The Early Vineyard Years

I don't know why we started going to Martha's Vineyard. Maybe it was just for a change of pace. It was certainly a shorter drive than Blue Hill, Maine, with a ferry ride on the Islander thrown in for good measure. We summered on the Vineyard for four straight years. The first year was spent in a beach cottage in Chilmark, the next three years were in the Webster house in Gay Head. I don't remember much about the Chilmark house except that it was on the small side. The beach was only a short walk away. The one memory I do have is of my friend John finding a deflated balloon on the beach. Only it wasn't a balloon. It was a Portuguese Man of War. He got a nasty sting.

The Webster house years bring back mixed memories. Let's get the bad memory out of the way first. One summer my mother got really sick from a tick bite and developed a large bulls eye on her abdomen. The local doctors didn't know what to make of it and sent her to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston where she underwent weeks of penicillin treatment. She was gone a long time but was finally cured. This turned out to be the first reported case of what, twenty years later, became know as Lyme Disease.

When you're 8, 9 and 10 years old, life is good. We were friends with the neighbors, the Howells, who had a couple of boys so we always had playmates. It seemed that every summer my cat, Pudding, would present us with a litter of kittens, usually born in my mother's bureau drawer. We named the kittens after Greek Gods and Goddesses. My favorites were Apollo and Aristotle, who were later adopted by our neighbors back home in New York.

The Webster house wasn't on the beach but you could walk to Squibnocket if you knew the shortcuts through the woods and didn't mind sloshing through some swampy areas. Squibnocket Beach was famous for its undertow so the folks didn't like us going there. Squibnocket was also known for its pond which was supposedly home to large loggerhead turtles, but I never saw any.

We picnicked at Lobsterville Beach, almost daily. Lobsterville Beach was a calm-water beach on Vineyard Sound, adjacent to Menemsha. It was a pebbly beach. My friend John and I would fashion pieces of driftwood into bats and spend hours seeing who could hit the beach stones the farthest. Other pastimes included watching teams of oxen working the fields near Gay Head lighthouse and collecting multi-colored clay from the cliffs there. Nothing was off-limits in those days. I was back for a few days a couple of years ago. Sadly, my former playgrounds are now either Indian preserves or private. I wouldn't vacation there with kids, there's nothing fun for them to do anymore.

A pinkletink is a singing tree frog, a peeper, commonly found on the Vineyard. The Pinkletink was the name given to the double-ended, open whaleboat that my father rescued from the scrapheap of a nearby boatyard. He worked for weeks on the banks of Menemsha Creek fixing her up, painstakingly replacing plank after plank, using only hand tools.  John and I would scamper around the creek looking for crabs and eels while Dad worked. I learned new words such as "clinker built" and "lap strake," probably learned a few curse words too, although my father rarely swore. The Pinkletink was seaworthy before the end of the summer and was put to good use. Fitted with a small British Seagull outboard motor, the Pinkletink would slowly chug through Menemsha harbor to our favorite fishing spot off Lobsterville Beach. The fishing was awesome, made better by the fact that the whole family could fit in the boat. My mother was an excellent fisherwoman. She would talk to the fish saying "come fish, come fish" and invariably caught the most. We had the Pinkletink for a summer and a half, until she was damaged beyond repair by a winter storm.

The State Road bridge that connected Chilmark to Gay Head washed out one summer, stranding all the Gay Headers. There was a car crossing the bridge when the storm surge hit. The car wound up in the pond fifty yards downstream, the lady driver amazingly unhurt. The bridge was out for several weeks before a temporary replacement was fitted. To buy groceries you had to row across the gap where the bridge once stood, then take a cab to the nearby general store. The cab company probably made out well.

Hurricanes tend to be cyclical; in the 1950's, the Northeast got hit regularly. Hurricane Carol, late in the summer of 1954, was the worst storm I remember. It blew shingles off the roof and sunk many boats in Menemsha Harbor, including mega-yachts from the visiting New York Yacht Club. One of the few boats undamaged was an old, green fishing trawler named "Bozo." Her captain chose to ride out the storm at sea, a gutsy move by an obviously highly-competent seafarer. Hurricane Carol was also the demise of the Cataumet property. On the way home to New York, we stopped there to survey the damage. Gone were the garage, dock and tennis court, washed away by the storm surge. There were large holes through both sides of the main house. The renter's car was upside down in the driveway. Hurricane insurance wasn't available in those days and my grandmother wound up selling the place that winter. She basically gave it away, netting a paltry $10,000, as per my parents, for the whole compound.