Dead in Vineyard Sand

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  For Bill and Vicki Tapply, Fly-casters, friends, and fellow scribblers

  O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms

  Alone and palely loitering?

  The sedge has withered from the lake,

  And no birds sing.

  —JOHN KEATS

  “LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI”

  1

  We were having lovely June weather. Our children, Joshua and Diana, had only a few more days of school and their mother had already added another pistol-shooting trophy to the growing collection she kept stowed away in our guest room closet. It was still a few weeks before the Glorious Fourth, which would semi-officially announce the start of the summer season on Martha’s Vineyard, but already the streets and roads were full of off-island cars. Golfers were crowding the courses, and the beaches were almost full.

  At one of these beaches, alas, we’d already had our first drowning: a teenage girl from New Haven who had been partying one night with friends at Great Rock Bight. Almost every year, it seemed, the island’s lovely waters lured some unwary swimmer to early doom, reminding us all that our Edenic island was not the perfect paradise many believed it to be. The young girl’s death struck us a bit closer to the bone than most because Manny Fonseca, Zee’s shooting instructor, knew her father, and the father’s hurt had in part been communicated to us through Manny. Moreover, Zee had been on duty at the hospital when the EMTs brought in the girl’s body.

  But life doesn’t stop for death, and more people were arriving on the Vineyard every day. Houses were being opened for the summer, and on the bike paths the galloping moms were running behind their tricycle baby carriages, couples were strolling, joggers were jogging, and even a few bikers were biking.

  Bikes staying on the bike paths did not apply to the island’s pro bikers, known to me collectively as Captain Spandex and the Tight Pants Bicycle Squadron, who appeared every summer like thorny flowers. Captain Spandex’s real name was Henry Highsmith, and he and his cohorts—sinewy, forward-leaning, fast-pedaling folk decked out in skintight pants, bright shirts, and aerodynamic helmets—scorned the bike paths as being too slow and dangerous. They kept to the paved roads, challenging cars for the right of way and taking great umbrage when the irritated occupants of passing automobiles rolled down their windows and screamed, “Bike path!”

  I had not screamed that scream although I shared the view of the island plebeians that all bikers, including Captain Spandex and his ilk, should use the bike paths, because our narrow roads, especially the up-island ones, are dangerous even for cars, to say nothing of bikes.

  Some, including my rich businessman friend Glen Norton and his golfing cronies, were less restrained when they read letters to the editors of the Vineyard papers written by the Captain Spandex/Henry Highsmith crowd claiming the high moral ground in transportation matters, contemptuously contrasting their silent, nonpolluting bikes with noisy, gas-guzzling cars and especially the four-wheel-drive SUVs that are so popular on the island. Henry Highsmith himself repeatedly extolled the physical, psychological, spiritual, and ecological merits of his daily bike ride from his home in Chilmark to Vineyard Haven, to Oak Bluffs, to Edgartown, to West Tisbury, and back to Chilmark, while condemning drivers of SUVs who made similar trips.

  Two such SUVs belonged to my wife Zee and me. We, like many islanders, used our trucks to drive over sand, especially to the far fishing spots on Chappaquiddick and, like other people who live at the ends of long driveways, to plow through the occasionally heavy winter snows. We were quite unapologetic about our SUVs and doubted if Captain Spandex could use his bike to do what we do with four-wheel-drive vehicles.

  I was both irked and amused by the cyclist-golfer wars because both sides were so morally pretentious, and snobbery in all forms, including my own when I remember to think about it, offends me.

  Glen Norton was annoyed not only by Captain Spandex’s campaign against SUVs but also by his other haute-environmentalist views. Henry Highsmith seemed to oppose everything from widening the island’s narrow roads, to increasing the number of bike paths, to approving new housing developments, to golf courses in general, including those that were already extant. The last was particularly infuriating to Glen and his pals because to them nothing was more inspiring than undulating fairways, sand traps, and challenging greens.

  Thus the letters to the editor from Captain Spandex and his Bicycle Squadron predictably elicited responding epistles from Glen and other even angrier golfers, including one Jasper Jernigan, whose letters were filled with a satirical venom that amused Captain Spandex and his followers not at all, as their answering letters made clear.

  “Why do they write those things?” asked Zee, putting down the Friday Gazette we’d picked up on the way home. “All they do is annoy each other.”

  “It’s like getting rid of stomach gas,” I said. “They feel better afterward.”

  I knew whereof I spoke, since every couple of years I wrote a letter protesting the annual closing of Norton Point Beach to SUVs by the Fish and Wildlife people in their ongoing vain effort to increase the population of piping plovers. My position was that the closings did next to nothing to help the plovers and were therefore simply another governmental exercise in stupidity; the triumph of dogma over data. My letters accomplished nothing, of course.

  “I don’t think I’ll pursue the gas analogy,” said Zee, “although it tempts me to make an odiferous wisecrack.”

  We had just come home from a Saturday-morning swim and were still in our bathing suits while the kids took turns washing off sand and salt in the outdoor shower. I put my arm around her waist. “Wives aren’t supposed to make fun of their husbands. I’ll bet Captain Spandex’s wife doesn’t make fun of him.”

