A Shoot on Martha's Vineyard Page 4

  A lot of people say that when they first see the place, but I often wonder how many would actually enjoy living in an old hunting camp that had only recently been spruced up enough to count as a house. For most of its career, it had been more of a wooden tent.

  My tent. Now our house.

  Still, like much that Mondry had a knack for doing, he had said the right thing. How can you be mad at somebody who really seems to like a house that you like yourself?

  “Hi,” said Zee, coming out of the house with Joshua on her hip. “Are you ready for your exploration?”

  “Raring to go,” he answered, flashing his white grin. “I thought we could take my Rover, here, if that’s okay. It’s got beach stickers if we need them.”

  I had been looking at the windows of the Range Rover. Whoever owned it had stickers for about every beach or parking area on the island. The stickers on my old Toyota Land Cruiser and Zee’s little Jeep were limited to Edgar-town’s beach offerings.

  The Range Rover was also new and shiny, unlike our cars.

  “The Rover will be fine,” I said.

  “Why don’t you drive,” he said. “That way you won’t have to be telling me where to turn all the time, and I can eyeball the scenery instead of just the road.”

  He could also chat with Zee while I was busy at the wheel.

  “Fair enough,” I said.

  I got Joshua’s car seat and strapped it into the backseat of the Range Rover while Zee fetched the baby bag from the house.

  Drew Mondry took the bag from her and carried it to the car as I wondered if my skin was literally turning green.

  “What do you want to see?” I asked. “Anything in particular?”

  “Everything but Chappy, I guess. George took me out to the very end of the Cape Pogue Reservation, all the way to the gut. So I’ve seen that area. Then he showed me the Japanese garden there by the Dyke Bridge, and took me around to some other places on Chappaquiddick. But I haven’t seen much else.”

  “The two-wheel-drive tour seems to be in order,” said Zee, strapping Joshua into his seat and climbing in beside him.

  “We can start with that, at least,” I said.

  I got behind the wheel and Mondry climbed in beside me. He had a clipboard and camera close at hand as we headed up our driveway toward the paved road.

  I give two Vineyard tours to visitors: the four-wheel-drive tour out around the far beaches of Chappy, and the two-wheel-drive tour around the rest of the island. Each takes about two hours at least, but can last a lot longer, depending on how often my guests want to stop to eat or pee or sight-see in more detail. Real restaurant/restroom tours can take half a day.

  I explained this to Mondry as we headed for Edgar-town and he laughed. “My belly and bladder are in pretty good shape,” he said, “but I may want some photo ops “or I might even want to get out and look around a bit. If we don’t get everything done today, we’ll go out again later, if that’s all right with you.”

  “If you’ve got the money, honey, I’ve got the time.”

  He grinned. “I’ve got the money, and we’re already in my Cadillac.”

  Son of a gun. Another C and W fan. Didn’t he have any flaws at all?

  “I know you’re looking for possible sites for shooting this movie,” said Zee. “But how do you know when you’ve found one?”

  He turned and put an arm on the back of his seat. “I have a copy of the screenplay and I’ve got notes with me here on this clipboard. I want to do two things right now: spot scenes that we might use for atmosphere and back-ground stuff—the ferry coming in, the beaches full of people, Wasque and the fishermen, the village streets, and like that; and I also want to find places like a beach where they can dig for the buried treasure, and a good road for the car chase scene. That sort of stuff.”

  “I hear that it costs a lot of money to make a movie these days,” said Zee.

  He nodded. “Especially if they’re made on location. It would be a lot cheaper if we could shoot this in a studio, but then it wouldn’t be the real Vineyard, would it?”

  “No, I don’t think you can fit the Vineyard into a studio.” She laughed.

  I have a pretty standard spiel that I give on my island tours: odd and not-so-odd observations about what we’re looking at, so newcomers will know something about what they’re seeing. I gave it now as I drove down through Edgartown, showing Mondry the yacht club, the On Time ferry, which was always on time because it had no schedule, and the town wharf, with its walkway topsides where you could get a good look at the harbor, which was full of yachts.

