Summer has settled in, the air thick with insects and thickets heavy with fruit, but the birds at my feeder don’t seem to care. Nuthatches, titmice, and catbirds whir and whiz and land unceasingly, enacting an aerial pecking order I can’t pretend to understand. But I do know that the woodpeckers prefer to dine alone, and that the skittish black-capped chickadees find strength not in size but in numbers. I know that the coupled-up cardinals treat every trip to the feeder like a romantic date – at least until the blue jays arrive, sharp-beaked and stern in their police caps, to shoo away the lovebirds.

There is a baffle attached to the feeder to keep the dozens of resident squirrels from stripping the buffet, but not once have I witnessed them attempting to steal the goods. “It’s because they live in a grocery store,” says my husband. That may well be true – especially this year, which a friend informs me is a good year for acorns, whatever that means – but the logic doesn’t seem to apply to the birds, nor to the chipmunks who scurry underneath to reap the benefits of messy eaters.

Perhaps they prefer takeout to meal prep. Don’t we all in whirring, whizzing, never-enough-hours-in-the-day, never-enough-days-at-the-beach August?

Recently I’ve taken to filling the feeder while wearing garden gloves, an overprotective and not scientifically based reaction to the news that a strain of avian influenza has likely reached the Island. Hundreds of shorebirds have so far been felled, including large numbers of shearwaters – remarkable offshore creatures who just weeks earlier embarked on a 7,000 mile journey from a small speck of sand in the south Atlantic, all for the chance to spend a summer in Vineyard waters.

So far, there has been no indication that songbird communities have been affected, nor that humans are at significant risk. So I keep the feeder up but don my PPE, much as I still wear a mask when venturing into August crowds for Morning Glory corn and Chilmark General Store pizza. “It’s about moderating risk,” I imagine the Audubon’s version of Dr. Fauci might say. Still, if I’m told to take down my feeder, I will comply.

The pandemic has changed me in more ways than I like to admit – I’m quieter now; more risk averse, more prone to imagine a conversation with a bird-scientist version of Dr. Fauci. The garden gloves are just one of the symptoms. Another is that I find myself worrying more often about things I can do little to change – gas prices and foreign wars and a government that keeps stripping the right rights and strengthening the wrong ones and thoughts and prayers that do nothing. I worry, too, about the things I can easily change, like whether I will make enough time to go swimming while the water is warm. Or whether I will remember to eat enough tomatoes and corn and bluefish before they’re gone. Or spend enough time counting the Perseid meteors from a darkened abandoned beach.

I worry that August – splendid, scorching, whirlwind August, the month I love most of all – will race by as it always does.

Yet the cardinals seem unbothered. Their only concern is that it is date night, the feeder is low, and their server seems distracted. They remind me that, come what may, summers on the Vineyard are short and sweet and beautiful.
                                                             

This article appears in August 2022.

Sore arms and a sore back are fine things to have. I’m talking here of the slight stiffness and dull ache in biceps, triceps, and whatever those lateral muscles across the lower torso are that move a paddle through the water thirty or forty times a minute, fifty or sixty minutes an hour, for as long a day as it takes to get from where you started to where you are going. I’ll take that feeling any evening or morning after a day on the water.

Several decades ago in what now seems like another lifetime, I paddled a kayak from Chilmark to Provincetown, stopping along the way at Cuttyhunk, Falmouth, Chatham, and somewhere else I can no longer remember. It was the perfect trip in the ideal boat for that moment of my life, even though my then-three-year-old son cried in his mother’s arms on the beach as I paddled away. (It may not have been his mom’s idea of the perfect moment for me to go wandering, I now realize.)

The memory of that long ago trip returned to me when I found myself enjoying the summer afternoon sunshine while sitting on a powerboat moored a few hundred yards off the North Shore. I was not missing my office particularly. Not wishing I was loose from the seafloor and underway. Not even hoping the occasional cavorting terns would gather their comrades and begin to scream and dive over a sudden school of ravenous breaking fish, though that would have been perfectly okay.

I was that luckiest of things: content. Not merely at peace, which implies some kind of battle won, lost, or otherwise avoided. I was content in an August way that for me is invariably connected with boats and with water, when who should pass by but a solo paddler in a respectable oceangoing kayak. The rig was tricked out and riding in the water in a way that suggested a voyage rather than an outing and was bearing away on a vector that suggested a destination across the Sound at an hour of the
afternoon that also suggested a return crossing was not planned for the same day.

It was an apparition of an earlier version of myself. A self on my way somewhere and determined to get there under my own power. A June self, you might say, with regard for neither sore muscles nor damp sleeping bags.

I am happy to report that the apparition did not dampen my enjoyment of the summer afternoon, though it made me wonder if it might be getting along time to check and see if I need to scrape a few barnacles and weeds off the hull. And it made me glad to think that I never sold that old kayak despite many threats to do so.

I thought of the line from Frost: “When stiff and sore and scarred, I take away my hand from leaning on it hard in grass and sand, the hurt is not enough.” And the one from Thoreau: “Everyone must believe in something. I believe I’ll go canoeing.”

Which I will do. But not until September.

