When you travel, sometimes the worst roads have the best views.

My wife and I had been married a little less than a year and when it came to money we were so far in the hole that bottom looked like up. That was the summer 25 years ago when we ended up living in my families two room shack near Webster’s Hill on Duxbury beach. We both remember it as one of the happiest times of our lives.

The tiny salt hay shanty had no running water and a hot plate perched upon an antique chest of draws served as the kitchen. The top draw of the bureau held an assortment of rusty cooking utensils, a hand cranked can opener, three forks, two knives, three plates and one soup spoon along with a badly dented aluminum sauce pan and a small cast iron frying pan. It’s pretty sad when you can fit your entire kitchen into a shoe box and still have enough room for the shoes.

For music we had a radio leftover from the 1950s. Its best days were behind it and it could only pick up a single station – WATD in Marshfield.

An old electric ice-box kept food semi-cold. When the compressor of the ancient refrigerator kicked on it did so with a low rumble that shook the whole structure. Even in the summer, nights on the beach can get rather chilly and the first two or three nights in the shack I thought we were going to freeze to death. We discovered the hidden benefit of kerosene lanterns. Along with light they were a pretty good source of heat; as long as you kept the windows and door closed and the wick turned up as high as it would go without smoking.

In the evening, flies were a constant nuisance. They seemed to be everywhere until you picked up a flyswatter when the little buggers seemed to vanish. It was like they had ESP. After dinner my wife and I would go on fly patrol using an old trick I learned from my grandfather.

Flies love to sleep on the ceiling and the best way to catch them is to let them catch themselves. We would fill a glass half full with warm soapy water and soap suds. When we spotted a "sleeping" fly the trick was to gently raise the glass under him. The warmth of the water woke-up the fly and he would take off right into the suds. The soap broke the surface tension of the water and the fly would promptly sink to the bottom and drown.

When you don’t have a working TV you’ve got to find a way to entertain yourself or you’ll go bonkers. We both got a perverse pleasure from our evening fly hunting expeditions and we actually kept score on a tally sheet thumbtacked to the wall next to a Norman Rockwell calendar that was 15 years out of date.

We didn’t have a coffee pot so we made coffee Texas style, i.e. dump the fresh grounds into the water and boil the daylights out of ‘em. There is something to be said for coffee that you can sip and chew at the same time.

Cooking with a limited range of utensils was a challenge and a single burner hotplate rather limited our menu options. That’s when we discovered the joy of underground barbecuing.

I would dig a shallow 2-3 foot trench in the sand facing in whatever direction the wind was blowing. In the center was the fire pit about 18 inches deep (any deeper and we hit mud). We made a fire out of drift wood, dead branches, and whatever was lying around. After a good bed of coals was established we added a layer of green cedar clippings topped by an old refrigerator rack I had found beside the road. The rack served as the grill. After we loaded the grill with chicken, fish, or whatever was on sale that day, we capped the pit with a galvanized trash can lid and a layer of sand to keep the heat in. The secret was keep each end of the trench open enough to allow enough air to flow to keep the embers alive. The food was ready to eat in about 40 minutes and whatever we made had a delicious smoky flavor of cedar.

Cleanup was a snap. After the fire was out I retrieved the grill rack and filled in the hole.

My wife and I were flat broke for most of the summer but we didn’t feel poor – we used to joke we were rich people with no money. And we were rich in so many ways. We may have had a pretty empty refrigerator but we had a priceless view of the marsh which seemed to go on forever. Instead of a fancy stereo system we had the background sound of waves breaking on the shore and the nearly constant rushing whisper of the sea breezes blowing through a giant broom bush growing alongside the shack.

We scrounged our way through countless yard sales looking for bargains or paperback books to read. We took long walks in the morning and evening. Sometimes would sit for hours watching for shooting stars. Sometimes we would just sit on the shore and watch the endless succession of waves breaking on the shore.

Once while walking along the beach we spotted a few coins sticking out of the sand. Digging around we uncovered a clump of about $15 worth of nickels, dimes and quarters. Most likely, the stashes of coins were someone’s tips which must have spilled out of an overturned purse. The way my wife and I danced around you would have thought we just won the lottery. That night we treated ourselves to a lobster dinner and a bottle of wine.