Everyday islanders brought the fictional Amity Island to life. They piloted boats, built sets, and worked as extras. Local carpenter Eric Ropke was a long-haired graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York City before moving to Martha’s Vineyard, where he would earn his on-set nickname “the hippie with a hammer.” Ropke’s job was to build things designed to fall apart, like the tear-away dock or Quint’s boat in the final battle scene. And like many people involved with “Jaws,” he spent a lot of his time trying to fix the endlessly malfunctioning mechanical sharks. One afternoon, he and a crew member swam out to a shark that had stopped responding to the control station in the middle of a shoot.“We were out there for 25-30 minutes and doing the repairs,” remembered Ropke. “We got it all done, so we push off to start to swim back. And I’m about two or three strokes into swimming, and out of the corner of my eye I catch the image of this shark’s head right at the water. And I was hit with this bolt of energy in my entire body that was totally uncontrollable and right down to the primal core.”Ropke was one of the first people to understand just how terrifying a fake shark could be, but he was far from the last. , Most people don’t expect to meet Indigenous people in a place like Martha’s Vineyard, which is primarily known for being a fancy vacation destination., Martha’s Vineyard is in the middle of an invasion this summer — one inspired by a 50-year-old mechanical shark and the movie that made it famous..