Art of the Odd

On Monday, as I was making my travel plans for Viable Paradise, I asked Solosez (that vast collective of lawyerly and other wisdom) what they thought of my plan to get to Martha’s Vineyard via Peter Pan Bus and Steamship Authority Ferry. They seemed to think it was a marvelous idea. Erik Hammarlund invited me to call him with questions, since he lives and practices on the Vineyard, and James McMullan had a word of warning:

“Mr. Vaughn, what we are dealing with here is a perfect engine,
an eating machine. It’s really a miracle of evolution. All this machine
does is swim and eat and make little sharks, and that’s all. Now, why
don’t you take a long, close look at this sign.”

“Are you saying I shouldn’t go in the water with an open wound?” I asked. “Especially if I’m wearing my seal costume?”

“Egg-zackly!” he said.

It didn’t strike me as odd at the time that was quoting Jaws. I’d been doing a bit of research on Wood’s Hole, where I’ll be catching the ferry to the Vineyard, and I knew that it was home to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and the director of the Institute had reviewed Peter Benchley’s Shark Trouble as “intended more as an argument against the hype than more fuel for it. The author’s introduction,” she wrote, “emphasizes how much has been learned since he wrote Jaws in 1974 and that sharks, including the most fearsome ones, are in much more danger from humans than humans from sharks.”

It wasn’t until I told the story to NovySan and he asked, “What does Jaws have to do with Martha’s Vineyard?” that I realized…

“I don’t know. It was set in New Jersey, wasn’t it?”

“Was it?” his daughter asked. “I thought it was in Jamaica or something.”

“No, it was New Jersey,” I said. I was positive. But not so positive I didn’t look it up the next day. And as far as I can tell… Amity Island could be almost anywhere along the Eastern Seaboard, but might very well be off the coast of Massachusetts – you know, like Martha’s Vineyard. The first few pages of the book, which I skimmed through on Amazon, told me nothing except that Amity was a place that New Yorkers came for the summer. The Wikipedia entries for Martha’s Vineyard and Jaws told me the movie was filmed on the Vineyard. I was terribly confused. But then I found the link to New Jersey I was looking for – the one that explained why, all these years, I’ve thought that fictional white shark had terrorized the Jersey Shore.

In the Google Books preview of Paging New Jersey: A Literary Guide to the Garden State, I discovered that a series of shark attacks on the Jersey Shore in 1916 was one of Benchley’s inspirations for Jaws. The information was familiar enough that I know I’d read it before – probably around the same time I first read Jaws, which must have been in high school. (It’s on a dusty bookshelf in my mind, right next to The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby – and wouldn’t that be an awful mashup? Or brilliant, maybe.)

And so, once again, the Internet informs me that something I’ve known for years isn’t something I knew at all. At least I didn’t invent a disease this time.