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Column: Island to island

James Bornemeier
James Bornemeier

One thing we agreed on this summer was that we’d take the ferry to Block Island. Surely there were many other agreements. Surely there were. Give me a minute.

This trip is the second we’ve taken from Montauk since we’ve lived on the Island. We’re pretty sure that we went a third time from Point Judith, Rhode Island, but can’t quite figure out what we were doing up there. Probably related to a Cape Cod family visit.

In the late ‘60s, when I was in the Navy in Newport when it still had a full-scale naval base there, I recall making a jaunt to Block from Point Judith, but will have to scour the archives to nail that down.

It was a perfect day to go: Cloudless sky, dry cool breezes, a palpable feeling of seagoing happiness among the smart-looking passengers. We’ve taken the Cross Sound Ferry many times for Vermont and Cape Cod trips and always comment on the ragtag nature of those much larger traveling groups. A Foxwoods factor perhaps? Always many strange dogs aboard.

The Block Island crowd had a subtle J. Crew look even down to the blonde toddler with the piercing scream that the parents had apparently become inured to. Eventually the mom took her outside to wail at will. They had three other kids to manage.

On the other Montauk-based trip we brought our bikes and that’s the way to really see the island, which is truly one of the great places in our midst. This time we left the bikes at home and took a cab into town and meandered, had lunch at Ballard’s, killed some time at the bar and hit Ben and Jerry’s.

Surprisingly, we decided to take a tour of the island by cab, although we mostly knew the lay of the land from the previous trips. We needed to cab it back to the boat so we just tacked that on to the tour. The driver was a friendly, grizzled woman whose son fled the island as soon as he was able. She loves the winter solitude, which makes Shelter Island seem like a madhouse of frivolity. I am prone to solitude too, but her description of winter island life gave me pause. You have to buy food online. The liquor store of course endures year-round.

When we decided to go to Block, we also agreed  to have dinner at Gosman’s when we got back. This seems virtually mandatory: If you make the trek to Montauk, you go to Gosman’s. We had also agreed that it would be lobster. There is no official rationing, but it seems that we hold our annual lobster consumption to one or two so it’s always something special.

I was hoping our lobsters once lived in Maine, but I didn’t dare ask for fear that the answer would be North Korea or some other off-putting place. North Korean or not they were delicious. It is amazing that only after a couple of minutes of crushing this and cracking that your experience of dismantling this creature is appallingly fun.

Then back to the Viking parking lot for the trip home. Then the car locks don’t open with the clicker and that feeling of automotive dread starts to take hold. Yes, I determine, the battery is dead as a door nail. We made some desultory searches for “road service Montauk” and got some results. But I decided to check in at the restaurant across the street to see if they had any suggestions.

I sketched out my predicament to a young hostess who seemed the last sort of person who could grasp the gravity of the situation. She departed, apparently for the kitchen, and I waited close to 10 minutes.

A young man, who was a dead ringer for Michael Phelps, brusquely inquired to the assembled would-be diners for the guy with the dead battery. I raised my hand and profusely thanked him for offering his assistance. I wondered, why in the world would he come to the aid of stray person who is not even eating at the restaurant? He said, cryptically, “My cousin told me to.”

I went back to the car and Phelps shows up in a battered Ford pickup and I see the jumper cables, perhaps more than one set, splayed on the front seat and floor. He hops out and starts to attach the cables.

Any owner’s manual lays out the proper sequence for doing this and it was immediately apparent that Phelps either didn’t know or didn’t care about any damn sequence. The owner’s manual always says that if you don’t follow the sequence you can blow yourself to smithereens (or something like that). I was in no position to remind Phelps of this possibility.

He tried five or six arrangements and he finally stumbled into the right one and the engine revved up. I got out and grabbed my money and started offering twenties. He adamantly refused, saying sagely that dead batteries happen to everyone. I pleaded and he said what he really wanted was that I go over to the restaurant, which his family owned, and tell them that he had done a good thing. Which I did to the giggles of the hostesses.

On the South Ferry (I didn’t dare turn the engine off), I devised my hypothesis: Phelps was the family ne’er-do-well — who everyone was fond of — and his cousin had told him to make himself useful to a stranger. That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

I backed the car into the driveway in case I needed to get a jump from a neighbor in the morning. But it fired right up. I took it to Hubbard’s to get the battery tested, and George said it was fine, although at four years old it was reaching that gray area for staying that way. The whole dead battery episode faded and Block and the lobsters reasserted themselves.

I just hope that Phelps catches some slack for his good deed, if only for a day.