If you are going to get nabbed for speeding in Chilmark, you could do worse than be stopped on the rise just west of the Allen Farm on South Road. Rolling sheep fields and ancient stone walls overlooking Chilmark Pond and Lucy Vincent Beach make it the quintessential up-Island vista. For police officer Charlie Paris, however, the spot is all about usefulness; it provides him with enough shoulder space to pull cars over safely. “These roads in Chilmark are so narrow,” he says after calling in the plate number on a speeder caught heading down-Island. “This is one place where I don’t worry so much about being clipped.”
But on this particular summer evening, as the sinking sun lights up scattered rain clouds over the Atlantic, Charlie is not worried about himself. He is more concerned about the driver of the car he has just pulled over, an elderly woman who has broken a cardinal rule and gotten out of her car to approach the cruiser. “Ma’am, please go back to your vehicle and stay inside,” he pleads, leaning halfway out the door. She yells something back at him, waving what appears to be a driver’s license, then turns and wanders back to her car as a truck rumbles by. “She could have been hit easily,” he says, shaking his head. “You really have to be careful on these roads.” The confrontation passes without incident, but Charlie is fired up. It’s the most action he’s seen all day.
The truth is, Charlie is pretty new to this. A college student who recently turned twenty-one and who spent last summer on a bike writing parking tickets, he has graduated this summer to patrolling the winding, rural roads of Chilmark in one of the town’s two police cruisers. (Coincidentally, Chilmark police and other town emergency personnel are referred to as “Charlie units” over the Communications Center radio channel. Charlie’s call sign is Charlie-40.) Where he once wore shorts to work, he now wears a bulletproof vest. Instead of donning a helmet, he now straps on a gun. “What a difference a year makes,” he says, laughing.
When you meet him, one of the first things you sense about Charlie is that he is a good kid. You can tell just by looking at him: his schoolboy good looks and wide, inviting smile remind you of the lad you hoped would ask your daughter to the school dance. He radiates an easiness that lends itself to helping others and seems to get along with everyone he meets. “It’s the best job in the world, really,” he says. “The Vineyard is paradise: quiet, beautiful and safe. Out here, it’s perfect for a kid to learn the job.”
The “out here” part is one aspect of Charlie’s job he’s still figuring out. Coming to the Vineyard from Braintree, he laughs when comparing Chilmark to his home town and admits to having had trouble remembering Tea Lane from Tabor House Road. Like his father, a police officer in Milton, Charlie hopes to work for a municipal police force after finishing at Stonehill College in Easton. “But to learn here, it’s perfect.”
Perfect, maybe. Exciting, not so much. Charlie often finds himself on a continuous loop, roaming down South Road into West Tisbury and swooping back up Middle Road or sometimes North Road – “You have to change it up or it becomes monotonous” – before starting all over again. If he really wants to mix it up, he’ll zip over to Squibnocket for a quick peek at the surf.
Mostly though, Charlie sits in his cruiser clocking traffic or at headquarters waiting for a call, for that chance to put into practice all he has learned about policing. But even Charlie has no illusions about what those calls most likely will be: beachgoers trespassing on a private beach, a wedding limousine stuck in a ditch off Middle Road, or, if it’s a bad day, perhaps a moped accident or a dog hit by a car. “It’s a small, quiet community, and you get the same calls, see the same things,” he says. “But at the same time, you’re glad you don’t see too much.”
As dusk begins to settle over the Allen Farm, Charlie has seen enough from the speeding elderly woman: his radar clocked her going more than fifteen miles per hour over the speed limit and she left her car twice in the ten-minute stop, despite the warnings. Yet Charlie returns to the cruiser having issued her only a written warning. As he turns off the flashing roof lights and returns to his loop down South Road, he offers an explanation for this act of kindness, which, you sense, is a common response from Charlie-40. “She was a nice lady,” he says, smiling.
