Red Burtts Storys

Everybody has a grandmother, but I had the best one. Many people never knew their grandmothers; but I did, for nineteen years.

Everybody thinks their grandmother is the best one, and that is good. They are “special people”.

“They wear glasses and they can take their teeth and gums off and put them in a glass of water at night”

“They don’t have to be smart – only answer questions like, why dogs chase cats or how come God isn’t married.

“Everybody should try to have one, especially if you don’t have television”

“Grandmothers don’t have to do anything except to be there. They’re old, so they shouldn’t play hard or run”.

“Grandmothers are the only grownups who have any time for children.”

Whenever I think of “Nana” as I called her, I think of fresh homemade doughnuts, frying bacon, “ocean air” blowing through the open windows, an old wooden screen door slamming, reading by a kerosene lantern, an outhouse with a “Sears & Roebuck” catalog and a big spider web up in the corner to watch as you sit there. I am reminded of dirt roads, blueberry fields, digging clams, baiting a lobster trap, then returning the next day to the excitement of pulling the trap out of the water to see four or five big fresh lobsters and a crab or two.

My grandmother’s name was, Philena (Tarbox) Kehail, she was born in 1864 on Westport Island Maine. Westport Island is located in “Mid Coast Maine” just off Wiscasset and the Sheepscot River. In my grandmother’s time Westport Island was a fishing community, most all worked at sea. She was twenty-five years younger than my grandfather, my grandfather passed away long before I was born. His name was Arthur Kehail, he was a sea captain sailing “Three Masted Schooners” all over the world, but mostly to the Orient. He had his captains’ papers when he was nineteen years of age and as a young teenager was sailing on fishing vessels out of Wiscasset and Bath Maine to Georges Banks, Nova Scotia and the coast of Newfoundland. My grandmother learned many things about the sea from her husband, and also her two older brothers who also were deep-water fishermen and the fact that she lived on an Island surrounded by the ocean for eighty-eight years.

The things she knew she tried to pass on to me, “I hung around with my grandmother” she taught me things like the tides, the shore and all the creatures that lived in and around the tide pools, sea gulls dropping their clams from high in the air onto the rocks below to break the shells, how to lift up seaweed at low tide to look for baby crabs. She told me that the water is warmer for swimming when the tide is “coming in” over the hot sand. She taught me how to row a large dory when I was ten years old; she showed me how to head the boat at the right angle into the waves and swells in rough weather. She taught me how to bait lobster traps, she told me what to do if I should ever be caught “off shore” in heavy fog (which did happen to me, I will explain later) she taught me how to tie knots for mooring boats, how to “calk” our big wooden skiff each spring to stop any leaks that it might have after being laid up all winter on shore. These may not seem like “big deals” today but back in the “Thirties” to a city kid these things were far more interesting and far more fun than to sit in a stuffy schoolroom listening to a teacher ramble on about the Pyramids in Egypt.

Fish were plentiful back in the nineteen thirties, we had all the Cod, Haddock, Flounders, Lobsters and Crab we could use. She taught me how to fish, how to let my line hit bottom, then raise it a few feet and wait for something to hit it, mostly Cod and Haddock, but sometimes, a “SURPRISE”.

