Back to school! For me and my brothers, the first day back at school was the greatest injustice inflicted upon us during our grammar school years — especially at the end of the extended summers that we spent out at Cape Pogue in the Self’s compound on the shores of Shear Pen Pond.

A couple of days before school started our mother would be unreasonably pestering us to find a pair of matching sneakers so that she could get them washed and dried in time. We always ended up putting on ice-cold damp sneakers smelling of bleach. The only comfort in it was the lingering sand and still discernible scent of clam flat mud that reminded us of our past days of freedom.

For us, the abbreviation Sept. was a four-letter word that we despised. After a whole summer of roaming freely unsupervised, going back into civilization made our time out there at the far end of the island all the more precious. We were allowed to drive the Willys jeep as long as we didn’t go farther out towards the gut than the camp at the elbow or back towards the dike past the jetties.

But at low tide we could drive on the outside shore without any of the adults being able to see us. The sand there was much softer than the gravelly low tide surface on the inside and we had lots of experience getting unstuck. We also got lots of practice keeping a straight face when grilled about why we were gone for so long.

Back in the ‘60s, way before the invention of containers, freighters still used rough lumber, called dunnage, to arrange the cargo in their holds. The jettisoned broken scraps ended up on East Beach. We built a crude two story “Texas tower” over the flat rock in the shallow water off of the north shore of Shear Pen with this free building material. The planks were hard wood and tough to nail and saw. The four-by-fours were pine, and luckily filled with nails that came in mighty handy once we used up all of the nails hidden under Dr. Self’s work bench.

Being far removed from the power grid, we learned first-hand about where household water and electricity came from and where the water that went down the drains ended up. We learned how to light gas lamps without breaking the delicate ash mantles. We marveled at the ability of a refrigerator to make cold from the heat of a propane flame. We knew that our phone was connected to civilization by a thin, often severed, wire that ran half buried through the dunes over the bridge to the last pole on Dike Road.

It’s a long drive out to Cape Pogue from the end of the pavement and still a long way from the end of the power grid, but I can fully understand why folks love to live out there.