Jason, on a borrowed tractor and with a borrowed truck, loading in seaweed.
When you stand on either side of the 527 feet separating Chappaquiddick from Edgartown, you have to believe life is pretty much the same on both sides.
Five hundred twenty seven feet – the distance the Chappy ferry plies over and over every day – doesn’t seem that far.
True, it’s longer than a regulation football field at 360 feet; and true, no one has ever thrown a baseball further than 445 feet, 10 inches.
But is 527 feet really wide enough to change the way people live, to give a place for a hardier, more self-sufficient people? To provide a community where people really do help each other for no better reason than that it’s the right thing to do? To create an atmosphere that mirrors quintessential small town life from a century ago, the life that Vineyarders always describe as “the way things used to be”?
I don’t live on Chappy. Two of my children, Lily and Christian, and their friends, Jason and Collins, have only lived there since September 1. So everything I am seeing is coming through their interactions with Chappy residents and Slip Away Farm, which has been established by Lily with the help of the other three farmers.
But it is a striking vision.
When Lily’s truck broke down a few weeks ago, Gerry Jeffers, who runs the seasonal Chappy store, hitched the truck to his own and towed it across to Edgartown so Lily wouldn’t have to pay the $40 Triple A fee. When neighbor Tom Osborne came by the first time to the weekly farm stand at Slip Away and heard about the farmers’ need for a tractor, he rode up on one the next day and has now loaned it to them for several weeks.
When ferry owner Peter Wells got stuck with an unwanted and dangerous accumulation of seaweed under his dock during last week’s no’easter, he called Lily at 7 am on the second day of the storm to see if the farmers might give him a hand raking out the weed. The seaweed had already fouled one of his ferry propellers, and he knew Slip Away was collecting seaweed from all over the island to use for fertilizer.
Lily, Jason, and his sister, Kaitlin (trapped for three days on Chappy because of the storm), spent a couple of hours using clamming rakes to pull the seaweed out of the water and into two huge piles.
When Dick Knight heard they needed a dump truck to make it easier to get the seaweed to Slip Away, he left a bright red truck in their driveway on Saturday. Lily, Jason, and Collins – using the borrowed truck and the borrowed tractor – made two dump truck runs to collect the seaweed, to the delight of Chappy residents who watched from the ferry line.
There have been gifts of coffee mugs for the coffee and hot cider Lily served at the farm stand each week. Chappy residents, hearing that furniture is needed for the historic home owned by the Preservation Trust that houses the farmers, call her with offers – lamps, an ironing board, two stools for the bar, a dining room table and chairs.
Scalloping season has brought them free sea scallops. Bundles of thyme arrived from a neighbor for the front walkway that leads to the door of the house – the giver says she has tons of honey bees around her own thyme, and she wanted to make sure Lily gets the benefit. (Another neighbor, who loves honey, offered a donation to help ensure Lily establishes hives so she can sell honey next year.) Sidney Morris and his wife, Margaret Knight, knowing the Slip Away land is loaded with poison ivy, walk their goats to the farm for munching sessions. Goats eat poison ivy; one of the Morris-Knight goats is even called Ivy.
The farmers of Slip Away are working their way into the Chappy society and are learning the benefits of living in a close-knit, caring environment.
I’m a bystander in all of this, but it makes me envious. Life on a place like Chappy is clearly not wine and roses. But it has welcomed my farmers in a unique and beautiful way – just the way things used to be.
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