On Teeth and Stars

Taking a break from the dramas of recent family vacations – last year’s summer rental house from hell, frequently uncooperative weather often culminating with our family being stranded in an airport/snowdrift/island ferry terminus (circle as appropriate), – this year we hedged our bets. We again went with a midsummer rental on Martha’s Vineyard during peak-season – but preceding the melee that typically accompanies up-island Presidential stays, (Chilmark being the preferred stop), although I needn’t have worried. Thanks to the debt deficit crisis Obama and family stayed home to enjoy the Washington air.

This year we were in the unusual position of renting the house where my husband spent his childhood summers. His Columbia County godparents, long ago co-owners of a summer home in Menemsha, both more recently deceased, had taken him there annually after his own father’s death. These trips simultaneously shielded him from the eternally unfolding weeks of boyhood summers and expanded his horizons with marathon rounds of I-Spy, morning hunts for pebble-smooth sea-glass, and lessons in bait and fishing off Dutcher’s dock.

Partly filmed at Dutcher’s Dock, “Jaws” was a pretty big deal in the 1980s, even when coolly received by the critics. Despite living some five thousand miles away, I recall similar memories of the film’s release (though I really only saw it after it reached television and my brother recorded it on our shiny Sony Betamax VCR): the shocking early scenes of a nubile, hippy girl rushing into the sea for a night swim before ending up as shark bait. The eerie tolling of the bell buoy, constant and haunting as the glassy waters returned to early morning tranquility, the girl’s inebriated boyfriend still lying oblivious and comatose on the beach. Now, sitting on our deck, some hundred yards from the dock, all I can hear is that 1980s clanging bell interspersed with the garden cicadas and bullfrogs that perpetually remind me I’m abroad. I think back to my early high school French exchanges in northern France and imagine what became of my pen pals. Nostalgia and the occasional ululating loon creep in.

I wonder if the bell buoy is maddening for those moored by the dock slips. I’m sure I wouldn’t sleep a wink. After all, the fishing boat decimated by Jaws in the movie’s final scenes was left just inside the harbour inlet for years, the picked-clean ribs of a trawler’s carcass projecting from the water’s edge. Clearly visible just ten years ago, it’s been slipping away. The island prefers to be remembered for its whaling history; no-one has capitalized on the shark theme, so rotted, stolen or submerged, this year the water has claimed the Orca II, now only preserved on film. For those boarding the bike ferry with or without such memories, there is nothing left to see.

The shingled house, named – tongue-in-cheek - ‘Footbuoy Manor’, proves a trove of memories. My husband strides around with our two and four year olds trailing him like ducklings while he lifts branches to touch a rock where he sat, aged five, looking over a small dam at the edge of the pond. They will sleep in the guest room where my husband once slept, though now the old pockmarked, popcorn ceiling has been smoothed over with plaster and paint. Albert and Ginny used to tell him he made the little divots in the sloped ceiling with his giant snores. He tells our children the same, but at least one is too wise to believe. And we seem to worry more these days. How close can they play to the pond? We douse them with water-proof, sweat-proof, toddler-proof SPF 70+ at the beach before clicking them into lollipop coloured life-vests, a far cry from the burnt feet, lobster shoulders and inflatable Li-Lo beds of beaches in the seventies.

There’s something in the act of re-living familiar scenes from your childhood. Visiting places so familiar they ought to have a scent to explain the evocative reactions. Like a dog-eared paperback you forgot but once read, faded postcards poked into the edge of a mirror, smiling faces recalling summer stays, ordinary days, and favourite spots, time spent in that carefree way reserved exclusively for childhood when your only concerns were your own explorations, discoveries, and getting home in time for dinner.

Sitting beneath a complexly star-dappled sky, one without clouds or light pollution, just constellations and the first of August’s shooting stars, we wonder what it would take to ever recreate the carefree exuberance of a childhood unfettered by grief, responsibility or greater concern. In the overwhelming space that blends nighttime with memory, interrupted only by bursts of salty air and the chiming bell, we share wistfulness wishing Albert and Ginny could be with us now, somehow knowing that we came back to continue the theme of those happy years. We sit sipping cocktails, watching the stars, talking about lives and plans, as they did at exactly our age, their young charges upstairs asleep in the same room where ours now doze.