by Holly Nadler
As they drew abreast of her, they had an impression of a pale face, a cloud of gold hair, and a long, bedraggled white dress.
“Should I stop for her?” whispered the good-hearted clergyman, removing his foot from the accelerator to hover over the brake.
“No!” cried Kathleen.
The panic in her voice made Gerry step on the gas. They kept on driving and the sight of the lost bride vanished from their rearview window as they rounded the next bend.
Gerry Fritz is a sprightly, fifty-something man with a head of bushy silver curls shorn short. He’s the dream minister in that you feel you can tell him anything. So I did, once I’d finished jotting my notes from our interview.
A memory had been slow-cooking in my consciousness for several days, and I had been waiting for the perfect person to share it with. I prefaced it by explaining my belief that emanations from the spirit world are just the starting point for our seeking, that there exist supernatural happenings of another, higher order that connect us with the Divine.
“Something happened to me some forty-three years ago,” I continued. “All this time I’ve been waiting for the proverbial scientific explanation, expecting to come across a description of the same phenomenon in a National Geographic article, or hear a similar story from another person, but that hasn’t happened. And in light of all the odd and wonderful experiences I’ve had, I’ve come to the conclusion that science had nothing to do with it. All those years ago, several high school friends and I were gifted with a miracle.”
I had his attention. His dark grey eyes stayed fixed on my face as he nodded for me to go on.
It was a July night in 1965. My friends and I had staked out a secluded cove of Zuma Beach on the Malibu coast. We’d built a campfire. I’m sure some beer was consumed, though I’ve never been a beer drinker myself. I sat alone for a while on the outskirts of the group, and at a certain point an unusual mood settled over me. At the time I had no frame of reference for it, although many years later I realized it was a state of Grace. Certainly during my young life I’d known pleasure and comfort and excitement. But this was altogether different. Even at the time I knew it was somehow bound up in holiness, even though my upbringing (Judaic heritage, Unitarian Sunday school) had given me no vocabulary for this brand of divinely inspired transformative state.
Then someone suggested we go for a walk.
The minute our bare feet touched the wet sand of the high-tide line, geysers of shiny sparks erupted from each footstep, splashing up into the air. This wasn’t a mere brief flare of phosphorescence—these were clouds of sparkles gusting all around us as if a sugar plum fairy with hands the size of catcher’s mitts reached into a sack and tossed out showers of glitter.
We not only walked along the beach, we strutted and hopped and performed jumping jacks, and those of us who’d taken ballet classes did fouette turns and tours jeter. We gamboled for at least an hour—maybe two, maybe three. My memory stops at the point when we at last turned our backs on the beach, packed up, and went home.
All that remains is a sense of transcendent beauty and a gift of holiness that I’ve been waiting all my life to recover.
The Reverend Fritz reflected for a moment. Then softly he told me of his own first experience with the Sacred.
In another life, as he called it, Gerry was a banker with a wife and two kids (since divorced and grown, respectively). He’d formed a friendship with a man who was studying to be a minister, and this friend informed Gerry that he, too, would be called to the cloth.
“Not a chance!” responded Gerry with a hoot of laughter. “I like my way of life, especially the security and this little thing called money.”
When his friend’s time came to be ordained, he invited Gerry to attend the ceremony and gave him a special assignment. Thirty appointed friends and colleagues would be placing their hands, pancake style, on top of the new minister’s head. “I want yours to be the first hand,” he told Gerry.
When the moment arrived, Gerry applied his hand gently (“If you press too hard, the weight of the other hands will drive me to the floor,” his friend had warned). As the thirtieth hand came to rest above all the others, Gerry felt an enormous wind blow through the cathedral.
“It surged through and roared in my ears and swirled around me as if I might levitate. When it finally faded away and we all removed our hands, I asked the man nearest me, ‘Does that always happen?’”
The man regarded him blankly. “Does what always happen?”
“The wind!”
A continuing blank stare.
Gerry asked some of the other participants as well, but no one seemed to know what he was talking about. Finally he faced his friend, the newly ordained minister. “Did you feel it?”
His friend’s face glowed from within. “Didn’t I tell you?”
A short time later, Gerry began planning his return to college in preparation for entering the seminary.
Our local National Public Radio station airs a regular show by a Vineyard bird-watcher named Vernon Laux. He always signs off with, “Keep your eyes to the sky!”
I’d like to make the same recommendation, but not for the purposes of bird-watching, although that’s certainly a worthy activity. I can’t emphasize enough how rewarding it is to keep our eyes to the sky, to the sea, to the fields, to the faces of all the people who pass us on the street. Each one of us is given opportunities to behold awesome—in the fine old sense of the word—sights and sounds. And sometimes these sights and sounds have an origin that we regard as supernatural.
I believe that whether it’s a bird on the wing or departed Aunt Cecily rapping on our walls or a sudden sense of oneness with all Creation, all these gifts are sent to us by the same Source.
Acknowledgments
My profoundest thanks go to my editor, Karin Womer, at Down East Books—this is our fourth book together, so between us we’ve demolished a whole acre of forest. Many thanks to intrepid archivist Eulalie Regan at the Vineyard Gazette, who played the Watson to my Holmes (or maybe the other way around) when she learned no one had ever written truthfully about Rudolphus Crocker and his part in the Great Fire of 1883. Also Eulalie has placed in my hands countless envelopes with clippings about fascinating islanders whose lives have intersected with so many of these stories. And, speaking of old Rudolphus, thanks are in order to Charlie Utz, publisher of Vineyard Style Magazine, and historian Chris Baer for being the first to break the real story.
And speaking of the Vineyard Gazette, many thanks to editor-in-chief Julia Wells, editors Lauren Martin and Jim Kinsella, and everyone else in that venerable newsroom, who extends a warm welcome whenever I visit. I also love it that they let me write about everything under the sun, including ghosts, in my weekly town column.
I appreciate all the help I’ve received from the folks at the Oak Bluffs Library: Danguole Budris, Matthew Bose, Anita Parker, Pamela Speir, and Rosemary Hildreth.
I’m grateful to Vineyard Haven psychic Karen Coffey for sending me down some most intriguing paths. Robert Alger, of Pilgrim Paranormal Research, has been an invaluable resource and generously allowed me to use one of his photographs in the book. It’s been fun hanging out with him and his cohorts, Patrick McAllister and Bob Kent, on ghost-hunting stakeouts, and a huge extra thanks to Pilgrim Paranormalists Scott Stalter and Donnie Reese for building my Web site, www.VineyardGhosts.com.
Over the years, thousands of people have participated in my ghost walking tours, and the accounts many of them have imparted during the hour we spend together have contributed to my own personal Wikipedia of the supernatural. Thanks also must go out to all the island spirits who’ve found a way to make me sit up and take notice—life is so much more magical when they’re out and about.
Thank you, too, to my fantastically loving, talented, supportive, and hilarious son, Charlie, now living in Los Angeles and following the promptings of family genes to be a writer. To my sister, Cindy; mom, Trina; brother, Owen; and sister-
in-law, Faith: thank you for being in my life. Much love and gratitude to Marty Nadler, the best ex-husband in the world. My pets, Huxley and Beebe, are hardly the best dog and cat in the world, but they keep me laughing. My heart always warms to my closest women friends on the Vineyard; in alphabetical order, Donna Bubash, Paula Catanese, Jessica Harris, Injy Lew, Gwyn MacAllister, Lisa Rohn, Marcia Smilack, and C.K. Wolfson.