The Good Crackers
When I was a teenager, I spent my summers at my grandparents’ place on the island. My eldest cousin, Kevin, lived there too, and with only a year between us, it was easy for us to fall into the rhythm of being together. I think of him, in a way, as my brother. As an only child, I often wondered what it would have been like to have siblings. Friends told me about the good parts, and of course, the frustrations. Perhaps because Kevin and I didn’t live together, and because we came from different households, I only got the good parts.
One summer, we were both working. Kevin was at a resort doing housekeeping and maintenance, while I was teaching sailing and working at a boat dock. In the evenings, we both worked at the local playhouse. That summer, the big production was The King and I. We helped build the set and then spent the run working the live music, lights, and stage.
It was a good summer to be young on the island.
Hitchhiking was common enough, and that was often how I got around. Otherwise, I would co-share Kevin’s 1980s lime-green Volvo 240DL wagon.
POC, as we called it.
The name stood for “piece of crap,” which was an unfairly accurate description. It was a perfect island car, though. Practical enough to haul whatever we needed for summer, slow enough for island roads, and probably too questionable to survive more than a few miles on the mainland.
The roads on the island topped out at 40 mph, with most of them around 25. The windshield was cracked. The tires were simply “there.” The doors never locked. There was some mysterious electrical problem that could kill the headlights while we were driving, and starting the car required a multistep ritual.
One did not simply put the key in the ignition and fire up POC.
First, you lifted the hood and reattached the battery lead. Then you pulled a throttle cable a few times to “prime the system.” Pumping the gas pedal did nothing. Sometimes, you also had to hit the engine with a hammer kept in the engine compartment for precisely this purpose.
I don’t remember if the keys ever actually left the ignition. There was little reason for them to. It was safe enough on the island to leave your car unlocked with the keys inside.
Who was going to steal it? More importantly, who was going to steal POC when stealing it required knowing the starting ritual?
I remember more than one night when we were driving home after the play had ended and the theater had been cleaned up, and the headlights and dash would suddenly go dark.
Kevin would slow down and keep driving. I would crank down the passenger window, lean out, and hold a high-lumen battery-powered boat light down the road.
If I told that story to someone now, I can imagine the look on their face. The disbelief. The calculation of just how many laws of common sense we were violating.
Maybe we were being reckless. We probably were.
But our parents and grandparents knew. This was the island they had grown up on, too. They knew those roads the way we did. The curves and corners were so deeply ingrained that we could close our eyes and picture every edge of them. The boat light wasn't really helping us find our way home. We already knew the way. It was there to spot deer. There was no one else on the road at that hour.
That was the thing about growing up there. The island was small enough that the landscape became part of your internal geography. You didn’t need directions. You knew where you were by the shape of the road, the trees, the water, the bends and rises you had driven a thousand times.
There were really two worlds on the island.
There were the people with second and third homes and a ridiculous amount of money. They brought expensive tastes with them, encouraged higher-end businesses, and sent their kids to my sailing lessons.
Then there was us. We were the byproduct of a homestead family that had gained the land for a song and worked and farmed it for more than 150 years. We lived among wealthy people simply because we had been there before they arrived, before they came on vacation and fell in love with the place.
If I told people I was from the island, they often assumed I was part of that wealthy group. I wasn’t. Farming and fishing were in my DNA. I had started working in tourism when I was five. I actually had a job at the museum greeting people.
By most measures, we ate well. Today, someone would probably call it farm-to-table. We helped in Grandma’s garden and got meat from the farm down the road. We ate oysters pulled from the beach and drank hard cider pressed from apples in the family orchard.
It was simple food.
If you have ever watched Ratatouille, there is a scene where the food critic takes a bite of a simple dish and is transported back to his childhood, to the food his grandmother used to make. That is what our food felt like. Meanwhile, tourists at the high-end resort were paying what amounted to my take-home pay for a week’s work for a single meal. We were eating oysters off the beach and drinking cider from apples we had grown ourselves.
Sometimes, between work and the play, Kevin and I would treat ourselves for being “adult-like” and having a little money to spend. The occasional good ice cream. A cup of coffee. Small luxuries. But the real event happened once a week. We would go to a specialty cheesemonger that had recently opened on the island and choose a cheese we had never tried, usually something from another country. Then we would buy a box of the “good crackers.” They were the crackers that looked like the ones in Wallace & Gromit.
An orange box. A black diamond. Yellow writing.
I am almost certain we bought them because they looked like the crackers in the cartoon, not because they were particularly good. Then we would find one of our favorite places to sit and watch the world. We would eat our cheese and crackers. We talked about work. About emotions. About the future. Sometimes we talked about absolutely nothing. Sometimes we just watched the clouds.
At the time, none of this seemed important.
We were two young people with jobs, a questionable car, a little money in our pockets, and an evening to fill. We weren't trying to make memories. We didn't know we were making them.
We were just living.
It is funny how core memories work. We spend so much energy planning for the big trips, the concerts, the activities we imagine will become the stories we tell for the rest of our lives. We photograph them. We anticipate them. We build them up before they even happen.
And maybe those moments do become important. But the memories that seem to reach deepest are often the ones that slipped past us unnoticed. The ordinary moments that somehow contain an entire season of our lives.
Driving POC home by moonlight. A boat light hanging out the passenger window. A weekly trip to buy a piece of cheese. A box of ridiculous crackers. My cousin sitting beside me while we watched the clouds. I think that is what I miss most when I look back on those summers. Not the island itself, or even being young, but how little we needed to feel like we had everything. A barely functioning Volvo. A piece of cheese from somewhere I had never been. A box of ridiculous crackers. A place to sit with my cousin while the sun went down.
We didn't know enough to call those moments precious.
We weren't trying to make memories.
We were just living our lives, one ordinary evening at a time.
Maybe that is why they stayed with me.
The best memories rarely announce themselves when they arrive. Sometimes they look like a broken-down car, a bag of groceries, and a cousin beside you, laughing at something neither of you will remember years later.
And somehow, decades later, you remember everything.
BOOK: The Pig War: Standoff at Griffin Bay by Mike Vouri The Pig War was a 'non-casualty' war waged in the San Juan Islands about the time that my family came and homesteaded. It was a conflict between the United States and England over the territorial borders.
SONG: I Whistle a Happy Tune - The King & I
We made so many bad lyric versions to this on the drive home sometimes.
Thank you for reading my post. This post/essay, like many of the ones I write, is a blend of my personal experiences, travel, memories, stories, and shared conversations. These solely represent myself and my opinions and thoughts. When it involves personal friends I have given them nicknames unless they have given explicit permission to use their given name. There are times that I am able to pull from what I wrote down in my journals at the time an event happened, others I am trying to recall memories that have been altered by brain injuries and a lifetime of simply living. I may not always get it right, so please forgive me for some unintentional variations.
I always welcome feedback and thoughts on my posts. Please feel free to send me an email or comment below.
Love from the road,
Nic & Rally
Comments