I was around twelve years old and out fishing with Nana for our supper one summer afternoon, suddenly there was a very heavy tug on my line, I yelled, “I got a big one”, to anybody that has ever fished the ocean with a “hand line” there is always excitement no matter how many times you have done it when you get that “big bite”. I started pulling and pulling, hand over hand, “Nana” told me to take my time, I still had a long way to go as I had let the hook and sinker drop until it hit bottom, now it was a long way up. I was a skinny kid with small hands and the line was starting to hurt as I kept pulling.
There were times, when salt water fishing, that you were forced to “cut the line” if you had snagged some unseen object so “Nana” told me to stop pulling for a minute to “feel” for any action on the other end of the line. I was glad to stop “pulling” for a few seconds, my hands were really starting to hurt, as soon as I stopped I felt the creature on the other end of the line franticly struggling, tugging and thrashing from side to side.
I was now so excited I almost fell out of the boat, this was no haddock. After what seemed like hours I was finally able to see my line going from side to side caused by whatever I had hooked trying desperately to escape back to the bottom.
Every young boy has sometime wondered what “monsters” may lurk in the depths of the ocean, well, what I saw coming up from the darkness of the water nearly made me scream. Nana just kept saying, “pull, pull”, but Nana was sitting in the bow, I was in the stern, Nana couldn’t see what I saw.
Each pull I made caused this things face to come up out of the dark waters, closer and closer. Now I was getting scared. As it got closer to the boat I was bent over the side looking down at it, and this “thing” was looking straight into my eyes, it was staring right through me. God it was ugly, a “movie nightmare” come true.
There was no way I was going to pull this horrible looking creature into this boat with me. I screamed for Nana, “she would save me”. She looked down into the water and laughed. I had caught what she said was one of the biggest “Monk Fishes” she had ever seen. This fish had a face that looked just like a cross between a large monkey and a human being.
I will remember the face on this fish until the day I die. And I still say this fish was looking right into my eyes with some kind of intelligence. The look it was giving me was almost human. (I will remember you).
We didn’t bring it into the boat, it was big and quite heavy, Nana got the hook out of its mouth and it slowly swam down into the darkness. I have never seen another “Monk Fish”. They now sell them in the supermarkets. I would never eat one.


Being married to a Sea Captain during the eighteen hundreds meant long periods of time apart, usually around two years. There is a two-year difference in the ages of my Mother and all of her sisters, as each daughter was born, my Grandmother would plant an apple tree in back of her house. Those apple trees stand there today (2004), “five of them”.

Everybody thinks their Grandmother was a great cook, but my Grandmother was the best. She cooked on a “Black Cast Iron, Wood Stove With A Hot water Tank Attached To The Side, no electricity, no oil, no running water,
(I always said they had running water, because I had to run out to the well and get it). When she cooked, she cooked all day, rolling her own dough, making her own pies, doughnuts, bread, muffins, and biscuits. Much of our food came from the sea, she has made seafood dishes that I can only experience in my mind, I nor anyone else will ever enjoy them again. They are lost forever, she never wrote a thing down, her cooking came from the things she learned as a young girl and the long hours she spent at the wood stove. On top of all this she maintained a garden with all the fresh vegetables, some of which she would preserve for the winter months when we were cold and hungry back in Cambridge.

My Grandmother loved the State Of Maine, especially the coast. As she grew older she spent less time on the Island in the cold weather, living on the Island in the winter meant, snow, ice, sawing and lugging wood, the only heat came from the kitchen wood stove and the dinning room wood stove. As there was no electricity or running water on the Island it was a very simple thing to shut down the house for the freezing months to come, you simply walked out and closed the door. There was no need in those days to even lock the door. (My mother always worried about her piano in the living room and what the cold weather would do to it, but it kept its tune long after my mother had passed on).

“Nana” and two of my aunts shared an apartment on Putnam Avenue in Cambridge Mass and this is where she would live for the winter months, “Oct thru April”. My parents couldn’t make the trip to the Island until June, as they had to wait until school closed, then, the very next day after school closing my father would drive my mother and myself up to Maine. There were a few times that my Grandmother would wait until June to make the trip to Maine. If she wanted to leave in the early spring she would take a train out of the North Station in Boston and get off in Wiscasset where a friend would be waiting to drive her to the Island. They would make the crossing of the Sheepscot River on a small four-car ferry that was pushed by an old “one-lunger” lobster boat.