  “I have trouble believing that Henry Highsmith has a wife,” said Zee. “At least I can’t imagine anyone marrying a man as uptight and self-righteous as Henry.”

  “Me neither,” I said, although we both knew full well that Captain Spandex was, indeed, married. According to the letters from Henry’s defenders, which hotly contrasted his obvious virtues with Glen Norton’s and Jasper Jernigan’s clear lack of the same, Highsmith was not only an acute moralist and cyclist supreme, but a brilliant Ivy League professor married to an equally brilliant Ivy League professor who, with their two beautiful children, shared his passion for both ethics and the cycling life.

  “Maybe we should stop fighting him and join him,” said Zee, running her hands up my bare back. “We can pump up the tires on those bikes you got in that yard sale three years ago, and get some exercise.” She brought her hands back down and rested them at my waist. “You might lose these love handles you’re developing.”

  “You’re imagining things,” I said. “I don’t have love handles. I’m a perfect physical specimen. Look at this.” I released my right arm and flexed it. The bicep was somewhere this side of Mr. Universe’s but it looked pretty good, I thought.

  “That’s your casting and drinking arm,” said Zee. “It gets plenty of exercise. I’m talking about the rest of you.”

  I leered down at her. “Other parts of me get exercise too, my sweet.”

  She kissed my naked chest. “True, but if the brain is a muscle, Captain Spandex would agree with me that yours could use a workout at least once a day.”

  I released her and raised my hands to the gods. “Everybody wants me to get exercise. Fi
rst Glen Norton and now you. I get plenty of exercise.”

  “How long has it been since we took a long walk?”

  “Fishing is exercise. Clamming is exercise.”

  “How about drinking and napping in the yard?”

  “Man does not live by bread alone, and I need my rest.”

  Joshua came in, drying himself with his big towel.

  “The beach was good, Mom. Let’s go again this afternoon.”

  “Why not?” said Zee. “How about going down to Katama so your father can get some quahogs while the rest of us swim?”

  “Can we play in the surf?”

  “If it’s not too rough,” I said. “We can go about three, when everyone else is heading home.”

  “Oh, good! And afterward will you help me with my homework? I’m writing about the color wheel.”

  “Sure.”

  Joshua went to his room to change into summer shorts.

  “What’s a color wheel?” I asked Zee.

  “I advise you to beat your son to the computer and learn something about it before you start helping him.”

  It was a good plan. I said, “Glen Norton wants the pleasure of my company.”

  “What does he want you to do?” asked Zee.

  “He wants me to play golf, of course. Glen can’t imagine anything better than playing golf.”

  She arched a brow. “Well, I guess that might not be a bad idea, if you walk and carry your own clubs. How long is a golf course? Several thousand yards, I seem to remember reading somewhere. If you walk that far, it’d be good for your legs.”

  “My legs are beautiful and manly just as they are.”

  Actually, my legs were far from beautiful. They’d taken shrapnel in a long-ago, faraway war, and since then other scars had been added.

  Diana came in, wrapped in her towel.

  “Ma?”

  “What?”

  “I’m hungry. Can I have something to eat?”

  Diana was almost always hungry, and like her mother she could eat like a bear. However, unlike Zee, who, to the disgust of her women friends, never gained a pound, Diana was growing steadily.

  “Change clothes and you can have a sandwich.”

  “Ma?”

  “What?”

  “Can we really go to the beach again this afternoon?”

  “Have you been talking with your brother?”

  “Yes. Can we go?”

  “Sure,” I said. “The plan has already been made.”

  Diana smiled the smile that made her look like a miniature Zee. “Excellent!” She went on to her room.

  I looked at Zee. “Quahogging is exercise,” I said.

  She sighed. “Doesn’t Glen support that new golf club everybody was so up in arms about? Pin Oaks, the one that’s going to cost so much money to join?”

  “Another reason for me not to play golf. I could never afford to belong to that club. It’s for people like Glen, with a lot more money than I’ll ever have.”

  “They have to build it before Glen can join it, and Henry Highsmith isn’t the only person to oppose it. But I know a lot of ordinary people who play golf on the courses we already have. You don’t have to be rich to play golf.”

  I knew those people too. Most of them couldn’t afford regular membership in any of the island’s clubs, but for a reasonable amount of money they could play at late hours in the summer and more often in the fall, winter, and spring. In the mornings, before they played, you could find them at the doughnut shops, stoking up for the day. We called them the Bold Golfers because they would play in weather that kept normal people indoors.

  “What’s all this push to get me to play golf?” I asked.

  “It’s not a push to get you to play golf. It’s a push for you to get more exercise.” She laughed and skipped away. “Not that kind of exercise! Keep your hands off me. I’m going to go take a shower.”

  “What a good thought. I’ll go with you.”

  I grabbed my towel and followed her out the door.

  Outdoor showers are the best showers in the world. You can’t steam them up, they’re open to the sky, and the best of them are, like ours, big enough for more than one showerer.

