The first vehicle my sister Laura
ever owned was a blue 1967 three-quarter-ton Dodge truck, formerly
belonging to the National Park
Service. She bought it the summer
she moved from California to
Chappaquiddick with her boyfriend, Bill. They lived here in a wigwam
they built from bent saplings covered with an old nylon parachute.
It was 1973 and all kinds of
odd structures were popping up in
the backwoods of the Vineyard. Edgartown selectmen, worried about being overrun by hippies, passed a
bylaw making it illegal to camp, even on your own land. On Chappy, we
just moved the campsites a little
farther back in the woods.
Some improvements had been made to Laura’s truck by the former owner, but he must have gotten distracted before getting around to the details, like bolting things down. The truck had a plush bench seat from a Cadillac, but it wasn’t fastened to the frame, so Laura had to ease on the brake to keep from hurtling into the dashboard. None of the fenders were connected at the bottom, and the truck rattled so loudly you could
hear it approaching half a mile away. The emergency brake was glued under the dashboard with Bondo, just to pass
inspection, and only one door opened, so everyone had to climb in and out the driver’s side.
The first night Laura had the truck, she and Bill decided to drive out to the beach. When they got onto the dirt road, a big bump made the battery bounce up and smash into the fan, which cut into the radiator, and the truck stopped dead. The fan was bent, the radiator gouged beyond
repair, and battery acid was leaking
all over. It was not an auspicious
beginning.
Back then, no one worried too much about being legal on Chappy. We didn’t have any regular police,
and people pretty much did what
they liked or could get away with in terms of the finer details of the law.
If you had a car that didn’t have
plates, you just made sure to back it
up to the bushes when you parked down at the ferry. We were like the backyard of Edgartown, and the
town officials didn’t seem to care
much what we did over here, as long as we didn’t expect them to spend
any money on public services for us.
Laura hadn’t registered her truck yet, so when she went to bring it back from town, she and Bill borrowed our sister-in-law Daryl’s car to pick it up. They took the plate from the back of Daryl’s car, put it on the back of the truck, and drove nose-to-tail through town. When they got across the ferry to Chappy, they stopped to put the plate back on Daryl’s car. Foster, the closest person we had to an island
official (which was not too close),
was in the ferry line with a couple of town government VIPs. Foster wasn’t so particular about being law-abiding himself, but he had to put on a good show for the bigwigs. He came over
to Laura and said, “What the hell
are you doing?” When she mumbled some vague explanation, he said, “Well, get on home!”
Home was down a grassy path
off a dirt road back in the woods near Cape Pogue Pond. Laura and Bill had started the foundation for Laura’s house near the wigwam, but neither
of them knew much about building. They didn’t get beyond the foundation that summer because they were always arguing about how to do things. I lived nearby in the woods with my best friend, Linda. We’d gone to high school together, hitchhiked through Europe, and now, with few thoughts about our future, were working and living on the Vineyard for the summer, or longer. We lived in pup tents, pitched under the pines to keep from being spotted by Foster as he flew his airplane around, looking for
illegal campsites.
Laura, Bill, Linda, and I shared a kitchen under the pines, surrounded by poison ivy and bull briars. It was built from two-by-fours we found at the dump, with plastic walls and roof, and mosquito netting for a door and windows. We had a table and chairs, also from the dump, and we built a counter for a Coleman stove, with shelves below for dishes. We dug
a hole to keep the food cool, and covered it with a board to keep out the skunks. The kitchen was between the tent and the wigwam, and on the way to breakfast we could pick blueberries for our cereal. The four of us found plenty to argue about too – who left out that honey spoon now crawling with ants – but the kitchen was a delightful spot in rain or sun.
My brother Mike is an artist and his passion back then was pin-striping cars. In the ’70s, every builder had his name painted on the door of his truck, lettered with a sense of reserve and decorum. Mike painted elaborate flames on Laura’s truck, and on the
door the name Raunchy from some 1950’s song. Bill got a kick out of
the subtle poke at Vineyard pride, but Laura didn’t. She thought her truck deserved more respect, even if it was
a bit, well, raunchy.
Living on the island only added to Raunchy’s character. Once when Bill was on his way fishing, there was a fly buzzing around the cabin of the truck. He grabbed his bathing suit off the seat to swat it. The suit caught on the fishhook underneath it and the sinker smacked into the windshield, shattering the whole thing.
The summer of 1973 was a wet one. I ended up getting pneumonia just about the time Foster found our campsite and told us we’d have to take it down. Laura retired the truck to the island junkyard where it rusted comfortably for many years. She and Bill moved back to California and split
up soon after. Laura returned to San Francisco State, where she’d gone to school before she met Bill.
Back then she’d lived in a tiny apartment with cardboard box furniture. People had told her life would get easier and she’d have a family and more money some day, but it was a mystery to her how that would happen. Her truck and her boyfriend had been learning experiences, but now she was on her own again. In a couple more years, she got a degree in architectural drafting and life did get easier. She found a good job and moved to a beautiful house in the middle of an avocado grove in southern California. The husband and family took longer to show up. It wasn’t until she was fifty that she got married. Then all within one year, she became a wife, mother, and grandmother. Her husband’s an executive and Laura’s an art teacher. She waited just long enough to find a man she didn’t argue with, at least not all the time. And now she drives a brand new Honda.
