On the Wednesday morning after Labor Day last year, I was in no hurry as I pedaled down Chappaquiddick’s main road toward the ferry. The piercing rays of the September sun dappled the pavement with patches of light and dark shadows that made it hard to see where I was going. The long stretches of shade were so dense that I felt I was disappearing when I rode into them. Up ahead in the sunlight, I saw a couple on bicycles coming my way. The woman called out to me: “Where does this road go?”
I’m used to people asking where a place is or how far it is to somewhere, so for a moment my mind jammed, because I didn’t know what to say. I thought, “Nowhere,” but that didn’t seem quite right.
I could have said, “It goes to the end,” but that seemed obvious; presumably she knew she was on an island, as she’d come across on the ferry – two ferries if she took one from the mainland. Even if she had flown to the Vineyard, she must have noticed from the air it was an island – the skies had been clear for a week, as only end-of-the-summer days can be.
I thought: It doesn’t make sense to answer, “It goes to Wasque” (the point at the end of the island), because she probably wouldn’t know what or where that was. If we had stopped, I would have asked her a question or two – like, where do you want to go, to the bridge, to the beach? – but she wasn’t slowing down, so I didn’t either. She zoomed by while I was still muttering, “Uhhhh.” As the distance between us grew, she called back, laughing, “It just goes and goes?”
Where does the road go? If it had been July or August, I might have said, “To the beach.” But in September after Labor Day, when so many people have left the island and it feels more like the little Chappaquiddick I’ve known all my life, I was confused about where to say it goes. The road goes to the blueberry patches at Wasque, to my friends’ and relatives’ houses, and to the farm where I got married; it goes to the home of Geof who just became a grand-father, to my beach of choice – East Beach – and to everyone’s houses.
If I was off-Island and someone asked me where a road went, I probably wouldn’t say California or the Bering Strait, but I could and, in a sense, it would be true. When my niece Gabrielle, who grew up on Chappaquiddick (she was born on the Chappy ferry) first went to live off-Island after high school, she wrote back about how disconcerting it was that the roads kept going and going without ever ending. Living here, she said, she’d never really noticed how, when driving, you always arrive at an end point sooner or later.
What an unusual place where I can say about the road, “It goes to the end.” And, that the end is only a couple of miles away. Strange, to live in such a delineated place, but maybe that’s why I’ve always liked islands: They don’t go on and on. An island seems to hold you so you don’t ever stray too far. When I grew up, I learned to sail in Cape Pogue Pond, where I couldn’t blow out to sea, never to be found again. When the fog came in so thick that I couldn’t see any land, which it often did, I could walk all the way around on the shore. I knew I’d find my way home.