  I took him up North Water Street, past the library—a favorite hangout—and the huge captains’ houses, which were each set slightly cockeyed to the street for reasons I have never had explained to me. We hooked away from the lighthouse, rounded out of Starbuck’s Neck onto Fuller Street, and passed Emily Post’s house and lovely flower garden. I took Main down to the four corners again, then went right on South Water, passed under the giant pagoda tree, then took a left down to Reading Room and Collins Beach, where the locals, including Zee and me, keep their dinghies chained to the bulwark to prevent them from being stolen by visiting gentlemen yachtsmen and other thieves.

  Then I drove him up Cooke Street and along other narrow, flower-lined streets, past the white and weathered-shingle houses of the village, until we popped out on Peases Point Way and I headed south toward Katama.

  “Beautiful,” said Mondry.

  Indeed.

  I drove to South Beach, where already the Late-August People were parking and putting up their umbrellas and morning kites. I showed him the Great Plains, the herring run and the ruins of the old herring factory. As we passed the little Katama airport, I told him the tale of the wife who, wearing only a bathing suit, had flown in with her husband so she could sunbathe on the beach while he attended to a couple of hours of business in Edgartown, but who had ended up buying a whole wardrobe and spending three days in town because of a sudden thick fog that kept her husband grounded.

  Then we drove back through Edgartown, where the traffic jam was already in place between Al’s Package Store and the A & P. Creeping free, finally, we went up the beach road to Oak Bluffs, where I pointed out the island’s entry in the farthest-north-statue-of-a-Confederate-soldier contest, which was actually a gray-painted statue of a soldier in a Union uniform. Then we crawled up honky-tonk Circuit Avenue and I showed him the tabernacle and the ginger-bread houses of the campground. I told him of the old-time camp meetings, of the town’s racially integrated citizenry—in stark contrast to that of almost lily-white Edgartown— and of its importance as a summer resort for nonwhite doctors, lawyers, merchants, and other wealthy folk, many of whose families had been coming there for generations.

  Mondry asked questions and took notes. I modified my earlier notion that he wanted to ride shotgun only because it would give him the opportunity to dazzle Zee. He seemed to be doing the job he was supposed to be doing.

  I drove him around East Chop, over the Oak Bluffs bluffs, and told him of the time when I was a little kid, that the sound had frozen a third of the way out from the island and a third of the way out from the far Cape Cod shore, leaving only a channel down the middle of the sound.

  “No kidding,” said Mondry, glancing at the blue August waters. “You’d never guess that now.”

  “If you look at photos taken in the old days,” said Zee, “you see pictures of wagons and sledges out on the ice unloading square riggers. It really got cold back then.”

  We drove past the hospital where Joshua had been born, and went over the drawbridge and past the island’s only red light. The Shenandoah, which sails out of Vine-yard Haven harbor, had her square foresails up and was heading out before a small following wind. She looked like something from an earlier century.

  I drove up Main Street and out onto West Chop. There, at the far end, I told him the tale of the island’s most famous murder and showed him the buildings associated with tha
t never-solved crime.

  “It captured people’s attention because the victim and the suspect were both involved with a theater company,” said Zee. “The guy they charged was found not guilty, but even afterward a lot of people were sure he was the one who done it.”

  “Just like modern times,” said Drew Mondry. “People love to know about scandals involving theater people.”

  I ducked down to the Lake Tashmoo landing, then drove out to the entrance to the pond, where mussels grow on the rock jetties and I’ve caught more than one bass and bluefish. Across Vineyard Sound, the Elizabeth Islands seemed close enough to hit with a stone from my slingshot.

  Then it was up-island, via Lambert’s Cove Road, Christiantown, and North Road, to Menemsha, a fishing village that looks like it was built by Walt Disney as a set for a movie about a fishing village. Drew Mondry, seeing the obvious, got out and snapped several pictures and came back full of enthusiasm.

  “We’ll shoot here, for sure!”