  “Allow me to help you out of that bathing suit,” I said to Zee. She allowed me.

  “Allow me to help you out of yours,” she said. I allowed her.

  As we stood under the shower, she was a dark Venus rising from the shell, her long, blue-black hair streaming down over her shoulders, her dark eyes looking up at me, her all-over tan making her appear as though she were made of bronze.

  “Pardon me, madam,” I said, “I don’t mean to intrude upon your privacy, but haven’t we met before? You remind me of someone, but I can’t recall who.”

  She let her eyes roam over me, toe to pate, then shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before. I’m sure I’d remember.”

  “Allow me to introduce myself,” I said, pulling her against me.

  When we finally stepped out of the shower and toweled ourselves dry, we felt clean and pure and good, the way you should when you live the simple life on Martha’s Vineyard.

  2

  One of our favorite beaching spots was at the far southeast corner of Katama Bay, where the Norton Point barrier beach joins the sometimes island of Chappaquiddick. There, a shallow clam flat reaches north into the bay. It’s an excellent and popular place to dig for steamer clams or, if you walk out a ways, to rake for quahogs, two of my favorite pastimes.

  Two alternative entertainments are to sit in the sun under your umbrella or wade in the warm, shallow bay water, or to walk across to the south side of the beach and frolic in the ocean surf.

  There, when the waves are high, there is danger. The waves can knock you down and break your bones, and undertows can pull you away from shore. Every summer there are ambulance runs from the beach to the hospital, and occasionally some bold surfer ends up paralyzed for life. Worse yet, now and then someone doesn’t live to tell the tale.

  As you might guess, these conditions make the beach very popular with both native and visiting teens and twenty-somethings, who like the excitement and know that they themselves will never die or suffer harm.

  Smaller kids have to be watched very carefully, and are best taken to other beaches when the surf is high. On calmer days, however, younger children such as ours can enjoy playing tag with the waves and floating in tubes at the edge of the sand.

  I had my own tube, and floated with Joshua and Diana when the conditions were right for them to leave shore. On noisier days I sometimes played the game called “tubing,” which consisted of seeing how high I could ride my tube on a breaking wave without being tumbled onto the sand. It was a sport that required a fine judgment: too far out was boring; too far in was disaster. I liked it for the same reason the teens and twenty-somethings liked high surf, and if asked why a grown-up man would play such a childish game, I referred to Churchill’s famous remark that nothing is as exhilarating as being shot at without effect. Old Winnie knew what he was talking about.

  We drove there via Katama, which was possible because this year a momentary enlightenment had descended upon the Fish and Wildlife authorities and they had decided to alter their normal policy of plover protection, which consisted of closing the beach upon sighting the first two amorous-looking plovers and keeping it closed for at least ten weeks. Instead, this year the authorities had chosen to close the beach when the first plover chick was hatched and to open it again when the last chick disappeared. The beach was closed for just two days, the time it took for the chicks to be hatched and for predators such as skunks or gulls to find and eat them.

  I was filled with hope that such common sense would prevail during summers to come, but wise Zee advised skepticism. “This is a onetime thing,” she cautioned. “You’re a dreamer if you expect the plover people to be smart more than once in a career.”

  And I knew she was right.

  That after
noon the waves were small, so while Zee and the kids played on the ocean side of the beach, I waded far out into the bay with my wire basket and rake, and collected stuffers and littlenecks. The latter would be appetizers for tonight’s supper and the former would be frozen for future chowders or stuffed quahogs.

  Raking for quahogs can be almost hypnotically relaxing. You stand in cool water with the warm sun turning you even browner. If you feel too hot, you just bend your knees and dip into the water to cool off. Erect again, you rake steadily until you have your quahogs or you’re ready to go ashore without them. It’s a task that requires no thought, but allows your mind to float whither it will as your eyes roam the bay, taking in sailboats, distant swimmers on the beach, other shellfishermen, gulls and terns; your ears are full of the sounds of life on the bay: distant voices, the calls of seabirds, the slosh of small waves.

  While I raked, I was thinking about Glen Norton and golf and wondering if maybe I should actually take up the grand old game. One thing I liked about it was that, in theory at least, you don’t get to blame somebody else if you do badly. Like tennis and chess, and unlike team sports, you can fault no one but yourself for failure; on the other hand, you get all the credit if you do well.

  Of course, losers always find excuses for losing: a camera clicked, a flash went off, someone moved or shouted or whispered, an official made a wrong call, someone cheated. Golf, tennis, and chess all produce sour grapes; but still, in theory, you are master of your fate, whatever it is.

  I had actually played golf once: a single round in Japan decades earlier when I was seventeen and on my way to be a hero in Vietnam. While we’d waited for transport, golfing grunts, on their way to the same war, had taken me to a misty course early one morning. I’d rented clubs and, knowing nothing about the game but what my friends had told me, had teed up on the first hole and struck a gigantic shot right down the middle of the fairway. It had gone up and over a hill and had disappeared into the mist. It was the first and best shot I ever made, and I remember thinking, There’s nothing to this game.