I remember one of the few times that she took the trip with us in June. She had a habit of telling us the name of each town as we passed through; she had been waiting all winter to get back to her home, her kitchen, her woodstove, her beach and her outhouse. As we drove along she would suddenly say, “we’re in Newburyport now”, then a while later, “we’re in Portsmouth now” she would do this all the way up the coast.
Today when you leave New Hampshire on “Route 95” and enter the State Of Maine, you travel over The Piscataqua River from Portsmouth NH into Kittery Maine via a very large modern day bridge that has been built high enough to accommodate any large ship that may have to pass under it.
Back in the nineteen twenties and thirties the crossing was made on a much smaller drawbridge located about two miles down river in an easterly direction, this bridge was part of the old “Route One”.
It has been determined that the NH, Maine borderline is the middle of the Piscataqua River. When crossing this bridge on our trip to Westport, Nana would wait until she thought our car was exactly in the middle of the bridge, and then she would say, “Well, we’re in Maine now”. She had been waiting all winter for this.
Before my retirement I was a truck driver and working a night shift for my company. My work took me many times to Kittery Maine. At two or three in the morning there was very little traffic traveling over the “Piscataqua Bridge” and as I approached the middle of the bridge I would look off to my right as I entered Maine, there are two other bridges, the furthest one down is the old route one “draw bridge” that we used to cross some sixty odd years before. I would look down there and say out loud to myself, “well, we’re in Maine now”.
With the Diesel engine in my truck roaring and looking at all the little lights and gadgets that are in today’s modern vehicles, I could still picture that little old lady sitting in the back seat of my fathers beat up old 1928 ford as though it was yesterday.
If you are related to me and should happen to travel to Maine someday, you undoubtedly will have to cross the “Piscataqua Bridge”, when you reach the middle, look off to the right and say out loud, “well, we’re in Maine now” if you feel a little shiver or a goose bump, you will know that “somewhere up in Heaven" there is a little old lady that heard you, and she is smiling.

When I was around thirteen my grandmother started to let me take the boat out alone to row around the cove and up the creek that ran into the Island. She was satisfied that I would do as she had taught me and that I would not do anything foolish or dangerous. My mother was another story, Nana and I both loved the water, my Mother feared it, she always thought of the dangers, and whenever I went out in the boat alone she thought she would never see me again, her fears I suppose were well founded.
Our end of the Island at that time was very remote, there was only one other person and she lived about a half mile up the road, her name was Gladys Hodgdon, she had been friends with my family since she was a child. The nearest people to our place lived about six miles up the Island. We would go days without seeing a car go by. If I had an accident out in that boat, it would be the end of me. But when your thirteen you don’t think of those things. I used to like to lie down in the boat and look up the clouds, I did this one day and my mother looked out of the upstairs window and thought I had fallen out of the boat. If we had “911” in those days my Mother would have had every Emergency Vehicle in the State Of Maine parked in our front yard, she spent the whole summer laying the law down over that. But during the winter when she spoke of it she would shake her head and smile. (I don’t think I would lay down in a boat today).
There is a small Island that lies just outside of our cove (Long Cove) and right off the tip of “Kehail Point”. This Island is about one hundred feet long and about twenty-five feet in width. Nana would sometimes take me out there to look for “Seagull Nests”. The name of this little piece of land is “Mark Island”.

I mentioned earlier in this story that Nana had told me what to do if ever I should be “fogged in” when I was out alone in the boat, well today was the day. It was a nice warm day, but cloudy, the water was calm with no wind. It was high tide and I wanted to go out in the boat, Nana OK’d it, she was the boss, my Mother put up a little fuss but it was two against one. I had to tell Nana exactly where I would be going, that calmed my Mother down a little. I told Nana that I would row out to Mark Island, stay a short while then row back in.
I reached the Island and tied up the boat on the rocks then climbed up to my “sitting spot”. I used to like coming out here and just sit and look out to sea and daydream. It was perfectly still, the only thing you could hear was a Sea Gull screeching and a “Bell Buoy” far off across the Sheepscot River. I loved this little Island, whenever I visit Westport I slow the car down when I come to the curve in the road where Mark Island is visible and take a long look at it. I haven’t been on that little Island since 1939, and I probably never will again.
Well I had been gone from the house long enough, my mother would be up in the second floor bedroom looking down into the cove and having a stroke if she couldn’t see me rowing in.

