Seventy years ago this August, V-J Day set up a string of events that led me to the Vineyard and altered my life forever. When victory was announced, my mother made plans to visit her parents, who were vacationing at the Harborside Inn in Edgartown, and we set out the next day, taking the Cape Codder train from Grand Central Station in New York to Woods Hole, where we would board the Vineyard ferry. The streets of New York were littered with confetti and other leftovers from the uproarious victory celebration, and the train crew was still celebrating.

By the time we reached Providence, they were too drunk to continue; so we disembarked and shared a cab to Woods Hole where we found the ferry crew similarly disabled. My mother – nothing if not determined – repaired to a bar stool at the Captain Kidd and soon convinced a fisherman to take us across the sound. And so it was on August 15, 1945, at the age of twelve, that I first set foot on the Island that would be a pivotal part of my life and eventually my home. The Chamber of Commerce called it “an island surrounded by striped bass.”

When my family became Edgartown summer renters in 1947 it was a much different place than it is today. Waterfront streets were still unpaved, there was a blacksmith shop and a fish market near the yacht club, and Manuel Swartz Roberts was making catboats in the building that now houses the Old Sculpin Gallery. “Up-Island” was only a rumor to most summer visitors, and electricity and phones were just coming to North Road. The Island as a summer resort had been discovered by only a prescient few, and day-trippers had not been invented yet.

When my father, brother David, and I discovered Wasque, we knew we’d hit gold. Reached by a rugged, winding dirt road after a cross-harbor trip on Tony Bettencourt’s ferry The City of Chappaquiddick, Wasque seemed like an undiscovered frontier where the longshore tides of Nantucket Sound met the Atlantic and created a fish-filled rip. We caught striped bass, bluefish, and weakfish on block tin Ferron jigs, split bamboo rods, and Penn Surfmaster reels.

There weren’t many other fishermen, and we usually had the rip to ourselves and felt crowded if another angler showed up. Sturgeon were also plentiful off Wasque in those days, leaping horizontally from the water like elevators rising from the deep and then falling back with gigantic splashes, and we witnessed Sheila Rice land and release an estimated eighty-pounder that she foul hooked. As time went on Wasque became increasingly famous as one of the premier surfcasting spots anywhere, and I was privileged to be part of the Trustees of Reservations’ successful fundraising effort to buy and preserve this magical spot forever.

V-J Day marked the victorious end to a terrible war and, for me, the start of a sense of place and a lifelong love affair with the Island that I call home.