Recently I started noticing some of the cars for sale in the Bargain Box of The Martha’s Vineyard Times, and they reminded me of the “good Island car” I used to drive. There was a car for which “rust is an issue,” and one that “needs a little work,” but the price was right at $100 each. There was an ad for a 1991 Nissan Sentra that “ran great before clutch problem,” and a 1974 Dodge van whose only advertised attribute was that it “has valid sticker.” Both were priced under $100. Below even this asking price was the Saab that “doesn’t run. Needs work, maybe will run” – which was free for the taking and therefore cheaper for the owner than paying to junk it.

These were my ideas of a good Island car. A good Island car is a car that stays close to your heart for years after its rusty demise. You might remember, with somewhat less fondness, its quirky habits that left you stranded or freezing, but mostly its little deficiencies are forgotten or forgiven in time: The snowy, winter days with no heater, freezing sleet, and broken windshield wipers. Shingles wedged to keep the side window from falling down, and boards on the floor so your feet didn’t run along the ground like Fred Flintstone’s.

A good Island car likes to be kept on the Island; you take your chances by driving it off-Island. I bought my first car, a good Island car, in 1973. It was a gray 1960 Chevy station wagon with flaring, horizontal fins that belonged to an old couple who lived in a trailer near the Tisbury School. When I test-drove it around town, it went fine. It was only while going over thirty-five miles per hour that the creaky ball joints made the steering wheel vibrate.
The car was right for my purposes, though. I had started building my house back in the woods on Chappaquiddick that fall, and I hauled wood and bags of cement in the back. When I went back to school at UMass in January, I got the ball joints replaced and drove it out to Amherst. I guess it didn’t like being taken off the Island, because it wouldn’t start on cold mornings, and one day the accelerator got stuck while I was driving. I tapped it a little to try to free it, but the car just went faster. Soon I was zooming down a little street, starting to panic. I managed to pull the car over to the side of the road and turn the key off. But the engine wouldn’t quit! It sounded like it was getting ready for takeoff. I guess my foot slipped off the clutch, because the car lurched and stalled out. After that, our relationship became a little more circumspect, but it was probably my fault for taking the car away from its Island home.

I brought it back to the Vineyard the next year and kept it on the Island until its problems became insurmountable. At that point, it joined the other rusting hulks in the junkyard near the beech grove I loved. Sometimes when I took a walk, I’d stop and sit in my old car and say hello to Putty Man, a little guy who sat smoking his matchstick pipe on my dashboard (he was made from the remains of a can of putty from a house-painting job). Finally, the car got hauled away in a massive junkyard cleanup.

Owners of good Island cars sometimes get so attached to their vehicles they can’t let them go, even when the signs are clear to everyone else that this car should be taken out to the side yard and left to rust. My friend Mary had a car like that. It was a red 1975 Plymouth Horizon that she bought at the Chappy Garage in about 1990. It was a hatchback, and there were still stray bits of hay in the back where someone had hauled hay bales. The Plymouth had been abandoned at the Chappy point after being flooded by high tides during some storm, and Gerry Jeffers got it running again. Gerry is the owner of the garage and surrounding junkyard, home of many former good Island cars, as well as potential future ones.

Gerry’s been messing around with cars on Chappy his whole life and probably never met a car he wouldn’t consider fixing. If he can’t fix it, the car is definitely ready to move on to the next phase of its life, probably as a parts car out behind the garage. The delineation between good Island cars waiting to be fixed, and parts cars waiting to become junkers, can get blurred, and there’s usually an indistinguishable mix sitting around the garage yard. Kind of like successive growth in an abandoned field. Sometimes the only way to distinguish a good Island car from a parts car is the For Sale sign. Gerry put one of those on the windshield of the Ply-mouth and parked it out in front of the garage.

My friend Mary rode her bike on visits from Indiana until she saw the Plymouth at the garage and decided it was time to get a car. She test-drove it a few feet in the garage driveway; the price was right, and she bought it on the spot. Later she got to know the many aspects of its personality. The passenger door didn’t open, so guests climbed in and out the window or over the gear shift. One day when she drove the car home it refused to shift into reverse. Luckily, she could loop through the trees and get it turned around. That was the first time the transmission fell through the floor. Gerry fixed it easily by propping it up with some handy metal piece scavenged from one of the junk cars.

Years later, when the car was quite elderly and the windshield wipers stopped working reliably, a friend offered Mary a newer good Island car, so she donated the Plymouth to the Chappaquiddick Community Center for use by the new director, my sister Laura, who had come back from California for the first summer in twenty-five years. The little car fit right in with her picture of an old-time Chappy summer.