Fog can come up out of nowhere on the coast, I had no sooner pushed off from shore and started rowing when suddenly I couldn’t see the bow of my own boat. Nana had told me never to get excited, and never jump around in the boat (you may fall out) if you had an emergency.
Heavy fog was a normal occurrence when you lived right on the water, Nana knew this and it was one of the first things she taught me about the water. She said, “when you are lost in the fog and you are close to shore, don’t try to row where you “think” the land is, you could very well be rowing out to sea”. She told me to calmly go to the bow of the boat and throw the anchor overboard and wait.

As I sat there in the fog I knew they would be doing something, my mother would be in hysterics, and my grandmother would be paying no attention to her whatsoever. So I just sat and listened to the “bell buoy” off in the distance.
We had a horn in our house that Nana used when she wanted to call us for lunch if we should be down on the beach or somewhere else away from the house. This was a very large horn that sounded like a “steamship whistle” with a very deep, penetrating tone. It wasn’t long before I heard “Nana on the horn”; I wasn’t very far off shore so I shouted out to her and she told me to row in the direction of the horn. She would sound the horn every few minutes and it wasn’t long before I could see the rocky shoreline emerging through the dense fog. Now, all I had to do was follow the shoreline back to our beach.
We returned to the house, my mother said she was going to put a hole in the boat so I could never use it again, Nana was laughing, I went into the living room and tried to play the Piano until things died down. I was happy; I knew Nana would be cooking something good up to eat in a while.

Today as I write this, it is the year 2004. That horn remains in the attic of our house on Westport today. My aunt and her husband are now living there, she is 97 years of age, and he is 87. I hope I live long enough to someday take that horn out in the yard and blow it; I would love to hear that sound again. (Little things like this stay in a young boy’s mind).

September 1939, I didn’t realize it but this would be the last time that I would have one of these wonderful summers on Westport Island with my Nana, my aunt Eliza (Lydie) and my Mother.

In 1944 near the end of WWII and shortly before her death, I went to work on a Sea Going Tug Boat out of Boston Harbor. We were tying up to a barge one day and the captain walked up to me and asked,” where did you learn to tie that knot” I said, “my grandmother taught me” then I realized how silly that sounded but after he heard the story of my grandfather and where my grandmother came from he understood. I loved this job.
We would have some time to ourselves when we were “under way” and I would go up into the Bow of the tug when we were out of sight of land and look out to sea and imagine my Grandfather passing through these same waters many, many years before on his way to China or some other far off port in the Pacific. I love the sea, my wife and I have crossed the Gulf Of Maine many times on board the “Scotia Prince” on our trips to Nova Scotia, before going to our cabin late at night I would go out on deck, even during a “rain and wind” storm and stand at the railing, look out into the darkness and listen to the ship cutting through the water, again thinking of my Grandfather sailing these same waters on his way to Newfoundland as a young teen age boy.
My bad leg kept me out of the War, but if things were different, and I was fit for service, I would have headed straight into the US Navy or the Coast Guard.

In the summer of 1945 WWII was all but over, my mother passed away in 1941 just before the war started. I was nineteen years old now and spending the summer up in Hampton Beach NH. Four of us from our neighborhood went up to Hampton and went to work part time in the Casino and a hot dog stand. My aunt had married, she and her husband purchased a home in Braintree Mass and moved from Cambridge. They took Nana with them. Nana was almost ninety now, it broke her heart that she couldn’t go to her beloved Westport Island anymore, it was another tragedy in her life that she bottled up and faced alone, she never complained or whined, she was the type of person that if she had to cry she would go into a closet where nobody could see her.
During her lifetime she lost her husband, and three of her daughters, now she knew that she would never see the Ocean, her little home, her gardens, the blueberry fields and all the other things that made up the world that she had known and loved since she was a child. She was now, just living with her memories.

