Karen was scheduled to complete all of her academic requirements for her master’s degree in Speech and Communication Studies with an eight-hour, written examination taken over a two-day period. As her reward for this arduous task, I planned to kidnap her. She was, I believe, totally unaware of the forthcoming celebration, even when I would suddenly ask her a question about whether or not she wore a girdle! I had to do the packing for a week-long trip and did not want to omit any item that might be a requirement for the journey. I had sworn the kids to secrecy and had the agreement of our next-door neighbor, Jenny Kilmer, to be available just in case of an emergency.
On the afternoon of Karen’s second-day exams, I picked her up as I had done several times before. As we drove out of town, she thought we were going on the usual donut-drive to celebrate and relax. By the time we entered the Massachusetts Turnpike, she realized this was not going to be our usual drive. She readily entered into the adventure without knowing our final destination. By late afternoon, we arrived at Woods Hole for an overnight stay prior to boarding the ferryboat to Nantucket Island. I finally revealed to her the site for our week-long vacation.
The next morning, we chugged off to Martha’s Vineyard, where day-trippers disembarked, and we continued on to the real island off the tip of Massachusetts. As usual, it was a pleasant, if breezy, passage. The trip was long enough for the stress of the mainland to be blown away and the examinations forgotten. Now we could arrive, unburdened, on the weathered dock on Nantucket. We had left our car and our cares at Woods Hole.
During our seven years in Amherst, Karen and I managed to visit the Island on several occasions. The days there tended to blur together into a very peaceful and harmonious oneness. At the moment, I’m not sure what might have been the details for this particular kidnaping and which ones were experienced at other times. The exact sequence was much less important than the emotions evoked by the Island, itself.
There were the cottages, themselves, built recently, no doubt, but with materials to maintain the weathered, grey-shingled, one-story appearance of those erected centuries ago. The flowers in the white window-boxes changed with the season, but nothing else did.
We have stayed in small accommodations on the outskirts of the Town as well as in the main hotel in its center. The experience of sleeping in one quaint cottage almost killed us, or at least Karen, literally.
It was summertime. We had gone to sleep with the window above our bed in an open position to allow the sea-fragrant breezes to enter during the night. At some hour after we had retired, we heard a very loud thump as the pane of the opened window slid down the wall at the head of our bed and toppled over enough to tap Karen on the forehead as we were awakened from our sleep. If the windowpane had fallen outwards, rather than slipping down the wall, the ending of this tale would have been dramatically, perhaps fatally, different. On the next day, when we informed the landlord of our “mishap,” he expressed his concern and said he would attend to fixing the window. We were too naive at the time, and the age was less litigious than today’s; we should have requested a reimbursement of our rental fee, at the very least.
For daytime enjoyment and relaxation, there were the sand and surf, especially on the south side of the Island. The grains of sand were soft and comfortable for burying feet; the ocean breezes for cooling down the rest of the body. The best way to travel from Nantucket Town to the southern shore was by a pleasant bike-ride over the narrow road cutting through flat, grass-covered dunes.
Shopping with or without buying anything was a very enjoyable pastime for spending a day in Nantucket Town or along its harbor. The small-pane windows of the shops displayed every nautical souvenir that could be designed by a craft-focused New Englander. They, also, wove Nantucket baskets, with their unique shapes, and created lids that included finely-inscribed scrimshaw on pseudo-ivory whalebones.
Of course, there was the food. During one visit, I managed to become a pescatarian and avoided red meat for every meal on the Island. I resumed eating cheeseburgers once we returned to Amherst. We also returned from Karen’s kidnaping trip with a few new items of clothing for her; evidently, I had not packed her suitcase as well as I had expected!