A View from the Shore

A clatter of emergency: a Coast Guard helicopter flutters low from Tashmoo to Gay Head, scanning the water for something that may have fallen. We watch from the beach in the summer morning. We stand among dark boulders, taller than we, that came to rest here 20,000 years ago when the glacier melted and retreated north. The waves in Vineyard Sound have a lazy heave, sweet whitecaps in the distance.

A friend has summered here all her long life. She remarks (the memory coming alive in her eyes as fresh as yesterday) that in the spring of 1932, after the Lindbergh...

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