Laura needed the car just to get to work, transport the tennis teacher with her rackets and balls to the courts, and go across on the ferry to town to buy groceries. The little red car was the right good Island car for the job. She used it for three summers, with all its personality defects, including a couple more episodes with the transmission. The last time it fell out, Gerry tied the transmission up with clothesline so Laura could drive home. At that point, Laura and Mary agreed it was time for the car to retire, and it was put out to pasture behind the garage. On the wall at Mary’s house there’s a picture that Laura painted of the little red car bursting with personality.

Cars come into their good-Island-car status kind of the way the stuffed rabbit comes to life in The Velveteen Rabbit. Over the years, daily use makes a car take on an almost anthropomorphic character. This is especially true when you live on an island off another island, like I do, and you use your car as a traveling domicile. Your car becomes a satellite home, containing many of the features of your primary home: photos taped to the dashboard, a couple of dirty dishes in the back seat, an old rain poncho, spare flip-flops for when you accidentally leave home barefoot, a bathing suit, summer and winter hats, a blanket to keep groceries cool in summer and lunch warm in winter, and magazines to read if you get caught in a Chappy ferry line. It’s not long before the car feels like home, and you acquire a real affection for that hunk of metal on wheels. In the Bargain Box, an ad for a “free big ol’ Buick Regal” suggests you can “get her started with a new battery.” You know someone has a close personal relationship with that car.

When I met my husband Sidney in 1974, he had an old blue 1966 VW Bus that was almost like part of his body. You know how when you see some people on foot, you’re surprised in some vague way as to how they look? Then you realize that you’ve never seen the lower half of their body, because you’ve only seen them driving their car or truck. They look a little the way a soft-shell crab must look when it’s just shed its shell. Sidney wasn’t quite that extreme, but he had that bus so long, it became a personal expression of his identity.

He kept the old bus alive for at least fifteen years, rebuilding the engine twice, and then replacing it with an engine that turned out to be underpowered. One year we drove the bus all the way up through the Rocky Mountains at fifteen miles per hour. Sidney built an elaborate camper interior for the trip, with a bench seat that folded down to make a bed, and a counter, complete with sink, for a camp stove. We had to start the car by crossing the terminals of the starter motor with a screwdriver. We got so good at it that we could hold onto the bumper with one hand, swing under the car with the screwdriver in the other hand, and fire her up all in one motion.

In time, the bus turned into our Island car and then eventually ended up parked off the driveway, where it became a shed of sorts. Some younger and more idealistic bus owners scavenged parts, and over the years, the bus slumped toward the ground. This past year, a friend bought an old flatbed truck to carry lumber to the Island. To pay for his ferry tickets, he takes junk cars off-Island to the salvage yard. Since our parting from the old bus was long overdue, we called on him for his service. Before he came, we cut back the vines and bushes that had almost swallowed the bus. The old bus nearly crumbled the rest of the way as she was towed out of the trees and loaded onto the flatbed, ready for her final voyage to the junkyard. Sidney took so many pictures, you’d have thought it was a child leaving home forever.

The thing about good Island cars is that they don’t last forever, so it’s useful to have more than one.

At one point, besides the bus, we had an old white VW Squareback. When someone offered us another one exactly like it for parts, we took it. Since they were both in the same condition, it took us awhile to figure out which one to drive and which to use for parts. Neither lasted very long, though, and we moved on to a series of old Volvo station wagons and other VW Buses.

Gerry Jeffers has driven an interesting succession of good Island cars ever since I’ve known him. Sometimes I don’t recognize him in time to wave as he drives by in yet another old Jeep or truck. For a while, he was driving such a fancy new car that no one recognized him, and he had to resort to honking to say hello. But Gerry needs a good selection of cars, trucks, and bulldozers because he uses them for lots of activities in various terrains.

I remember the snowy day Sidney and I made it through the drifts, driving our old Bus down the dirt road as far as Gerry’s house, where he’d started plowing. A little farther on, between the banks of snow, we came upon Gerry’s plow truck. He wasn’t in it though, because he was under the tow truck parked in front of the plow. The plow truck had broken down, so Gerry walked back to the garage for his tow truck, called the Wrecker. But when he got the Wrecker there, it broke down too. I pictured a whole line of disabled vehicles in front of us as Gerry went back for needed parts, but he easily got the Wrecker fixed and towed the plow truck back to the garage.

Gerry’s garage and junkyard have become an important part of life on Chappy over the years, but some people think they’re eyesores. Even though I don’t love the way rusty old cars look, I like driving every day by a place that has a purpose. Recently a friend and longtime visitor to the Island said to me, “What would Chappy be without the junkyard?” The junkyard puts Chappy’s peace and beauty into the context of the real world, where people live regular lives. It reminds me I don’t live in Disney’s Chappaquiddick World, but in a real community – one that has a tradition of making do with what’s around. What’s been good enough in the past, if it still works, is good enough now, and good Island cars are just good enough.