It's a remarkable house sitting in just the right place looking out over the perfect view. And it seems like it's always been there, but it hasn't. Sixty-five years ago it stood on Stonewall Beach at Squibnocket, maybe a hundred feet from lapping waves. That's almost unthinkable now, with what we know about storms, hurricanes and erosion. It's illegal, as a matter of fact. But back in 1938 the Chilmark sands were dotted with cabanas and summer shacks and a handsome shingled Cape Cod house, recently built by Roger Allen (of Allen Farm in Chilmark) and Clifton Parker for Benedict (Bob) Thielen and his wife Virginia Berresford.
Thielen (pronounced TEE-len) wrote novels as well as short stories for the likes of The New Yorker and Harper's. Virginia was a painter who'd shown in New York and Paris. (It's her portrait of Katharine Cornell as Juliet that hangs in the back stairwell at the Cornell Theater on Spring Street in Vineyard Haven.) The two were part of a savvy word-of-mouth group of artists and writers – including the Thomas Hart Bentons and later the Max Eastmans – who discovered the Vineyard as a summer hideaway shortly after World War I. Even better, they found Chilmark, far from the summer hordes of Oak Bluffs and Vineyard Haven.
On September 21, 1938, the Thielens were at home, along with their cook, Josephine Clarke, and didn't have a clue that one of most fearsome hurricanes in American history was tossing houses and roads and trains and human lives out of its way as it barreled up the East Coast. They had no electricity and no radio and even if they had, the storm was laying waste to radio towers, telephone and telegraph lines, wiping out the means to send warnings before the warnings could be sent. All the Thielens knew was that the weather was awful and that the wind, rain and ocean were on the rise.
There are two versions of what happened next. According to the story he told his stepson, Charles Close, Thielen stepped out on the porch that afternoon and said, "It smells like a hurricane ." He would have known, living as he did part time in the Florida Keys, where hurricanes regularly wipe clean the slate of those tiny islands. In this version, he urged them all to leave the house as soon as possible.
But Virginia told a different story. In her version, it was the cook Josephine Clarke who remarked that it looked like "hurricane weather." As a native of Jamaica, another island familiar with hurricanes, she would have known too. In this account, Bob resisted until he'd spent some time looking around outside and was finally convinced that the situation was serious. We'll never know whose story was right. There's no record of Josephine Clarke's version, but when they left might have made all the difference to her.
The storm strengthened quickly. The Thielens watched as foam blew over the top of the dunes, then a trickle – "as if someone had emptied a glass," he would later write – ran over the crest, followed by another trickle, and then a stream. Just an inch or two at first, but incessant. The water was a foot deep when the three finally began to wade to the high ground next to Stonewall Pond, just inland of Stonewall Beach. Bob held Josephine Clarke's hand as Virginia walked ahead.
Without warning, what had been a threat turned into a full-blown catastrophe. "There was no slow, gradual, increase of the water," Thielen wrote in "A House by the Sea," a short story originally published in The Yale Review. "There was a swirl and a noise of rocks and splintering wood and the water was up to our waists. There was a second wave and it was up to our necks."
The storm surge had wiped away the high ground and the three were now plunged into deep water. Thielen and Berresford swam well, but Clarke didn 't know how.
Thielen kept his grasp on Clarke's hand, but that made it harder for him to swim in his oilskins, weighed down as he was by boots filled with water. He described the terrible decision he had to make: "There is a screaming in my ears of this sinking woman and the wind blowing at ninety miles an hour across this water where there was once land. I know about lifesaving and try to swim backwards holding her with one arm on my chest. I cannot move my legs with their water filled boots. To get them off, I must submerge completely, lean down and pull at each one with both hands. I must let go my hold on this dark reaching hand. I dive under, twice, once for each boot, then undo the buttons of my oiler and let go again to pull off the trousers …. I see my wife swimming ahead of me. The other face is gone. A woman's hat with a green feather is floating, spinning slowly around in the water."
Bob and Virginia made it to shore, then looked back toward the ocean at an astonishing sight. The storm surge had lifted their house up off its foundation and tossed it into the pond. Now it was moving across the water, heeling like some crazy boat as the wind pushed against walls and doors. Bob was scanning the waters for Josephine, but there was no trace. She was to become the only Vineyard fatality of the Hurricane of '38.
Later, Thielen was distraught. "To get warm," he wrote, "you can drink all the rum they hand out to you and you can get drunk on it, but it won't make you sleep…. [E]very time you close your eyes you see the immense slavering arch of the oncoming wave, the yellow spittle dripping down and a dead face in the sullied waters."
It was artist Tom Benton who had "handed out" the rum that Thielen was drinking. Benton, a good friend and neighbor, lived up the hill and had come down to check on the couple. What he found must have appeared surreal – his friends emerging from a wall of mist and water and their house in the distance floating in the pond. He was taken enough by the scene to later commit it to canvas in his painting "The Flight of the Thielens."
Josephine Clarke's body was eventually found and sent back to Jamaica. Bob Thielen refused to rebuild on the beach site. The house had come to rest on the down-Island side of Stonewall Pond and neighbor Bernetta Parker (nee Vincent) took pity on the young couple. She sold them the property where it had landed, including the crown of a hill which overlooked the original site of the house, but which stood a good thousand feet back from the ocean.
Surprisingly, a good deal of the house had floated over intact (as did the cat, Finn, who remained behind when the Thielens left and rode out the storm in the houseb as it traveled the pond). Roger Allen claimed the house needed only a new chimney, drying, scraping and painting and set to his work, testimony to the acumen of Island carpenters and perhaps the seaworthiness of a wellbuilt Vineyard house. When the time came, oxen dragged the house up the hill to its new site where it was christened Anchor Hill. It was a wise choice of location – it stands there still, changed little, the high water marks left by its journey across the pond visible on the original wood plank walls inside.
Virginia Berresford continued as a noted painter, off- and on-Island. She divorced Thielen some ten years later and eventually moved into her own home in West Tisbury, living there until her death in 1995. Bob Thielen remarried and continued to make the Island and Anchor Hill his summer home until his death in 1965. A coincidental footnote – a hurricane came through in August of 1991 and cut a temporary channel between the Atlantic and Stonewall Pond. The wind and water passed directly over the original site of Bob Thielen's home, kicking up the last remaining bricks and parts of the foundation left on the beach. The name of the storm, which once again inundated the beach and sent storm waves as far as Qyitsa Pond, was Hurricane Bob.
This article appears in September-October 2003.