Packed to near bursting with provisions, the Chevrolet beach wagon waited in the dirt driveway at 30 Phillips Street as everyone piled in on a Saturday morning in July. Dad had a week’s vacation from Peaceful Meadows, and was eager himself to sit on the porch of the two-room cottage, cradle a bottle of beer, and, as he so often said with a contented grin, "watch the rest of the world go by." The cat was always the last passenger to load in. Then, last minute bathroom runs completed and all in readiness, doors slammed, the car motor rumbled to life, and the journey commenced.
At Lloyd Prario’s service station on Main Street, just beyond the deserted Hanson railroad station, with the smell of gasoline rising through the tailgate window, Dad would gas up the car for the big trip. Eighteen miles away high adventure and sweet relaxation waited. Wesley, Laurie, Donnie, Marlene, Eric, and Dave could hardly wait. Long years afterward the smell of gasoline still reminded Eric of going to Brant Rock, where the Green Harbor River joined the Atlantic, a salty smell of passion that bonded him and his siblings forever to the sea.
The oil checked and the tank fueled up, and with a friendly good-bye from Lloyd as he stepped back inside to work on his perfectly-detailed dollhouses and model country stores, Dad would turn the car southeast down Route 27. Moments later Laurie would burst into song:
"Oh, you can’t go to Heaven
In a rocking chair
‘Cause the Lord don’t want
No lazy bones there,"
with the brothers and sisters gleefully joining in, repeating each line in an ebullient echo. Verses followed for each family member:
"Oh, you can’t go to Heaven
In Daddy’s car
‘Cause the darned old thing
Won’t go that far."
Nor would Mommy’s boat, Wes’s pants, Laurie’s bike, or any other number of bright ideas provide the requisite transportation to Paradise. "The Ants Go Marching" came next, or "One more river, and that wide river is Jordan," with a succession of sing-along favorites close behind, and the singing didn’t stop until the familiar sights and smells of the coast caught the children’s attention. Next to Dad sat Little Dave in the car seat with its own plastic steering wheel and horn. Mom rode shotgun position, turned sideways to accompany the chorus of high-pitched voices. The Blauss family was going to the island! After a whole year they were on their way again. The thought of salt water, clam shells everywhere, crabs side-stepping under the wharf, periwinkles or snails clinging to the wooden posts that held up the dock, waiting for the tide to rise again, kept the kids in high anticipation. And for Eric, in the rough years that followed, the smell of beach roses always brought on the longing for and refreshed the vision of those hot, safe island days.
From Hanson through Pembroke and Duxbury, along King Philip’s Path and over the bridge at Route 3 the overcrowded vehicle groaned happily. Soon they had reached the north end of Duxbury Bay’s extensive salt marsh and then the historic Winslow house and the sign for Camp Cedar Crest. They recognized they were close now. The old Chevrolet passed a few more sandy streets and cottages with neat hedges, came abreast of the Green Harbor Marina, and out onto the dike. The dike, the dike!
Upon riding onto the dike everyone except Dad would exclaim, "Hi, island!" Pulling the car up to the guard rails on the river side, Don clambered out, untied the rowboat from the roof racks, and heaved it over the guard rails, the bushes on the slope below so thick that the sturdy, little vessel would slide right down the twenty foot embankment, gently and undamaged, on the cushiony underbrush. The boat was soon in the water and the Chevrolet partly unpacked. Most importantly the heavy aluminum beer keg that would provide their source of potable water was hoisted with effort over the side and everyone stepped back as it rolled crashing down the hill, ending with a splash in the marsh grass. The little kids remained itchily in the car. The loaded boat had no room for more than Dad and Wes once all the provisions had been stowed aboard. The first trip over began. Dad rowed. Mom and her children closed the car doors and drove the short distance to Marshall Avenue, then a left on Webster and another on June Street. In a little pink house lived the Helpins, where Edna stopped to fill more jugs of drinking water. The children were becoming antsy now to get on with it. Back in the car Edna drove slowly around the bend of the dirt road. A tall chain-link fence surrounded a high voltage electrical transformer, and just to the far end of the fence a circle of dirt and grass had been worn down by car tires, a circle about thirty feet in diameter. A guide wire from an electrical pole anchored in the middle of it. Often another car would be parked there already, belonging to Belle and Bill Dexter, "Auntie Belle and Uncle Bill." They owned, after years of squatting, the little log cottage down the path, the family’s next, if temporary, destination. Nine years of residence on the unclaimed property had given them title to it. Uncle Bill mowed the trail from the parking area to the river. In some places boards or slabs provided dry footing over the muddy spots. Blackberry bushes groped out from the sides, snares for unwary children carrying bundles and boxes of provisions. A lightly-laden younger child could pause and refresh himself on fruit before running to catch up with his older siblings. The Dexters’ cottage and clearing seemed a long way from the car. It wasn’t, much less than a quarter of a mile. The world just seemed that much bigger when we were small.
The Dexters and their grandchildren relaxed in lounge chairs and hammocks on the shaded lawn at path’s end, Uncle Bill nursing a Narragansett beer, Auntie Belle with a mixed drink and Kent cigarette in hand. Edna and Auntie Belle exchanged big hugs. Uncle Bill’s greeting, though seated, was no less sincere. Now another generation had arrived. In terry cloth underwear and no shirt, three-year-old Cathleen Dexter, their granddaughter, ran uninhibited over the soft carpet of grass, so gentle on bare feet compared to the bristly island lawn. Three years older, Marlene was just as likely to run shirtless after her under the shade trees. Modesty was not an issue for Edna’s children until the girls started to develop, and the Blauss girls developed late. The island was private, and the Dexters’ was the transition into the freer world where underpants ruled. No one deliberately stripped on arrival, but a toddling David clad only in diapers fit seamlessly with the terrain.
