To the New Owners, page 21
Julie Stanton, speaking for the whole Lawlor family (her husband, Ted, and daughters, Claire and Hilary), on August 18:
Sadness prevails as I look around this beautiful living room dismantled and packed into boxes. But there is immense gratitude to have shared even a small part of the experience. And comfort in knowing that the friendships that deepened here will continue forever. To paraphrase Rick and Ilsa, we’ll always have Thumb Point. The spirit of this place will live on.
Leslie Ware’s final “consumer reports rates the beach house”:
CR has provided some suggestions as to how to ruin the Point:
Tear down the house, replace with a ten-thousand-square-foot “cottage” with turret, widow’s walk, and moat. Pave the road and add speed bumps and an electric gate with a guard in a uniform. Install a satellite dish for the big-screen TV that goes over the fireplace. Have a fenced heated pool sunk into the beach. Pave the beach. Buy jet skis and a cigarette boat. Commence daily delivery of the Wall Street Journal and the New Hampshire Union Leader. Finally, charge all guests: $5 to sightsee, $25 cocktails, $50 dinner.
Best beach house ever. RIP, Thumb Point.
Chapter Sixteen
At Rest
“You can’t fend off the passage of time,” as John’s father liked to say.
As we headed down our driveway to the dirt road, leaving the house behind for the final time, I wondered as I always did when I left for the summer about the island at rest. Was it like the Night Kitchen, all chaos and merriment? Even better? I had visited a few times during the shoulder seasons (late spring just before summer and early fall just after) and once at Thanksgiving, and I got the impression that for year-round residents the real life of the island occurs most vividly any time but July and August.
I once had a student in my memoir class at the University of Massachusetts who grew up on the island. In response to a prompt about “The Things They Carried,” Rob Morgan wrote about a piece of wampum from the beach on Martha’s Vineyard, explaining that it is “just part of a sea-worn hard-shell clam or quahog. It ranges from white to lavender to a kind of organ-dark purple, which is my favorite. It connects me to the Vineyard and its history when I’m away from it. The first one I carried was given to me by a girlfriend of nine years. She wanted to get married, I couldn’t quite commit, and it ended. But I carried that damn shell around for another five years then lost it. I’ve got a new one now.”
If I remember correctly, Rob’s father had been harbormaster on the night of Chappaquiddick. You can see Rob in Jaws—an extra, along with his sister: little kids bobbing on a raft just before one of the attacks. Because getting on- and off-island always requires forethought, the Vineyard has the capacity to make you feel closed in and trapped. Rob experienced that sense of enclosure to an extreme degree. He said that he was nine years old before he took the ferry for his first trip to the mainland and how he had to catch the next ride back because his mother, who was agoraphobic, had jumped off just before the boat left the dock. Later, smitten with wanderlust, he tried to join the marines and received a letter back from a recruiter, who lauded Rob’s high goals and tenacity but said that as an eleven-year-old he did not meet the age requirements. He ended up writing, and publishing in Boston Magazine, an essay called “Island Bound” describing how when he finally came of age, he lit out for the territory:
In 1983, when I was 18, I left the island for the first time. I experienced enormous joy in seeing a world I had known only through stories and pictures. Among other things, I “discovered” at 70 miles per hour what a rotary is. I wondered at the beauty and synchronicity of a traffic light. I marveled at the Boston skyline. I rode an escalator for the first time but didn’t know how to work an elevator and was too embarrassed to ask, so I usually used the stairs. I went to 43 states and hitchhiked through California. I traveled from Mexico to Canada to Ireland to Poland. I lived in Vermont, Boston, and New York, where I worked in film production—a lifelong dream.
Yet Rob reported that it is always a thrill to see Martha’s Vineyard from out at sea when coming home on the ferry:
I now live far from the ocean. In the summer I will visit my parents. Leaning against the rail of the boat, I will see the island as a thin line on the horizon. And I know that from where my mother waits, the ferry will look like a dot on the sea. I’ll ask my father to take the beach road home. I’ll look to my left and find the Atlantic curling into the shore. It has always been my favorite view.
