When I was a little kid, our family had a camp on a lake in southeastern Massachusetts. It was pretty rustic, just a long room with two bunk beds, a fireplace, a sink, and an old Westinghouse refrigerator.  Dad had built the place himself out of white pine from the property.  There was also a tiny cabin where I slept, a tool shed, and an outhouse. I like to think back on it now as The Compound.

I remember one morning when I was about ten years old; everything started off normally. Dad left for work. I had finished breakfast and was sitting in front of the TV watching The Today Show as Dave Garroway talked about a hurricane named Carol  heading toward New England. This was before satellite tracking systems and hysterical meteorologists, and it was the first news we’d heard of a hurricane, although the wind was definitely picking up. Within an hour it was blowing like stink, and we could hear brittle pine trees around us snapping like match sticks.

Suddenly, right over our heads, there was a crack like a gunshot. I looked up in time to see a huge branch puncture the roof near where I was sitting. My mother didn’t waste any time gathering me up and making a run for my aunt’s house, up on a nearby hill. It had two stories and could afford a little better protection.

I spent the next few hours huddled under an oak table with my cousins, waiting for Carol to pass. That evening we went out and found our house flattened by three big trees. That was my introduction to hurricanes. I don’t take them lightly.

Shortly after Joyce and I built our house on the Vineyard, we were to face another hurricane, this one called Bob. But this time we all knew it was coming. It was August of 1991, and hurricanes didn’t sneak up on anybody anymore. Crack meteorologists from all the major networks had been tracking this one from the time it was just a gleam in the eye of a zephyr off the coast of Georgia, and they had been working themselves into a lather for two days. This one looked like it could be serious, so we did everything we could to get ready. I took the sails off Netcher and let out extra scope on the mooring line. We made sure we had batteries, candles, lamp oil, and canned goods. We taped the windows and filled the tub with fresh water, although that proved to be worthless when, at the height of the storm, our dog jumped into it. We tied down everything that could move and parked the car in the middle of the lawn where it would be less likely to get hit by a tree. Then we hunkered down and hoped for the best.

When you’re sitting through a hurricane, the sound is what gets to you the most. The windows rattle, the whole house trembles, but it’s that turbine-engine, whacked-out-on-steroids sound that really gets to you.

As hurricanes go, Bob did a pretty good job. Not as devastating as the hurricanes of ’38 or ’44 or even Carol. But Bob definitely made his presence felt. We were lucky; we lost a couple of trees but nothing serious. Netcher came through unscathed. Elsewhere, the Island lay under a carpet of fallen limbs. Boats were beached and tossed up on jetties in the harbors. Some spots on the south side of the Island lost fifty feet of beachfront. And power lines were down everywhere; we wouldn’t have electricity at our house for about a week.

At least that’s what I’m told.

I’m ashamed to say that I was on the first ferry out the next day so I could fly to Los Angeles, where I would be working for the next few weeks. And so while Joyce and our son Spike were seeking out friends with generators so they could take a shower, I was sitting next to the pool at the Loews Santa Monica, charging margaritas to my room.

The wonderful thing about Joyce is that in spite of being deprived of electricity and water for about a week, she never lost her sense of humor.

One afternoon I returned to the hotel and stopped by the desk to pick up my messages. There, waiting for me, was a box that had been sent priority mail. I went outside on the patio and found an unoccupied table, ordered an iced tea, and proceeded to open it.

The people at nearby tables must not have known quite what to make of the guy sitting by himself who suddenly burst out laughing while he held up a gray T-shirt with bold blue letters on the front: I GOT BLOWN BY BOB.

The Bob T-shirt was to see quite a bit of action over the next few years, starting that very evening when I wore it to meet up with a couple of college friends over at Venice Beach – not that anyone even noticed it over there. But every so often, after a couple of drinks, we’d drag it out and have a good laugh. Eventually, it got tossed onto the rag heap and would have just faded into oblivion were it not for the annual Whippoorwill Yacht Club Regatta.

The Whippoorwill Yacht Club is an organization set up to hold model sailboat races every fall out on Menemsha Pond. There are different age- and boat-class categories, and it’s become a very popular event, drawing everyone from little kids to old-timers. The only stipulation is that everyone has to build their own boat from scratch: no kits.

The first year we entered, we didn’t even realize the race was that day until someone called to ask if we were going.

“We don’t have a boat,” we replied.

“Make something. You’ve got a couple of hours,” was the response.

So Spike and I went down to the basement to see what we could cobble together. Over in the corner, where I keep stuff for the sailboat, Spike spotted  a couple of small fenders you hang over the side of the boat when you tie up to a dock or another boat. They were about two feet long, full of air, and would make great pontoons for a catamaran. We lashed on a piece of plywood for a deck and attached a mast made from a quarter-inch dowel. Now all we needed was a sail, and what should be staring up at us from the rag pile than our old friend Bob.

Spike and I proudly walked upstairs with our sleek racer.

“Oh, my God. You’re not – they’ll throw us off the Island,”  screamed Joyce, who nearly fell over laughing.

I’m not sure if the Whippoorwill Yacht Club was entirely ready for Bob. To begin with, the caliber of the fleet was a whole lot better than what I had anticipated. Thinking “no kit,” I just assumed that there would be a rag-tag bunch of boats made from scraps of wood found behind the shed.

Hardly. Granted, a few boats did look like an eight-year-old had glued them together, but for the most part, it seemed that if these boats were made by little kids, they were little kids who knew their way around power tools. A few of them looked like they’d been taken out of a glass case in a museum. Bob was looking a little scruffy.

But Bob had bigger problems to overcome than aesthetics; Bob had structural problems. The wind was  really blowing that day, and it didn’t take long for Bob to capsize. One of the cardinal rules of naval architecture is that a vessel shouldn’t be top-heavy.  Bob’s pontoons weighed about four pounds. A size XXXL T-shirt, soaking wet, weighs about 750 pounds. You do the math.

I felt bad for Spike. There were several preliminary heats and he and about ten other kids at a time would wade out waist-deep, and when the starting gun went off, they would let go of their boats and stand back. The boats would then sail off in different directions. Bob’s direction was always down. If there had been a submarine class,  we would have taken home the gold.

But that’s all right. As I said to Spike, “It’s not about who wins or who loses; it’s about who can go out there with the most tasteless message on their sail without actually being arrested.”

And just for the record, the winner in Spike’s division was not a scale model of a classic Herreshoff with twenty-three coats of varnish. It was a shingle with four seagull feathers mounted on it for sails.

There is a God.