After nearly a year’s absence, everyone visited. Donnie and Eric tangled cheerfully on the rope swing. Into the hammock clambered Cathleen, Marlene, and David, maybe baby Brenda Dexter as well, and Laurie provided wild pushes, while Edna sat with Belle and Bill and exchanged the news of the year. Cathleen and Brenda were the children of Laddy Dexter, lobsterman son of Belle and Bill, who had settled in Brant Rock, less than a mile from the cottage where he, his brother Danny, and his parents had spent their summers, and his parents’ presence provided easy babysitting service. The kids romped. The adults jibber-jabbered while awaiting the arrival of Wes and the unladen boat.
Eric ran to the riverbank, hurdling a ditch, barely noting the old stone fireplace and Uncle Bill’s thatch duck blind, to await Wes’s arrival. The muddy riverbank dropped into salt water, shallow off the Dexters’ pier. Clamshells littered the bottom. Dropping to his belly on the rough wooden planks, Eric reached down into the river to examine several. While he paddled, Wes appeared around the end of the island with the empty boat. "Hello!" shouted Eric, leaping up to run with the news. "Here he comes! Hurry up! Hurry up!"
Edna would stay with the Dexters a while longer. Not enough room in the boat for everyone, but the kids crowded down to the shoreline, possibly with supplies in tow. "All aboard that’s getting aboard!" Laurie announced. Into the back clambered Eric and Dave, Laurie wedging her skinny self between them. Marly and Donnie got the front seat. Wes stood up with one oar, handed the other to his brother. "Here, Donnie, help shove off," said the rower. Shoving against the muddy bottom, they broke the suction of the mucky flats and inched off from the bank. The boys sat. The oars were slipped back into the oarlocks. Wes turned the stern upriver and the bow toward the island, pushing one scull forward and he other back. Often one oar only worked at the turn, the other poised horizontally, relaxed over the water’s surface. Eric would study his older brother’s rowing techniques. ‘I’m going to row the same way,’ he’d think. From Dexters’ dock to the end of the island was about a hundred feet. A wide flat extending out from island’s end gradually dropped to a depth of four or five feet at high tide. Showing off, Wes pulled hard. The boat, overfull and low in the water almost to the gunwales, raced over the flats, just clearing the muddy bottom. Eric watched the swirls of water twisting off the end of the oars, the boat racing away from them with each pull.
As the family rounded the point of the island, the dike came into view. If the tide was coming in, white foam floated up the channel in the current. Wes steered out toward the center of the river to avoid shallow water and the thick, algal bloom that covered large areas of the river in midsummer. The green, slimy growth could drag on an oar, making it too heavy to pull a stroke, and the oarsman would perform annoyed contortions, rolling the blade, until the gunk fell off. Sumac groves swept by, the stand of birch trees on which they would soon be swinging.
There, close by, sat the little barn red cottage. Closing in on the sandy landing area, Wes alternated strokes, left, right, left, right, one oar in the water at a time, the port oar pulling slightly harder, arching the boat around the end of the little dock and pulling it up alongside. "Land ho!" yelled Laurie. "All ashore that’s going ashore!"
Donnie, holding the bow rope, secured the rowboat. Everyone else scrambled onto the pier. Someone had to go get Mom, still over at the Dexters’. In the early summers the job went to the "big kids", Laurie and Donnie, but soon Eric was volunteering to go, hoping to practice his strokes and turns the way Wes and Mom did. There was no rush. The children unloaded provisions. Bags and pillowcases and cardboard boxes were lugged up onto the lawn, then instantly deserted as their bearers raced around in a near frenzy of delight at their summer homecoming. Back upriver Eric headed to pick up Mom. Pulling alongside Hidden Cove, not really a cove, but a little indentation in the bank that Donnie had named, where a double birch tree grew out from the island almost parallel with the water, Eric practiced his sculling techniques. Pushing the left oar and pulling the right, he turned the boat in a few quick circles. Then scaring himself because he was alone, he rowed as fast as he could for his mother. Hopefully she would be waiting for him at the dock and not still jibber-jabbering with Auntie Belle and Uncle Bill. That was unlikely. A whole year had passed since they last saw each other. They had plenty to talk about.
But now Edna was ready to move on. She had plenty to do when they got to the island, even if "those kids" hadn’t vandalized the cottage as they did almost every offseason. "Those kids" broke windows, scattered crockery, smeared peanut butter on the walls. Edna didn’t know who "those kids" were, but once or twice they were spotted retreating from the island as the family approached, and many times they had broken into the empty camp and spent the nights drinking and trashing the place. Occasionally they might be spotted on the mainland, carrying guns. The little ones were fearful of them. Was there vandalism this time? Edna wanted to know. Eric reported that all was well on the island. Still, even without "those kids’" efforts, Edna had many chores ahead, washing the dishes, airing out the blankets, and all.
She and Eric pulled up at the dock. Eric beamed as his mother commented on what a good rower he was becoming.
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