Chapter 7: The Summer Shack

My grandmother did not own a television set. The drama of the cold war was a distant thing and she refused to let it into her life. She refused to allow fear into her home. Her attitude was, “If I can’t control it, I don’t need to worry about it. What will be, will be.” The summers living with my grandmother were some of the best summers of my life.

I spent weekdays at my grandmother’s rambling eighteen room Victorian house while she ran the post office. A tiny, two room shack at her open-air parking lot on Duxbury Beach was our home on weekends.

To call the hut primitive would have been a compliment. Built in the 1890s as a salt-water shanty, the shack sat for forty years on the marsh, supported by an array of wood pilings to keep it above most storm tides. Around 1930 when the demand for salt hay diminished, the shack was hauled by a team of oxen to slightly higher ground about a half-mile inland.

The structure measured about fifteen feet by twenty feet and above the first floor was a second floor loft accessible by a set of open wooden stairs. That was it; the shack had no closets, no electricity, and no running water. It was just a shingled box with rattling windows. As far as I was concerned, it was a summer palace!

Several sets of kerosene hurricane lanterns and a few flashlights provided lighting. A wooden ice box was our refrigerator. One fifty pound ice block would last up to three days in the summer. The ground floor served as combination kitchen, parlor, and bedroom while the upstairs loft was sleeping quarters for kids and visiting adults.

When nature called, we had a choice. We could trek fifty yards to an old two-seater outhouse or use the chamber pot. An open water tap about thirty yards in the other direction provided drinking water. A small propane camp stove was our kitchen.

I slept in the loft on a khaki-green canvas army cot my uncle had brought home with him from the First World War and his service in France. The loft had one small window at each end. In the evenings, as the wind blew across the marsh, the wind would sing in the wire mesh of the storm screens.

The wind’s gentle song would become a constant howling when the breeze freshened to anything above twenty-five miles per hour. I found the music of the wind to be comforting and mysterious, all at the same time.

The “ceiling” of the loft was nothing more than the underside of the roof. I would sometimes lie awake in bed and read the markings and labels of the old wooden boxes, cranberry flats, and shipping containers my great-grandfather had scrounged to construct the roof. It was the ultimate in recycling.

Without radio or television, evening entertainment was limited to storytelling and card games. We would often get up just as the sun was rising and go beachcombing, especially after a storm. Sometimes, if the sea had been rough the night before, we would find the beach when the tide was dead low often littered with sea clams and an occasional luckless lobster or two. We would gather them up, sometimes in bushel baskets, and my grandmother would make clam chowder.