Rob, as a child, and his family to this day, as well as the schoolteachers and the fishermen and fisherwomen and the seafood store operators and the nurses and the doctors at the hospital and the home health care workers and the construction workers and the retired summer residents and the librarians and the schoolchildren, know the true story of the island at rest. My sense is that the Vineyard in winter is similar to the town where I grew up in the western part of Massachusetts: it exults in the rhythms of its ordinariness. People harvest grapes for jelly and they freeze their homemade raccoon stew. Life in the off-season boils down to an elixir of essentials: light and the lack of light; cold, more cold, and what to do about it.
I read the Gazette thoroughly, which I suppose is already, from the many references to it in this account, obvious. What a treasure that paper is, both well written and well edited. It is fiercely local. “Names sell newspapers” is an old journalism saw, upheld with enthusiasm by the writers of the six town columns who report on world events rarely, nature and her sermons often, and news of family and friends and neighbors all the time. The paper honors the past, seeing it as an undercurrent that buoys the present. And it is visionary: the paper keeps the island’s future front and center with an implicit sense that it is an expendable resource if we don’t watch out.
The paper lets me know that by Labor Day the island has cleared out and a more restful rhythm takes over. The invitations from prep schools and posh colleges for cocktail parties are no longer featured in the paper, replaced by ads for winter rentals. Now you can detect sweet pepperbush that attracts bees and butterflies. Sailors love it because, inhaled from out at sea, the odor carries the promise of land.
The first order of business is getting the island children back to school, but also right up there is the annual Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby, which lasts five weeks and features big money prizes in an array of categories, as well as grand prizes like a new Chevrolet Silverado 4x4 and a nineteen-foot Boston Whaler. The men and, increasingly, women (Phil, take note!) talk about past triumphs, a 10.13-pound bonito caught off Nomans Land and the 12.48-pound false albacore caught off Memorial Wharf in Edgartown.
Seasonal residents close up their houses, laying a fire as a final gesture to ensure a guaranteed greeting in the upcoming spring.
The Polar Bears, self-named and perhaps not as intrepid as the winter Polar Bears you read about elsewhere, swim at Inkwell Beach in Oak Bluffs every morning from the Fourth of July until Labor Day. They bid each other good-bye, remembering among other fine moments the impromptu concert of jazz on a keyboard and flute that greeted them one summer’s day.
At Heather Gardens in West Tisbury, if you buy three mums you get one free. Sheep are put out to pasture in fields that were off-limits during the summer months. Monarch butterflies swarm the island in the early fall, competing with the foliage for the prize of most colorful. A powwow might be scheduled in Aquinnah. Stores go out of business or have insane sales.
By early October the recreational season for bay scallops opens. In recent times, two dueling worries: the fear of a sparse harvest and, even then, not enough shell fishermen to get what there is. The diminished supply sickens those who care about such matters. The culprit, they say, is in the Midwest: higher smokestacks carrying more pollution across the belly of America to the coast.
The Chilmark General Store closes until the spring. Some of the fish markets stay open until Columbus Day. The second Tuesday in October is called Cranberry Day, a time when children get a day off from school and families all over the island celebrate not just the cranberry harvest, but abundance in general, with picnics and storytelling and gatherings.
By mid-October applications are available for the Red Stocking Fund, a charity that has been in existence since the 1930s, which supplies food, toys, and clothing to island children through the eighth grade over the holidays.
The commercial scallop season begins sometime in November.
At West Tisbury School, the children traditionally prepare one hundred pumpkin and apple pies for the food pantry and the elderly.
Late fall: shotgun season for deer. Wear bright colors.
The Old Whaling Church holds an annual holiday concert.
