One could see Quonset Point from our spot at my grandmother’s cottage on the Portsmouth shore of Narragansett Bay. 

The irony registers only now: Gram’s cottage was itself a Quonset hut, once housing a naval officer at the station across the bay. When the housing was no longer needed, hundreds of these distinctive semicircular structures became government surplus, snapped up to fill a postwar housing shortage. In our family’s case, one was rebuilt on the Portsmouth shore to provide a summertime escape from the city life of Fall River, Mass.

Less than 10 miles apart, the distance between Fall River’s famous textile mills and the shores of more rural Portsmouth was enough for the city folks to call it “going down the country” when making the trip.

What was once officers’ quarters showed itself in the details. A large maritime compass design was inlaid in the floor. Porthole windows caught the light off the water. Someone had cared about the finishing of this structure, and that care survived the transplant to Portsmouth.

Three Fall River brothers built a mini compound of sorts on that Portsmouth shore — two druggists and a city clerk — adjacent cottages within shouting distance of each other. They didn’t leave Fall River so much as reassemble it on the water. “Cottage” in this part of Rhode Island can describe a wide margin of places. The Vanderbilts’ summer retreats in Newport were palaces rivaling Versailles, still called cottages by Gilded Age convention. For three brothers from Fall River, these were ramshackle camps — no indoor plumbing, sitting on the rocky shore of Narragansett Bay. They didn’t have the means of the Vanderbilts or the Astors, but they escaped, just the same.

The corner drugstore — my grandfather’s place of business — in those years, the 1920s through the 1940s, was as much a cultural fixture in a Fall River neighborhood as the Catholic parish. Each ethnicity and patch of the city seemed to have their own. The stores were social gathering places where in the evening a man could stop in and, for a quarter, get a five-cent cigar and a coffee cabinet at the drugstore counter.

My family grew up in Portsmouth on Aquidneck Island, a short drive from Fall River but a world away from the mills which employed the first wave of immigrant ancestors in the 19th century. We were all lifelong lovers of the ocean — swimming, boating, and just taking in the seascape from an Adirondack chair. The Mount Hope Bridge, Hog Island Light, and the pier of the Weyerhaeuser lumber yard were all in sight of the cottage.

By the 1960s, the old outhouse at the cottage had been transformed into a utility shed holding toys, gardening tools, and the basket of old Converse sneakers — necessary for navigating the rocks and barnacles when going in for a swim. When we’d invite friends over it took some explanation for the uninitiated that they’d need to choose some footwear from the basket if they wanted a quick dip in the bay.

Summer sleepovers at the cottage were the long-awaited events of the season. We fell asleep in the sticky salt air to the sound of the Hog Island Light foghorn, its incessant cadence lulling us to sleep. Morning meant blueberry pancakes — and the sound of an Ohio Blue Tip match lighting an ancient gas stove. The explosion when match met gas would wake the dead, but Gram took it in stride. Just part of the morning routine.

After breakfast she’d gather the kitchen scraps — orange peels, coffee grounds, assorted garbage — bundle them in a brown paper shopping bag, and hand it to us to float out to sea. “For the seagulls,” she’d say. An innocent but misguided environmental practice, overlooked as simply what one did down the country.

One landmark of that shoreline was the deep-water pier of the Weyerhaeuser lumber yard. As kids we’d marvel at the incoming boats from the Pacific coast or maybe even further away. My aunt would come out to join in the gawking, producing a pair of binoculars — from her son, she’d always say, who brought them back from the service in Germany — and let the kids look through them, the strap still around her neck, as if to say: you can’t have this precious thing from my son, but here, look.

A daytime adventure and chore was digging clams for chowder. My older brothers taught me the trick: a rock tossed at low tide would produce a telltale squirt, showing where the clams were and where to bring pail and shovel. Up the stairs to the cottage kitchen we’d haul the pail for grandmother to take over.

The rocky shore, the old Converse, the lack of waves — that beach did not compare with Second Beach in Middletown with its sandy dunes and crashing waves. But to us, it was paradise. An early evening bonfire might close the night before the foghorn wished us sweet dreams.

A neighbor on the other side kept her own humble summer respite — a Newport schoolteacher named Flora, there with her sister. Not a relation, but part of the community. “Come join us, Flora” was the standing invitation from Gram to pull up a chair and visit. To this day, in our family circle, that insider’s idiom still extends a welcome to join in on a visit, a chat, or a walk down memory lane.

By the early 1970s it was over. The family eventually sold the cottage for what now seems like a modest sum — a true kick-yourself-in-retrospect moment. The man who bought the neighboring cottage also bought this one, only to knock it down and keep the land as a buffer. The compass in the floor, the porthole windows, the Quonset curve, the ancient stove retired after hundreds of pancakes — all gone, for a buffer.

Years later, for a milestone birthday, I rented a cottage just two doors down from where the old place had stood. My elderly uncle, well into his eighties, came down to the shore for a swim. Unsteady on the rocks but born to the water, he took to the bay with a swimmer’s stride that had never left his muscle memory. It gave the rest of us a teary-eyed thrill. For a brief weekend, it was 1972 again.

Down the country is a special place and remains one. In an era when high-priced enclaves are encroaching on the shore with names like “Newport Beach Club”; Carnegie Abbey now occupies the old Kaiser Aluminum site — some of the original charm survives. Many of the old cottages on the shore have been renovated for all four seasons. My aunt’s place is now an Airbnb, renting by the week to people who never knew it as a humble cottage, but maybe their grandkids like pancakes.

The shore remains. Come join us, Flora.

Ted Dunne grew up spending summers on the Portsmouth shore and once delivered The Sakonnet Times. He now lives in New Hampshire and works in technology market research.