  Joshua, less impressed, had taken advantage of the stop to pass that morning’s breakfast along to his diaper, requiring a change of clothing by his mother, who didn’t mind because she’d seen Menemsha lots of times but still barely knew Joshua and his habits.

  “Why do you call it up-island?” Mondry asked.

  I told him about the two explanations I’d heard: that it was up-island because the prevailing winds were westerlies and you usually had to sail up-wind to get there from down-island, and vice versa; and that it was a longitude matter, with Gay Head being a higher number than, say, Edgartown.

  “I favor explanation number one,” I said, “because I’ve beat my way up the sound more than once, but I’ve never met anybody who knows the longitude of Edgartown or Gay Head.”

  “And that’s why you go down Maine, I guess.”

  “I guess that, too. Down Maine and up to Boston. Of course, I’ve never sailed to Maine and back again, so what do I know?”

  “You seem to know quite a bit,” said Mondry. “If you ever decide to go into a new line of work, you might consider buying yourself a bus and running your own tour of the island.”

  Quel horror!

  “How you doing?” I asked Joshua, who once again smelled sweet.

  He said he was hungry. What a kid. As soon as his belly was empty, he wanted it filled again.

  “I’ll tend to his lunch,” said Zee, and she did that while I drove us past Beetlebung Corner and on toward Gay Head. I paused at the overlook where you can get the great view of Quitsa and Menemsha Pond, with Menemsha Village way over on the far side, then cut through the gateway in the stone wall on the opposite side of the road and parked so we could walk down and see the Quitsa Quoit, one of the island’s oddest stone structures.

  “What is it?” asked Mondry, as we came into the little clearing and saw the quoit.

  “A genuine Vineyard mystery,” said Zee, taking him up to the structure while Joshua and I went down to see the little fire pit at the bottom of the grassy area. Mondry was busy with his camera.

  The Quitsa Quoit, also known as the Chilmark dolmen, consists of low, vertical supporting stones topped by a slab of rock that pretty apparently didn’t get there by chance. I’ve seen photos and read of quoits in Great Britain, and the resemblance is considerable. But American and British antiquarians, archaeologists, and historians differ greatly about their interpretations of such sites. The British are quick to say that their dolmens are prehistoric structures (the current favorite theory being that they were originally the interiors of burial mounds from which the earth has long since washed away), while the American scholars dismiss such claims about their country’s quoits and are inclined to say they are either fakes built by beguilers or are storage chambers built by early settlers who just never got around to mentioning them in their writings.

  Zee had apparently brought Mondry up to date on the various theories, for as we walked back to the car together he was saying, “Storage chambers? Burial mounds? That doesn’t look like a storage chamber or a burial mound to me.”

  “John Skye couldn’t agree with you more,” I said. “He thinks both theories are bunk.”

  “Who’s John Skye?” asked Mondry.

  “John Skye is a friend of ours who summers on a farm in Edgartown,” said Zee. “In the wintertime he teaches up in Weststock College, up north of Boston. Medieval lit. He goes over to England whenever he can get the college to pay for it, and spends his time in libraries and out in cow pastures looking at standing stones. He says that if the quoits were originally covered with dirt, there should still be a lot of that dirt right there around them. But there isn’t.”

  “For years he’s been working on the ultimate translation and interpretation of Gawain and the Green Knight,” I said.

  “So what’s he think of this quoit here?” asked Mondry. “You’ll have to ask him.” “Will you introduce me?”

  “Sure. If you need to know anything that happened before fifteen hundred, he’s your man. He’s not so good on things that have happened since.”

  “I’d like to meet him,” said Mondry. “I’m not sure if I can figure a way to get this quoit into the film, but I like it. Do you know who owns this land? I’d like to talk with him.”

  I’d heard the owner’s name, but I didn’t know him.

  “We can find out,” I said.

