cars – Maxwell Butler

On the gluttonous maw of Martha’s Vineyard roads

My folks, of the hippie stardust that landed on the deer-ticked dunes of Martha’s Vineyard in the 1960s and 70s, have lived down the same driveway in Aquinnah for the entirety of their five decades there. Locust Lane was a notoriously treacherous gash of gravel and sand that crept through the forest towards Pancake Hollow that down the years had swallowed buggies, pickups, and UPS trucks whole. Its prominent center hump, steep grades, loose stones, and tendency to flood which turned it into a bayou in summer and a solid glacier in winter meant it was only reliably passable by high-set 4×4, Subaru, or toboggan. All others were at their own peril. They always said it kept the Jehovah’s Witnesses away if nothing else.

Make America Super Again

Folks get the wrong idea about me. Because my online dating profiles usually contained the 1968 Kinks lyric “I’m the last of the good old-fashioned steam-powered trains,” and I tend to surround myself with machinery old enough to collect Social Security, and I pronounce “#” as “pound,” I must be a certifiable codger, a stone-assed Conservative, bemoaning the curse of being born in le wrong generation, who would tell children to vacate his tract of grass-covered land if children had any desire to trespass upon a yard full of squirrel-nibbled oranges and stray cats.