City of Chappaquiddick by Andrew Sarewitz
Memories can be vivid and clear. Whether they’re accurate or not is another story. Especially if reflecting on childhood times where you tend to unconsciously rewrite the history. Altered or in truth, I remember my summer days, young and carefree, on the island of Chappaquiddick, at the far edge of Martha’s Vineyard. I’m conveniently forgetting the multiple times I had contagious, itchy rashes from poison ivy and the August I came down with chicken pox.
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Where to some, Nantucket Island may have been considered elite, Martha’s Vineyard was an interesting sociological piece of Americana. In the mid 1800s, a large part of Cape Cod and the islands of Massachusetts were populated by immigrant Portuguese whalers and fishermen. Strangers to these foreign shores who became first generation American.
By the 20th century, as summer migrations added to the shore-town economies, Jews and people of color were accepted in certain parts... sometimes. On Martha’s Vineyard there is a town called Oak Bluffs, that was populated by African Americans. Though segregated, it was elegant and animated, known for a great many carved gingerbread houses painted in bright, fantastical colors, reminiscent of Creole New Orleans. Oak Bluffs, as with Sag Harbor on Long Island in New York, was a safe vacation and year round haven for the black population in white America.
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Our family rented one of two single floor apartments built deep into a rocky cliff on Chappaquiddick, mirror imaged and side by side. The other apartment was reserved for the same weeks by longtime friends. Both of the families were Jewish. When at our full capacity, we were four adults, nine kids, two dogs, a cat, three boats (if you include the dinghy) and a babysitter, often in tears. I was the youngest of our family’s four, the second to the youngest of all nine children. The Olingers, who took the neighboring apartment, were a five sibling crew.
Perpendicular and screened in, shading the front entrances of the rentals, was a porch that ran the full width of the building — and a significant reason someone would choose this lodging. It bragged an unmatched panorama. The full view veranda was raised high above the waterline and trees, facing east. The sunrise over the salt water pond was nature’s brilliance displayed like hushed morning fireworks. The property behind and well beyond the house traveled over to the sand and stone floor beaches of Katama Bay, across from Edgartown Harbor. Facing toward the west, those sunsets were filled with just as much magic as the morning light show, spectacular, before vanishing beneath the tides surrounding Martha’s Vineyard Island.
This was the 1960s. Before Ted Kennedy put Chappaquiddick on the national map by driving the family Buick into the salty river at the lip of the wooden Dyke Bridge that crossed from the dirt road over to the white sand on the far side. The Buick rested ghost-like on its side under the water, where Mary Jo Kopechne was later found in the back seat of the car, drowned.
If you were to cross the bridge on foot (or by a vehicle able to traverse deep sand), you’d eventually arrive at the ocean and dunes of Chappy’s aptly named East Beach. We summer residents and permanent citizens of Chappaquiddick know that Kennedy lied about his actions leading up to and after the crash. Whatever theories the locals formed and discussed, no one believed it was intentional.
Someone — I presume a teenager — splashed red paint all over the wooden bridge, resembling (not really) blood. Americans lined their automobiles down the dirt road leading to the arched plank crossing. People cut little chunks out of the bridge to take as souvenirs. While fishing, my brother was forced off the bridge by the gawking tourists in cars with license plates ranging from Alabama to Wyoming. If that sounds rather harmless, if not morbid and stupid, so much of the bridge was excisioned, it had to be rebuilt.
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The glorious gem where we and the Olingers stayed was advertised as the “Caleb’s Pond Apartments,” which my sister, Ellen, reminded me was also referred to (by us) as the Slums of Chappaquiddick. Antiquated bread-burning toaster and Depression Era glass dishes included. We rented the house from Tony Bettencourt. The properties he owned on the Vineyard would be worth millions by now. Without debate, Tony was land poor. Little cash in hand, but wealthy in real estate.
Armed only with circumstantial evidence, Tony was a witness for the prosecution against Ted Kennedy. Knowing the landscape of the island and her roads, Bettencourt testified that the events mapped out by Ted Kennedy could not possibly be accurate. Beginning with Kennedy claiming he accidentally took the wrong fork in the road while driving to the ferry slip. There is no fork. You either turn left and stay on a paved road, or you turn to the right and enter the dirt road that takes you to the Dyke Bridge and East Beach. Though Tony spoke the truth, he was metaphorically laughed out of court.
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Sometime in the 1930s, Tony built the first open air ferry that traveled from the edge of Edgartown to the western tip of Chappaquiddick. It could carry two cars. During the summers I was there, the motorized barge was called “The On Time.” An irony not lost on anyone, since the crossing only took a few minutes. The very first propelled ferry invented by Bettencourt was named “The City of Chappaquiddick.” By the 1960s, that ferry was permanently moored, dormant and abandoned, in Katama Bay. There had been a fire on Chappaquiddick. A fire truck drove onto the little ferry on the Edgartown side and subsequently the flatboat heeled and sank. The ferry was recovered, but I presume the truck was either rescued after the fact or remains at the bottom of the harbor. Needless to say, after that, the island of Martha’s Vineyard built a fire station on Chappaquiddick.
One summer, while Tony was clearing out his garage beneath the Caleb’s Pond apartments, he came across the sign for the original ferry, “The City of Chappaquiddick.” My brother Dan, who was “helping” Tony, asked if he could have the hand painted sign. Instead of discarding it with the trash, Tony gave the sign to my brother. From the time we returned home, the stenciled plaque lived on a wall in Dan’s bedroom in New Jersey.
What was formed decades ago between the Olingers and us was a bond that still holds. They are family to me…without the intra-intimate drama. In winter, we would take ski trips together. Warming by a fire place after an exhausting day and terrorizing wait-staff when we went out for dinners. Come summer, when we all went for our annual lobster meal at a Vineyard restaurant called The Homeport, I think I remember us all behaving well.
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In 1971, my parents bought property and built a house in Southern Vermont. Our time on Chappaquiddick came to an end. I tend to blame Kennedy’s sensationalism and the masses it attracted for why we abandoned Chappaquiddick. The truth is that our getting to Chappy by car from New Jersey would be near to impossible during the cold months. Vermont was much more convenient. Accessible and vibrant year round, I admit it made much more sense. But I am an ocean and island boy. The mountains of Vermont did not call to me.
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In 1997, Mom and Dad sold the home in which I grew up and moved to a condominium in a neighboring New Jersey town. When the house was being emptied, I asked Dan if I could take the black lettered sign that hung unappreciated in his childhood bedroom. He agreed to let me have it on a permanent loan. Though it’s just an old piece of painted, decaying wood that was attached to the first ferry that ran between Edgartown and Chappaquiddick, it is a marker that reminds me of a time rare and gone from my childhood. I accept that I can’t go back, but I can remember.