  We got back into the car and headed for Gay Head, where the Wampanoags, after centuries of being hard-pressed by the Anglos, were now hoping to do quite well, thank you, from the profits of their proposed mainland bingo joint. Toni and Joe Begay, she a native of Gay Head and he a long way from the Navajo country of his grand-fathers, lived up near the cliffs, and I thought it might be a good thing for Drew Mondry to meet two real live Indians.

  — 6 —

  Gay Head has some of the finest bass and bluefish grounds on the island. Squibnocket, Lobsterville, Dogfish Bar, and other sites are famous among East Coast surf casters. The town lies on the western tip of the Vineyard, famous for the multicolored cliffs whose bright-hued clays give those cliffs and the town their name. Gay Head is a lovely place of rolling hills, fine beaches, and ancient Wampanoag traditions, but I consider it to be an unfriendly town because of its politics. I mean, you not only can’t park beside its roads to go fishing or lie on the beach, there are signs that forbid even pausing to unload passengers. Worse yet, the town parking lot charges two arms and a leg to park there, and the only public toilets are pay toilets. Any place with pay toilets is a place to avoid, such facilities being an affront to God herself.

  But Zee and I didn’t completely bypass that end of the island. The fishing was too good, and we had friends who lived up there and who let us park in their yards when we wanted to fish under the cliffs, thus allowing us to avoid the clutches of the ever avaricious Gay Head distributors of parking tickets.

  Two of these friends were Toni and Joe Begay. Joe, whose folks still lived out in Arizona, near Oraibi, had, long ago, been my sergeant in an Oriental war, but now, after a long and little-discussed career in odd parts of the world, he had settled down with island-born Toni in a house not far from the famous cliffs. They and their new girl-child Hanna lived a quiet life while Joe and Toni, like Zee and I, tried to figure out how to play the parenting game. Toni and Zee had grown close even before both had become pregnant, and now that they were the mothers of actual living and breathing children about whose care they knew not too much, they were even closer, and inclined, as new mothers often are, to participate in long mom talks about their babies and the trials and pleasures of motherhood. The failure of males to be enthralled by such conversations was, as Zee observed with tart sympathy, another liability of the Y chromosome.

  I took Drew Mondry first to Squibnocket Beach, where, after the daytime sun seekers have gone home, the bass fishermen love to prowl, then on to Lobsterville Beach, where there’s more good fishing (if you can find a parking place), then up to the cliffs themselves. There, after making three circles be
fore I could find a free place to park, I led Mondry up between the fast-food joints and the shops selling Taiwan-made Gay Head souvenirs, past Toni Begay’s shop, which actually sold American Indian crafts, to the lookout at clifftop. From there, looking to our right, we could see the bright clay precipice, see across the sound to Cuttyhunk and, far away, the edges of America itself.

  To the south lay No Mans Land, that curious island which at one time had been a combination of bird sanctuary and navy bombing range. What a mixture of uses. Now the navy had gone away, but even before that the birds had thrived there in spite of the bombs. Recalling this, I immediately thought of wretched Lawrence Ingalls, who had closed Norton’s Point because of his misplaced conviction that ORVs were responsible for the dearth of piping plovers on those sands. Loathsome Lawrence.

  “You’re clouding,” said Zee, looking up at me when I stopped talking. “What are you thinking about?”

  “Nothing,” I said, pushing the cloud off my face and putting on an artificial smile.

  She frowned, not fooled. “It’s something.”

  “I’m thinking about Immanuel Kant,” I said. Immanuel had once observed that the possession of power inevitably spoils the free use of reason. Maybe that was what had happened to Lawrence Ingalls. Maybe he’d been fine before he’d gotten to be a state biologist. If so, he wasn’t the first person whose brain shrank as his power grew. Old Immanuel’s generalization was a good one.

  Zee decided to let it go. She put a finger under Joshua’s chin and smiled down at him. “Immanuel Kant, eh? Well, if Immanuel can’t, who can?”

  Joshua laughed and drooled. Apparently he’d not heard that old one before.

  “We’ll go there next,” I said to Mondry, pointing down to the narrow beach at the foot of the cliffs. “On the way I’ll introduce you to a couple of people who live up this way.”