A Festival of Wreaths benefits the 1832 Sara Mayhew Parsonage in Edgartown.
All winter, new babies are welcomed: Stella, Tabitha, Eagan.
In the spring: witch hazels, camellias, magnolias, rhododendrons, viburnums, dogwoods, and, just before summer, just before the population swells from 15,000 to 120,000, stewartias.
Around May first, Morning Glory Farm reopens, advertising “young and lusty plants.”
The orioles usually return just in time for Mother’s Day.
The students at the Chilmark School distribute May baskets to members of the community, with the fourth and fifth graders performing the maypole dance. The Chilmark Community Church celebrates the annual Blessing of the Fleet on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. According to the town news one year in the Gazette:
The service begins at 9 a.m. in the parking lot next to the Menemsha Texaco building. All are welcome at no cost and the children are made part of the event, to their delight. It is a most enjoyable annual event with music and refreshment and a reading of the list of Menemsha boats.
And every year, if you are a seasonal visitor, you see the changes you might not notice with the same jolt if you live on the island year-round and witness the flux in slow motion: A fishing shack is gone. A mansion has sprouted up on State Road on the corner leading to the beach at Abel’s Hill South. The intersection at Barnes Road and the Edgartown–Vineyard Haven Road has a roundabout; it cost $1.4 million and some neighborly goodwill between those who oppose any changes to the island that smack of city and those who don’t. (In 2016 the town of Oak Bluffs declared the former blinking light to be surplus so it could be auctioned off at the Possible Dreams auction as a nostalgic icon. A couple bought it for $8,600.)
More and more the houses are architected, like the Gap House across from us, the one with the roof that resembles a rudder. You will know its current owner is on his way when you see landscapers combing the seaweed off the beach in front of the property. Fancy, fancy, fancy.
Also, all over you will see new swimming pools or the equipment to create them: pretty soon the island will be a doughnut.
As to the ultimate question: How much did the new owners pay for our place?
Three million dollars minus $17,000 for our share of their new roof.
You might think that with our portion of the loot from the house, we took off for the Riviera to live in perpetuity on the spoils. Not so fast.
The days following the sale were an exercise in accounting.
Expenses associated with the move came to $13,020.11.
John warned his sibs there would be another bill from Leo DeSorcy.
Our accountant, June Walker, sent a bill covering her preliminary handling of tax aspects of the sale: $3,620. June agreed to prepare a K-1 form for everyone.
“The K-1 forms should go to whoever does your 2014 taxes,” John said in a note to his siblings. “Please be prepared to pay the government approximately 20 percent of what you receive from the sale. That’s the low-end estimate.”
We had been covering expenses on the house through an equity loan for at least five years, so after paying that off, after paying the real estate agent and the lawyers and the accountant, after paying back individual debts to the kitty by those who had borrowed from the estate, after setting aside a wad of cash for the government, everyone had enough to feel better about their bank accounts, but not enough to change any lifestyles. For the most part the windfall relieved debt and created a cushion against the encroachment of our advancing years. This was an amazing gift on top of the memories and nothing to scoff at.
Some of our old neighbors nursed a fantasy that the new owners might allow the land to revert to its wild state and make it a kind of visual public park for everyone to enjoy as they swam or boated by the property.
Wishful thinking.
Most expressed a strong opinion against expansion, hoping to find an old rule somewhere that would prevent any new construction. Someone promulgated a Hail Mary theory: perhaps the riparian owners (the association of people who own land on the pond) had agreed internally fifty years ago to limit the size of new construction to three thousand square feet.
More wishful thinking.
In that first winter season after our departure, snow was record-breaking all across Massachusetts, and the Vineyard was not spared. On the island, most of the barn owls starved to death, as they were unable to feed on the rodents beneath the snow. As a result, Susan Straight commented on the Gazette’s website, “the population of white-footed mice (an important vector in the spread of Lyme disease) is likely to sky-rocket.”
