The Legend of Bouncing Bertha

Here's a chilling true story, and one of the first articles I published...from the archives of Blue Ridge Country magazine.

The Legend of Bouncing Bertha

Family Ritual and JAWS

Family Ritual and JAWS

David Sims’ excellent coverage of the “40^th Year Legacy of Jaws” in The Atlantic last week conjured memories of almost four decades of watching this movie with my Dad, ironically before our annual family trip to the beach.

Roy Scheider as Chief Brody in Jaws

Sims’ theory about why Jaws has become a legacy is that it’s simply a film about “three men in a boat, chasing a shark,” in a situation that could happen anywhere and to anyone, and that Spielberg’s “everyman a hero” theme works.

It doesn’t matter to me whether the movie, set in the Fourth of July, is labeled a classic by critics, because (however odd it may seem to others) it is a tradition that Dad and I share, and anchor to a special childhood.

There’s this fragment of a memory: me, standing in line with Dad, to see Jaws at the Lee Theatre in Pennington Gap, where his dad would take him to the movies. Times were different when I was little; helicopter parenting wasn’t the norm. Mom asked me if I was traumatized by seeing it at such a young age. But I don’t recall a reaction, or feeling afraid. Being on the street beside him, my little hand in his, having him all to myself…that is what my memory banked.

We began taking annual vacations to the sleepy Sunset Beach, with its one-lane swinging bridge (until it became an artifact of another time, replaced by a bigger bridge to accommodate larger crowds) around the same time the movie came out. My dad rents a house for a week, and over the years he has built friendships among the king fishers at the Sunset Beach pier. Three decades later, he is still meeting them once or twice a year to fish there.

Swinging Bridge, Sunset Beach, N.C.

Occasionally they catch big fish, like sharks. They caught several this year. Nothing as big as Jaws, though.

Once we settled in, we’d watch the movie. We know every line in the script. And every time, it is just as terrifying, just as funny, just as thrilling when Chief Brody- trapped on a sinking boat- takes on the three-ton beast with an air tank and a rifle. There are no frills, no superhuman strength. The father of two, who is most afraid of the water, uses what he has and makes the best of it. He wins.

But there’s something more meaningful in that tradition. Dad and I share a strong connection to history, to a love of the way things used to be. Last year, our oceanfront rental sat next to the first house we rented at Sunset beach, sometime around 1977 or 1978. My cousin had a broken arm and had to wear a plastic bag on it when she swam. There were saloon doors between two of the interior rooms. My mom wore frosted hair like Farrah and Fonda; my dad had sideburns. And being at the ocean was the most exciting part of the year besides Christmas. It meant shark tooth necklaces and shell bracelets, trips to the Callahan’s in Calabash-a place that is worth a visit for the sensory experience alone-fried fish, hushpuppies and tea, finding sand dollars whole in low tide as the sun rose. It meant walking trips to the Kindred Spirits mailbox on Bird Island, where people leave their thoughts and prayers in a simple notebook. It was one of the first houses built there: simple and small. 

The house was empty that week, and I spent far more time than I should have studying it from our screened front porch, just remembering, the past settling over me as comfortably as the warmth of evening sunlight. I wandered around its carport, and took pictures.

Megan Mayhew Bergman, in an Oxford American interview, describes this feeling as being “drunk on nostalgia.” She said, “I love sensual bridges to another time—my imagination can find its way in with song, scent, and taste.” Jaws  is one of those bridges for us. So is Sunset Beach. And there are more places and rituals throughout the year that our family returns to, in large part because of Dad.

My brother and I have teased Dad at times about his love of tradition, of returning to the same places year after year. But the truth is I'd be lost without his consistency, his dependability.

We’ll celebrate his birthday on the Fourth of July with ribs and pulled pork, then keep another tradition going that we started several years ago. As Chief Brody says in one of the first scenes of the movie, and in an exaggerated New England accent, we’ll watch fireworks from “the yahhd, not to fahh from the cahh.”

The Rocks

My essay, "The Rocks," will appear in the Chattahoochee Review's spring issue as the Lamar York prizewinner for nonfiction. It took two years and a great deal of research to complete, and I'm not sure if it will ever really be finished. The essay is about seven graves on my grandmother's property and the family lore that surrounds them. The research took me through Reconstruction Appalachia, introduced me to two women (both single mothers-one my great, great grandmother- whose husbands left them with children to raise and farms to tend), and led me to a startling revelation in my own DNA. Here's an excerpt:

"The graves are slightly rounded or squared, setting them apart from the others because that is all the memory that sharecroppers could afford in Reconstruction Appalachia. No words or dates speak from the stones about people who once lived and worked and loved, and no flowers are there to prove that someone loved them back. So the woods took them in, blanketed them with leaves, and protected them with a fortress of briars and fallen limbs braided by wind. Underneath the graveyard ivy, the dead leaves, and a hundred years of soil there are bones angled into moist ground where they settled like a long, tired breath after the wooden coffins returned to the earth.

Family lore could not explain why the rocks were there, but older folks were sure that they belonged to freed slaves who had once worked the cornfields down below, just seven among the hundreds of enslaved people who once lived here. I have often wondered if their story was conjured, like the ghosts my great-grandparents described as we sat on the porch in the summer’s gloaming, fireflies pulsing around us. Was the story a way to anchor tales to family property that we would someday inherit, lest we ever think of selling?

The rocks hunkered in the shadows of low hanging branches several decades after I saw them as a little girl. And in all that time, I never thought to ask questions of the one living person who knew the most about them."