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Marty’s Memories - Hamilton Beach and Fog by Marty Trower

I am still amazed by my interest in the life and times of my parents and grandparents and great grandparents. Of course, now it’s too late, really, as I’m at the age where I am intrigued and have questions but none of my relatives are alive to answer. Thank goodness for people like Donna Damon who seems to know how to blend the factual, fascinating details of her family’s past with her own memories and she sees how they become intertwined. I hope to learn from her one of these days. In the meantime, on foggy days like today, I am ingulfed by my own memories of the island in the summers of fifties and sixties. Days when we thought there was nothing to do because it was so foggy -but these usually turned out to be the best! I know it was one of those slow, dripping, fog days when my best childhood friend Maggie and I built our raft, the Sea Witch on Hamilton Beach. We used logs we found washed up on the shore. they were uneven in length and some had peeling bark still clinging to them. We used rope to bind the cross-pieces together. We nailed some flat green boards onto the frame. I think they must’ve been left over from when Merle Ross built a bathroom and a bedroom onto our cottage. Our cottage was always painted green. Mostly I was interested in the immediate of my life in those days, but I do remember another when I walked on the beach with my grandfather Trower on another fog draped day. My grandfather and grandmother had come to the Hamilton hotel for many years before I was born. My father had always spoken so wondrously about the hotel and his childhood and teen-aged years there and how sad it was that it had to be torn down during the war. I was hoping now that my grandfather would open about what he remembered about

the hotel and his years there and maybe we could talk about it. We got to the place which still exists today on the beach, where the stubs of the Hamilton Hotel pier once stood. A long, elegant pier stretched out on these pilings and there were a few benches on the edge to sit on. You could then stroll up a long boardwalk to the hotel itself. Maggie and I used to imagine what it would be like to dine in the hotel or play tennis in front of it. We explored the remnants of the disappearing grand place until the area got too overgrown to get around. But my poor grandfather seemed to remember nothing, I realized. He was grieving for my grandmother, Emily Fraser Trower, who had recently died. My grandmother was the one who discovered Chebeague for us, coming down by train in 1900 from Quebec City with her maiden aunt to the Hamilton Villa. Then, last week I attended the celebration of Bob Follette’s life at Bennet’s Cove. Bob and Mort ran the Island View house in the late fifties and early sixties. My grandparents still visited us from Montreal then, but our cottage lacked some basic luxuries, so they stayed at the Island View House. I remember when they were staying there, they brought us, (my sister and I) the most amazing dolls. We brought them down to Hamilton Beach. It was low tide.We wound up the keys on the backs of our dolls and dropped them face down into the saltwater. Lots of frothy fluttering and spitting followed and it was thrilling, but short- lived. I don’t remember seeing those magical wind-up swimming dolls again. I’ll bet all that salt and fog and moisture rusted up the moving parts of those miraculous plastic imitation swimmers and that was that; they were put into the past until deep thoughts brought back a tiny wisp of a memory.

BOOK STUDY GROUP Sunday afternoons at 4:30 p.m. at the Library. A 52-week series on spiritual formation. Everyone is invited to join in.

For more information contact Gloria Brown at gjbrown58a@gmail.com or 846-3491.

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SEPTEMBER 2019 CHEBEAGUE ISLAND COUNCIL CALENDAR