As I said, in the summer of 1945 myself and three of my friends were working two or three days a week in Hampton Beach and spending most of our time just “beach bumming”. In those days, right beside the old “Hampton Bandstand” the “Chamber Of Commerce” had a building, there were two loud speakers mounted on the roof for public announcements. During the day they would announce upcoming events or public messages. I happened to be in the “Casino Building” when one of my friends found me and told me that my name had just come over the loud speakers and that I was to report to the Chamber Of Commerce building.
I had a telegram, my Father always called my grandmother, “Mother”, the telegram said, “come home as soon as possible, Mother is sinking”. I took a bus up to Hampton Center (route one) then hitchhiked back to Cambridge, I didn’t have the money for bus fare. We hitched rides everywhere in those days. Those were much safer days in America then they are today.
My father and myself went to my aunt’s house in Braintree early the next morning. Nana was in bed, she looked very old and tired, when I went into the room she looked at me with a big smile, she was probably thinking of all the tricks I used to play on her and of all our fishing trips together. She was peaceful, but I know she realized this was the end.
Nana went to sleep that night and never woke up. It was summertime 1945; the blueberries on Westport were starting to ripen, Nana’s little house was empty that summer, our boat lay on dry ground, unused. (Some of the best summers of my life had come and gone).

Forty years later in 1985 I had to go to Mt Auburn St in Cambridge Mass for a company related physical. The small medical building that I was in is located almost directly across the street from the “Mt Auburn Cemetery”. After I was through with my physical it was almost lunch time, I bought a sandwich to go and a Coke and decided to have lunch with my “relatives”, my mother, father, two of my aunts and of course, “My Nana”, they are all buried in “Mt Auburn”.
My family’s plots are all on “Pansy Path”; there are stone benches to sit on up where the family graves are. I sat down and had my lunch; it is hard to believe that there is such a quiet and peaceful place in the middle of a busy city. After eating and enjoying the silence and beauty of this place, I walked to each of the graves. Nana is there, with three of her children. Memories of these people went through my head for a few moments, I looked around to make sure no one was listening (I talk to grave stones) and I told them we now have electric stoves, cars that go one hundred and fifty miles per hour, I told them we watch movies right in our houses and I told Nana that “there are no more Haddocks to be caught off Mark Island”. I then got into my car and drove off. I haven’t been back since. I don’t need a cemetery, I just close my eyes and go back, everything is in my head.

(The Mt Auburn Cemetery Is One Of The Most Beautiful In The World). “Visit it sometime”, go to Pansy Path, and look for “Kehail and Burtt”. (Philena Kehail is NANA)
~
Next month my wife and I are going to drive over to “Westport Island” to visit with my aunt and her husband. I will stop at the curve and look out to “Mark Island”, I will take my cane and walk down to “Our Beach” I will walk around the little house that I spent all those happy summers in. I will walk out to the spot where the old “outhouse” used to stand. I will visit the “Well” where I used to draw water for Nana early in the morning. (it is still there) Then I will go out and sit in the yard, close my eyes and listen to the “Sea Gulls”, they still sound the same. Cars now drive by the house but I pay no attention to them. They are not part of the memory; they weren’t there when I was a boy.

This house and property will someday come to me, or if I go before my aunt, to my family. If I am not here, I would like one of my sons or daughters to climb up into the attic, find that horn, walk down to the shore and give it one big blast. “I will hear it” (so will everybody else on the Island)

If your Grandmother is still around, listen to her, you may be surprised at what she knows.
Give her a hug and a kiss now and then; someday when she is gone, you will be glad you did.
Remember, there is nothing like a Grandmother, especially if you don’t have television.
They are wonderful people.

Author: Red Burtt