Long before the prospect of having a permanent place on the Vineyard had ever occurred to us, we had our summer rentals, stretching over almost twenty years. There were cottages, camps, and barns, an elderly Cape we began to think of as our own, a rambling Victorian that we knew would never be ours – seven houses in all, scattered about the hills of Chilmark where we had first landed, utterly by chance, and from which we have never had reason to stray. One by one, from the dark and unprepossessing cabin on the Crossroads where we began, sleeping on the sofa with our small kids piled together in the bed, to the spacious and well-mannered Victorian above Menemsha Pond, where we dug our own clams, the houses led us into Island life, past and present. We were young and undaunted by misadventure. It rained every day during the week of that first rental and we never found the beautiful Jungle Beach, which was an inside secret then, later to be deeded as part of Lucy Vincent. We saw charm in sloping floorboards and eclectic sets of dishes, and accepted as fate the rudimentary (or nonexistent) appliances, the snakes in the basement, and the spiders in high corners.
It still surprises me that during those first stays in undistinguished quarters and soggy weather, we caught such a keen scent of the Island that it was never in question that we would be back. With little money to spare, we moved slowly: another week in the tiny cabin; a month in a camp on Middle Road; boldly, our fourth year, a full summer rental in a five-room 1850s Federal-style home on South Road, where, as it turned out, we settled in for a decade. Named Millbrook House for the quiet stream nearby and maybe a long-lost gristmill in the hills, it was a plain and unpretentious house that we remember with unusual affection – the small bedrooms with faded floral wallpapers; the painfully steep backstairs that led to the kitchen and an ancient stove; the absence of a washing machine about which we grumbled until we discovered the old laundromat behind Alley’s; the view to David Flanders’s real estate office across a wide driveway, where during the first weeks away from city life, the kids played in the dirt.
From the beginning, we loved Millbrook House and accepted it on its own terms. Its very simplicity seemed to be a form of welcome. In the way of old houses, it had an innate sense of quiet, but it also had stories to tell and ghosts in residence. A farmer and woodsman named Josie West, one of the last of the large deaf community in Chilmark, had lived there with his wife until his death in 1945. On summer evenings, Josie seemed close, his perpetual silence almost palpable. We walked down to the library to read about the Vineyard sign language that for centuries townspeople had acquired as children, the hand motions that described everyone and everything. (The sign for New Bedford involved a wavy gesture for a fish, cupped hands for a boat, held nose for the smell, and pointing a finger north.) Before its conversion, the library itself, a late-eighteenth-century Cape, had been the home of Josie’s brother Benjamin and his wife, both deaf. A house we rented later, farther up South Road, had belonged to an earlier West with the same hereditary condition. Such coincidence was its own historical statistic. We learned unexpected things from that full-season rental, the way we did from the others in our itinerary of houses.
In retrospect, I think of our experience with rentals as a long interview with a bunch of local characters who offered us their disparate versions of what Island life was about. Millbrook House, only a short walk from Beetlebung Corner, introduced us to life at the center of Chilmark. As we became regulars at the general store, post office, library, community center, and even fire station, all within steps or yards of one another, we began to feel like locals.
Windy Gates, the nineteenth-century estate that sprawls along the Wequobsket Cliffs, where we moved next, launched us into another mode. Purchased in 1891 (with additional lots purchased in 1898) by the eccentric Lucy Sanford, and famous for the years that it was owned by Roger Baldwin, the major founder of the ACLU, as well as its beautiful beach and clay baths in the cliffs, it was a site unto itself – secluded, historic, dramatic, and a little funky. The manor house at Windy Gates was empty and in disrepair then, and the landscape, once lush terraced gardens and pastureland for sheep, was untended, woodsy, and dappled by shade, which made the property all the more evocative to encounter. We lived very casually in a converted carriage house, which was really just a barn with a ramp: wood inside and out, lofty one-room living space with a single bath and sleeping porch downstairs, unstructured bedrooms above, a new outdoor deck. Tipped off by the crusty caretaker, we explored the grounds, searching for the fabled outbuildings – the party house, the writer’s cabin – the old town roads where locals learned to drive, the bountiful trout stream where they came to fish in the spring. We found an oddly elegant dirt court from the 1920s and played tennis, and we stumbled upon a field of exotic mushrooms that we dared to cook. But mainly, we went to the beach every day, down the 144 steps of the wooden staircase to swim in the gentle surf and dip into the pools of liquid clay, the way generations of hipsters had done in the past. We were in thrall to the lore of the place – the stories of the intellectuals and artists who had gathered there in Baldwin’s day and the countless reports of ghosts and ghostly deeds through the ages. Our own inexplicable sighting of heavenly lights and a woman in white dancing came late one night and was later explained to us as the birthday appearance of Baldwin’s daughter Helen, who had died years earlier.
The property that is known as the Mayhew House (given the size of that founding family, there are many other namesakes around the Island) was our first ambitious rental, a commodious white Victorian set high above Clam Cove with a long view to the Menemsha docks and the Elizabeth Islands beyond. Its rather fussy Victorian furniture, wall-to-wall carpeting, and largely formal rooms set it apart from our usual beach houses, but the joys of the pond were only a short path away and we swam, fished, clammed, and motored about in a newly acquired Zodiac with abandon. If our kids, by then young teenagers, felt at all uneasy with the mannerly décor of the place, they soon migrated to a large den-like room and deck at the back of the house, where their games, boom box, and general lounging about found a natural and insulated setting.
In the two summers at the Mayhew House, we felt privileged and a little heady to be in temporary possession of that extraordinary site – Menemsha at our feet, Squibnocket down the road, and the ancient hills and dales that the late artist Thomas Hart Benton had painted in our surround. We were more involved with the natural landscape of the Island than we had ever been, and days evolved without a plan beyond being part of the outdoors. Yet our pleasure had an uneasy edge, for we had begun to think about a house of our own and we sensed that our increasingly costly rentals were at an end. As a statement of intent, our next and last house was an uncomplicated affair, modest and camp-like in design, practical in style and furnishing: cubbies and hooks instead of closets and bureaus, a pass-through window from the small kitchen. The center of the house was a double-height living room with an oversized picture window that looked down over Chilmark Pond and its coves, and caught, every day, a new spectacle. Just out of view, to the east beyond Abel’s Hill and Quenames, in the direction of Black Point Pond, was the plot of land that we bought the following winter.
We can see the history of our rentals in the house that we built and live in now. The double-height living room and wall-sized window, the dedicated kid space in the barn and its loft, the outdoor shower hidden behind a stand of viburnum, even the old tub and maritime light fixtures all speak to our memories of earlier summers. If we had once expected to buy an old house, when the time came we tried to build one, something resembling an old-fashioned New England connected house and barn that was as simple in spirit as the sandplain around us.
It has aged impressively now, and at twenty-five is no longer an upstart. We are no longer strictly summer people. But except for the addition of a screen porch and the new liveliness of grandchildren, little has changed. All of our long-ago rental houses are still around, except for the last one, which, soon after our departure, ceded its place to a grand and forward-looking piece of modern architecture.
