carpet, a small outboard engine, frilly canopy and a few cases of beer on a flat, calm pond on Sundays somewhere out in the country, maybe rafting up with a few other families for a party. Once on Cuttyhunk, her assumption was that if anything ever happened to our boat, we would each take two kids in life jackets and swim for shore.
I’m sitting on the Vineyard waiting for the wind to let go so the ferries will start running again so I can drive up to Boston to meet my wife who is in a hotel, also waiting for the wind to die down. When we lived on one of the small islands in Gosnold, the transportation situation was entirely different. The regular ferry service is privately owned and not under the same scrutiny as the Steamship Authority.
It’s Memorial Day weekend and sometimes I think we forget what that’s about. First, it’s about our war dead. No matter how you feel about war, we all hurt for the sons and daughters who don’t come back or come home damaged, and how that reverberates through the psyche of our society. It is also about people missing from our lives leaving that permanent, empty and personal sense of loss. All through life, things and people fall away, reminding us that we are all going to have a turn. It’s the ultimate equal opportunity.
The vehicle safety situation on this little island is pretty funky indeed. We have no police or mechanics or any other way of keeping tabs on the condition of vehicles, or fixing them if we do find something wrong. What we do know is if it runs we should drive it. Then there’s the rust thing; even if you wanted to fix something, the odds of getting through to rusty bolts without breaking them off are pretty slim. Cars and trucks seem to dissolve around here. It’s like parking your car on the beach for months with all kinds of storms blowing through them all the time.
Ray Hopper died the day our first child was born. It wasn’t a natural death, or a peaceful death. At the time Ray was the husband of the storekeeper and he had a daily ritual. He would load his antique dueling pistol and his muzzle-loading rifle, roll up a couple of dog-haired, dust-bunnied, washashore joints and head out looking for deer. His route was exactly the same every day, so when he did not show up by dark, the island went looking for him. They found him, still warm, with his much-loved antique guns, pack, wallet and one joint neatly stacked on a rock nearby.
Some weeks before I was carried off the Island feet first to the country club rehab in Newport, my friend Pepe Quero came to the U.S. to visit from Mexico. That month on the island was his only window on life in the states (although I confess that when I lived in Mexico Pepe and I had raised a certain kind of hell not unlike life on the island, so he was probably more at home there than he would have been in some suburb).
The freight situation on the island got completely out of hand for a time awhile ago, but fortunately fate stepped in and prevented a possible lynching. Bung Ward has run the freight business for a long time, probably forever. The business consists of him meeting the mail boat with his 1968 Chevy pickup which got here on a barge in 1976 because it couldn’t pass inspection on the mainland, a condition which seems to be fairly chronic around here making for some pretty inexpensive vehicles.
