Twenty-eight years ago, I was commercial shad fishing on the Connecticut River. I was twenty-one. We heard Edgartown was the place to be if you like to fish. The guy I fished for wanted to give me a boat, but I bought my own instead and came down here with a couple buddies of mine. I should have took that boat! My boat broke down in the middle of Vineyard Sound. The Coast Guard came up to us and said, “Are you guys all right?” I mean, the boat wasn’t registered. They just looked at us, shook their heads. They didn’t know where to begin.

We got the thing going and tied up at the Edgartown dock. It sunk that first night. It was a pretty big boat, a twenty-two-foot lapstrake with an inboard engine. That old Gray Marine, in-line, four-cylinder. We got it back up somehow. I think it was Al Noyes who helped us get that baby going. Poured kerosene down the cylinders and flushed the crankcase out.

Then we did do a little fishing in it. We were getting a lot of scup and dogfish, but out off Porky’s Island there [in Muskeget Channel, between the Vineyard and Nantucket], it died. The guys were seasick. I had this Top tobacco can I was flashing for boats on the horizon. We were totally unprepared. We dropped the anchor. The tide was running so hard the anchor line parted. We were headed for England by the time somebody finally came.

The guys were so seasick they couldn’t even get up. I tied down the rescue line and our cleat came right up out of the deck. That boat was tired! It had no business being out on the ocean with a crew of dingbat kids from a river town. I tied the line around the steering wheel, which started to pull the whole deck out. We got back to Edgartown, tied up at the dock – and the boat went down that night again. We said, “That’s it. See you later.”

We dove down, got some tools off it, got a couple of fishing rods, but basically lost everything we had that was stashed in the boat. We just left the thing. We had no money to give them to haul the boat out and dump it. So then, listen to this, we moved in under the Big Bridge [on Beach Road between Oak Bluffs and Edgartown].

We dug little foxholes under there and had sleeping bags. We raided gardens and ate doughnuts out of the Black Dog trash and tried to find work. We were living off the fat of the land. I’d be hitchhiking around and notice they’d started baling hay. So we worked up on Ann Hopkins’s farm at the end of Christiantown Road in West Tisbury. Ann was a good contact. She always had some subsistence kind of work up there for many a young guy.

We’d go back to the bridge and sleep every night. And catch some fish and barbecue them up. Well, somebody figured out that we were under there and didn’t like it, so they called the cops. The cops came and got us one morning at about 4 a.m. and took us to the jailhouse.

They took us up before the judge right after some really bad guy; I think the guy had been accused of rape. We told the judge our story about the boat, living under the bridge, working, fishing, baling hay, trying to make it the best we can. The judge is looking at us and, well, you can just kind of tell he’s thinking, “Jeez, that sounds like fun.” He could tell we weren’t bad guys. The judge looks at the cop, who was just a summer cop, and says, “Young fellow, this is an island with a long seafaring tradition. On this Island, we come to the aid of marooned sailors. We don’t throw them in jail.” Then he looked at us and said, “But I don’t want to see you boys in here ever again.” I thought that was good justice.

My dad lived in Laguna Beach, California, but my ma lived in Connecticut. I had gone to high school in California and my last year there, I quit. I’d already been hitting the road, hitchhiking. I had just read Jack Kerouac. If there was a Halloween party on the other coast, I’d hitchhike across country and hitchhike back. I’d hitchhike East for Thanksgiving and again for Christmas. When I got tired, I’d hop a freight train. That’s how I learned to play the harmonica. The harp really sounds good in a freight car. It’s all echo-y in there. I used to spend days on freight trains. They’re so slow. If I was ever spending time in a freight train again, I’d sure want to have a harmonica.

I did all kinds of different jobs for a few years, and I loved running this guy’s shad-fishing operation in spring on the Connecticut River. We had six or seven boats.

When shad season was over, I came back to the Island and scalloped and fished here and started doing a little masonry. And then in the winter, I would hitchhike and ride freight trains to California and down South. In the spring, I went back shad fishing, and then usually at the beginning of June, I’d get back to the Vineyard. But little by little I began to build a scene here, and after a while, there was no point in leaving. I had work.

I got to be a good stonemason.

Totally self-taught, like everything I know how to do, but I never did only one thing. It’s the age of specialization now. Now that’s what people do. The old way was, you know – you had to know how to do a lot to make it through life.

Now if I can find a nice fireplace to build for somebody that isn’t on a fast track, I do it. I like doing it. But at heart, I’m an old subsistence guy. I fish and garden. That’s mostly how I feed my family. I carve birds and some snakes, and sometimes I sell them. I deliver manure for people’s gardens and I do some dump runs, some antique dealing, some commercial hook fishing – and a lot of music. I play a lot of music. Raise the kids, too. I’m into the kids. Gus is six and Annalee’s two in December. Ruby’s seventeen and had a 4.0 average in school last year. How about that?

Johnny Hoy and the Bluefish, the Vineyard’s mainstay dance band, has served up bluesy, honky-tonk, “good-time” music to a loyal following for seventeen years. Their newest CD, Film Noir Angel, is available at www.johnnyhoy andthebluefish.com.