My boyfriend and I lived at Blueberry Heaven, way back in the overgrown fields behind my parents’ house on Chappaquiddick. There were high-bush and low-bush blueberries growing everywhere and we pitched our tent in the middle of them, far enough off the path that no one would find us. We felt almost invisible camping back there in the bushes, and lived like happy fugitives.

It was 1972 and a lot of young people were living together without getting married. Cohabitation was still a shock to many in my parents’ generation. In my family, my brother, who met his girlfriend crewing on a boat in the Caribbean (she was the captain), moved with her into the tiny A-frame he’d built in 1963 at the age of sixteen with his cousin and a couple of friends.

The A-frame sat on Chappy land belonging to our parents, and our father, an Episcopal minister, had threatened to kick my brother off the place unless he married his sweetheart. That bit of subtle pressure seemed to do the trick and they soon got married.  

My sister moved to the island with her boyfriend a few years later and I don’t know why she told our father. He was predictably furious. He said he wouldn’t come to Chappaquiddick as long as they were living here together. I suspect it may have been an easy ultimatum for my father, because he never really liked the seashore. He grew up in Pittsburgh and loved the mountains. He rarely wore shorts or went to the beach when he was here; he preferred working on some project such as painting and repairing our house, the building of which he had orchestrated in 1959.

My mother had come here summers all her life, along with a couple of generations of the family. She wanted to be on Chappy in the summer, so my father eventually gave in to the inevitable and we would come to the island every year. In the summer of 1972, though, my parents didn’t. My father was on moral strike, and my mother had rented the house anyway. That summer, when my boyfriend came to live with me on Chappy, I didn’t tell anyone over the age of thirty. Since I had about fifty relatives on this small island, it’s hard to believe that someone of the previous generation didn’t find out. But since I hadn’t publicly announced my cohabitation, and since our campsite was a secret, either no one knew or they let it pass. I liked not having my parents around. I was twenty-two and enjoyed the feeling of living like a refugee in my own home territory, sneaking around, and planning escapes and ways to avoid my relatives.

My boyfriend and I pitched our tent, set up a camp stove, and dug a hole as an outhouse. I remember eating lots of blueberry and peanut butter sandwiches. Each blueberry bush ripened at a different time and had its own distinct berry flavor. I had my favorite bushes and I picked from them for years after that, until the shade from the growing woods made them stop producing. We planted a vegetable garden in the old field and carried water in buckets from the swamp to irrigate it. The garden didn’t grow too well because the soil was mostly sand and we never watered the plants enough.  

Our relationship didn’t grow that well either; after the summer, we split up and I moved to Amherst in my 1960 Chevy station wagon with the horizontal fins. I went to school at UMass where I met the man who eventually became my husband. By then it was 1974 and my father had mellowed considerably and was coming to the island again. It seemed safe to mention this guy (just a friend, Dad), who had come here to see the house I’d started building myself. He liked the house and I guess he liked me because he wanted to move in, even though the house had a big hole in the roof where the tower was going to be. We pitched a tent inside to keep us dry and save us from the mosquitoes. Together we built the tower, the first of many construction projects.

Late in the summer my parents invited us both to dinner for the first time. I remember my surprise and anxiety about it. My father seemed to put on his minister role as a defense and was guardedly pleasant. I was grateful for the tentative acceptance and we all survived the dinner. My boyfriend and I ended up living together for four years before we decided to marry. When we did get married, I noticed a change in how people related to us; even the shopkeepers in town were more open and friendly. I guess there’s some way that when you conform to society’s values it makes other people more comfortable.

Thirty-five years later my brother and his wife are still married, their little A-frame consumed by additions, not even one beam of the original house left. My sister got married for the first time at the age of fifty. She and her husband live in a beautiful house in the middle of an avocado grove in California and come to the island for vacations. My husband and I have been married for twenty-seven years. We’ve added on to our house four times and twice to our family. Now we have a big enough house for extended family holiday dinners. I guess living at the end of a dirt road, on an island off another island, doesn’t qualify us for having a conventional lifestyle, but when I look around at our big, mostly finished house, the garden, and two cars, I feel pretty well established. I’ve come a long way from living in a tent and sneaking around hoping no one would know what I was up to. I think of myself as rather a solid citizen now, an established member of the community. Although sometimes when I drive down my dirt road and come to the fork where the sign on the left says Dead End and the sign on the right says Cemetery, I’m reminded that this is just a temporary arrangement.