On March 9, 2015, the West Tisbury Planning Board reviewed the plans for a new house to replace our old one:
The proposal is to replace an approximately 2000 sf seasonal house with 1969 sf deck with a year-round house of 5054 sf plus 3431 sf of deck. There will be a 560 sf auxiliary structure (garage) located approximately 200-plus feet to the north from the main house.
The original Katzenbach camp was built about 50 years ago and renovated into several structures (detached master bedroom/bath and main house including 4 bedrooms, living/dining room and kitchen plus bathrooms) by DeSorcy Company about 20 years ago. About that time electricity and phone service were provided to the site and to other locations on the easterly side of Thumb Cove—before there was no electricity or phone service on that side of the Pond. The renovations were completed to a very high standard and the rustic style is very charming. Over the years the residence has weathered and the vegetation grown so that the complex is barely visible from the Pond.
The current plan places the location of the current residence (grandfathered) to be located in the shore district of the coastal zone, and the proposal is to locate the new house—which will be a year-round rather than seasonal house—so that all but a small portion is out of the shore district although the deck is actually significantly greater in size, and thus significantly greater in impact on the coastal zone.
After a description of the proposal by Reid Silva, James Moffatt of Hutker Architects showed the plans and described various aspects of the plan including the general layout, energy efficiency, architectural style, need for special permits, and elevations which show a central flat roof portion surrounded by several components which will have gable roofs. The plan contains 5 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms, a wing with a kitchen/dining room/living room and a central portion containing four closable areas for unknown use. There is also a considerable amount of glass-enclosed space which is peripheral to the main central units.
The applicants’ agents were reminded of the demolition delay clause of the ZBL.
Questions were posed by board members, and members of the audience and abutters (Mal Jones and Joel Kirschbaum), about the adequacy of the dirt road leading to the property, about the point’s propensity for significant erosion, etc. Virginia Jones commented that the access dirt road can be easily flooded either when the Pond is very high, or during coastal storms. In fact on the point to the west the hurricane line from the ’54 hurricane is still visible and on Thumb Point it would be either at, or close to, the base of the proposed house with the access road being flooded.
James Moffatt pointed out that the current plan is for the central flat roof to be accessed by an outside stairway, and roofed by a roof system composed of a waterproof membrane topped by—perhaps—succulents. After considering the design—essentially a glass box with various internally segregated rooms, the applicants were also reminded by the board of the need to minimize light pollution with shaded down-pointing or inward-pointing light fixtures, particularly as the plan shows floor-to-ceiling full glass windows and numerous potentially lighted areas both inside and outside. All landscaping is to be planned with reference to the guidelines established by the Polly Hill Arboretum, no fertilizers or chemical amendments (pesticides, fungicides, herbicides) are to be used, all glass is to be nonreflective and no cutting is allowed in the overlay districts. Heights of the various facets of the structure are strictly regulated and must be designed and constructed according to the heights allowed in the various overlay districts. As shown the plan is currently for red and/or white cedar shingled walls. Roof of gabled areas was not described. Glass windows are planned to be triple glazed although this may be an issue due to inability to meet hurricane standards. Shutters may be required.
As a new septic system and location are required, we urge that a state-of-the-art denitrification system be installed. This is particularly urgent due to the potential year-round use of up to 6 bathrooms by a potential of 10 or more people.
It was suggested that the proposed 12’ x 42’ pool should be constructed so that when the Pond is flooded that the pool doesn’t pop up and float away. Any associated machinery (pool equipment, auxiliary generators, and other noisy machinery) is to be located underground if possible and in highly sound-insulated structures.
Although it was not mentioned, we remind—by this letter—the applicants that any paths in the various overlay districts, or future docks, will need to be reviewed and permits obtained. Any riprapping or coastal armoring must be reviewed and permitted in advance. Further any additional structures for sports equipment, boats, guests, etc., must be reviewed and permitted as well.
