While we waited for our ferry to Nantucket, we drove around Hyannis Port, parking our car when we could go no further then walking down to the Kennedy compound. No one was around, the driveways were all uninhabited by cars. “The Big House” looked the same as when seen on television and in photographs: sprawling green lawn, white siding, black roof and shutters, an American flag on a high pole reaching towards the heavens. It was eerie, though, to find all the properties quiet when their iconography is countless cousins playing football in the yard mere steps from the Atlantic Ocean. I could hear the snap of the pigskin, the laughter, the grunts of major, passionate competition, the same waves I was listening to now in the background. Life, despite the family’s incomparable deaths. The grey, rainy, windy conditions on this May day added to the contrast, the halcyon blue skies and bright sun as absent as the people I expected to find there, in spite of the passage of time and the graves that cannot be denied.
I wondered what had transpired within the walls of these emblematic buildings: what had they heard, who had they protected? How would they feel about their own fame, both indelibly intertwined and distinctly separate from the notoriety of those who walked their halls? And lastly, are they sad to have been left behind?
Nine months later I read the new book, “White House By The Sea: A Century of the Kennedys at Hyannis Port”, by Kate Storey. It was excellent, I now have an understanding of what the New England coastal town went through when the Kennedy clan was in residence. Every press outlet, whether local, national or international, had a representative in Hyannis Port to document even the most mundane movement or activity. Over fifty years later, the neighbors’ yards on Marchant Avenue surely still bear the impressions of feet and camera tripods, cigarette butts and to go coffee cups. It was difficult to reconcile this quaint, sleepy – at least in the spring – oceanfront community with the unwanted chaos and unrelenting intrusion that was the norm for decades. It adds new meaning to “neighborhood watch.”
I wish I had read the book before I visited but I’m sure I will return to Hyannis Port someday. And when I do, I hope it is once again filled with families, even if their last names are not “Kennedy.” It is too lovely a location to stand empty, a relic of a fairytale called Camelot. I love history more than most, but life is for the living, as are these beautiful homes.
#sisterrain alittlesightalotofheart #legallyblindtraveler #travel #usahisory #kennedycompound #hyannisport #whitehousebythesea #katestorey
