Chapter Seven: The Summer Shack
My grandmother did not own a television set. The drama of the cold war was a distant thing, and she refused to let it into her life. She refused to allow fear into her home.
Her attitude was, “If I can’t control it then I don’t need to worry about it. What will be, will be.” The summers living with my grandmother were some of the best summers of my life.
I spend weekdays at my grandmother's rambling 18-room Victorian house while she ran the post office. A tiny two-room shack at her open-air parking lot on Duxbury Beach is our home on weekends.
To call the hut, primitive would have been a compliment. Built in the 1890s as a salt-water shanty, the shack sat for forty years on the marsh, supported by an array of wood pilings to keep it above most storm tides.
Around 1930, when the demand for salt hay diminished, the shack was moved to slightly higher ground about a half-mile inland.
It measured about 15 feet by 20 feet and above the first floor was a second-floor loft accessible by a set of open wooden stairs. That was it; the shack had no closets, no electricity, and no running water. It was just a shingled box with rattling windows. As far as I was concerned, it was a summer palace!
Several sets of kerosene hurricane lanterns and a few flashlights provided lighting. A wooden icebox was our refrigerator. One 50-pound ice block would last up to three days in the summer.
The ground floor served as a combination kitchen, parlor, and bedroom while the upstairs loft was sleeping quarters for kids and visiting adults.
When nature called, we had a choice. We could trek 50 yards to an old two-seater outhouse or use the chamber pot. An open water tap about 30 yards in the other direction provided drinking water. A small propane camp stove was our kitchen.
I slept in the loft on a canvas army cot my uncle had brought home with him from the First World War and his service in France.
The loft had one small window at each end. In the evenings, as the wind blew across the marsh, the wind would sing in the wire mesh of the storm screens. The wind's gentle song would become a constant howling when the breeze freshened to anything above 25 MPH.
I found the music of the wind to be comforting and mysterious, all at the same time.
The "ceiling" of the loft was nothing more than the underside of the roof. I would sometimes lie awake in bed and read the markings and labels of the old wooden boxes, cranberry flats, and shipping containers my great-grandfather had scrounged to construct the roof. It was the ultimate in recycling.
Without radio or television, evening entertainment was limited to storytelling and card games.
We would often get up just as the sun was rising and go beachcombing, especially after a storm. Sometimes, if the sea had been rough the night before, we would find the beach at dead low tide often littered with sea clams and an occasional luckless lobster or two. We would gather them up, sometimes in bushel baskets and my grandmother would make clam chowder.
Other times we would hike about 3/4 of a mile to the nearby clam-flats and dug-up buckets of steamers for the evening meal. We ate like royalty.
Every Saturday and Sunday night, we would visit the local lobster pound. The menu was always the same: lobsters, steamers, corn on the cob, watermelon, and French Vanilla Ice cream.
My childhood summers were pretty much a 'free-range' affair. From about the age of seven, the rules were simple and few: Stay out of trouble and be back home by suppertime.
From an early age, I learned to be self-sufficient when it came to entertainment and keeping amused. I can remember doing 1,001 things, but I cannot remember ever being bored. Aside from helping my grandmother park cars at the lot, I spent my days exploring, building sandcastles, and flying box kites.
One day along the side of the road, I found an unopened 1,000-yard spool of nylon fishing line - 10-pound test. I brought it back to the shack, constructed a bright red box kite, and set it aloft. I was thrilled as I watched it soar into a cloudless summer sky.
After about twenty minutes of flying, I had let out about half the line, and the kite was a speck almost lost in a field of blue. After 45 minutes of playing out the line, I was at the end of the spool, and the kite was now an invisible dot lost in the heavens. Even searching with a powerful set of binoculars did not reveal the kite's location.
After about an hour of flying an invisible kite, I began to feel a bit foolish. People would stop, stare, and then ask what was I doing, where was my kite? They could only see what I could see, a long thin line of kite "string" disappearing into the summer sky.
As the afternoon wore on, I shuddered at the thought of rewinding nearly 3/5 of a mile of kite line and decided it was time to let my kite "live free." I found a large empty soda bottle and filled it three-fourths full with water, leaving enough air space for buoyancy. I tied the end of the kite string to the bottle and marched down to the beach.
The wind was blowing out to sea, and as I dropped the bottle into the water, it took off like a shot. What a sight to see! A quart bottle of Coke was skipping and splashing across Massachusetts Bay, headed in the direction of Provincetown on the Cape.
I watched until the bottle became lost in the distance and its wake merged with the waves. As far as I know, the kite is still traveling with the west-wind.