Okay, I admit it. I’m goofy proud of my wife Nina Bramhall, her co-coach Liz Roberts, and their team of high school tennis players who at the beginning of the summer won their fourth consecutive state championship. (Nina herself, meanwhile, was named coach of the year by the Boston Globe…again!) It’s a testament to the dedication of the young women that they won in a tough final match despite having moved up to a higher division. Nina would be the first person to tell you, however, that the rise of the Vineyard to high school tennis powerhouse – there have been six champion teams in seven years, counting the boys’ wins in 2012 and 2013 – is a direct result of the creation of Vineyard Youth Tennis by Gerry De Blois.

As Edgartown attorney Ron Rappaport wrote in the Vineyard Gazette not long after the win, De Blois conceived the program some twenty years ago after noting that year-round youth didn’t have many opportunities to learn the potentially lifelong sport. There was no campus at first, just an instructor and a group of young players. Using entirely his own money, De Blois bought an eleven-acre triangular parcel near the roundabout in Oak Bluffs and constructed four clay courts and a clubhouse on it. He also purchased a bubble to cover two of the courts so that the facility could be used year-round. He hired top-notch pros, including long-time director Scott Smith and head pro Michael Halisky.

“Another hallmark of Gerry’s program: Vineyard Youth Tennis is free – free instruction, free tennis balls, free uniforms, the only thing required is dedication and effort,” Rappaport wrote. “Island children have met those requirements from the beginning.”

For more than two decades De Blois has been the sole funder of Vineyard Youth Tennis. By Rappaport’s estimation, “this is the largest individual philanthropic gift in the history of Martha’s Vineyard.” Also notable, to me at least: De Blois never sought publicity for his extraordinary generosity. In fact, for many years he sought to remain anonymous, occasionally slipping in to watch a practice or a match as if he were just another proud parent or grandparent.

 De Blois, however, “is not in a position to continue to support the program in the future,” wrote Rappaport near the end of his piece in the Gazette. “And we are working on another model so that the program can continue well into the future. We will need help from public officials and hopefully from private donations.

“This is a moment to take pride in winning another state championship, and to enjoy the great satisfaction of watching our children learn the game of tennis and of following our players’ academic achievement in high school and college. But it is also the time to pause and simply say: thank you, Gerry.”

Indeed, thank you, Gerry. And while we’re at it, thank you, Ron, for helping to figure out a way to keep a Vineyard winning streak alive. Not just for the high school teams, but for all of the more than 300 young people, from first grade through twelfth, who participate in the program every year.

Strange times

It was an odd beginning to the summer here in paradise. And not only because it got going so fitfully, with June shrouded in what felt like weeks of fog and rain, and the Fourth of July sneaking up like a thief in the night. Or rather, more like an unwanted text – or, God forbid, a tweet – at first light from a phone that wisdom would suggest should not be left bedside. Ask not for whom the “smart” phone buzzes; it buzzes for you, smart-ass.

No, it was more than the weather, which nearly rotted the leaves off the ornamental cherry trees up-Island. Or the caterpillars, which were back again in corners of down-Island in numbers not seen for almost, but not quite, long enough to have been packed away in the memory as a one-time fluke and not a harbinger of a hard new reality. “It’s a caterpillar-eat-leaf world out there, pilgrim, so you better be ready. And you better ask yourself, ‘Are you a caterpillar, or a leaf?’”

Coming on the heels of a notably rancorous spring town meeting season, the sudden firing of the popular head of the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital after only thirteen months on the job by a closed-door, closed-mouthed, self- and corporate-appointed board-of-directors-apparently-for-life tested the veneer of comity on the Island. “Trumpian,” howled more than one aggrieved member of the online peanut gallery. “The board president and the Development director [who are married] are professional people not Donald and Ivanka,” retorted another.
“This is not a conspiracy.”

The resulting sense that our long national insomnia had spread to the happy shores of Noepe was further enhanced by the spectacle of one popular educator quitting in a huff for reasons every Islander seemed to have an inside story about, but that no one wanted to go on the record and say. Another teacher, meanwhile, took to painting the school walls after hours without completing the requisite peer-reviewed mural inventory impact statement. It was as if the distinct odor of vendetta and whitewash had blown in on the prevailing southwest breeze all the way up the coast from the capital.

The good thing about an unwanted buzz at first light from a Mensa phone bearing the all-important news that the cable will not hold and the battery is running low – the good thing on the Vineyard at any rate – is that it might get you up for the day’s first tweets of real birdsong. It’s a music, I have been told, that literally circles the globe every day with the moving blush of sunlight. Whether the sound of one waking bird travels west and wakes the next sleeper in her nest even before the advancing sun gets there, I do not know. (Or am not currently at liberty to say.) But any chickadee will tell you, and the titmouse will confirm, along with four or five other reliable sources close to the story, that it’s time for sleepers to wake.

Wake up. It’s August already. There is much to do, and plenty of fun to be had.

Can I just say right here and now that I am going to miss President Obama and his brand of low-key but relentless sanity. And not just politically, though I am not ashamed to say I will be sad to see him exit the White House even as, the electoral college willing, I will welcome the new regime with high hopes. 

It’s not going out on any kind of limb to be a fan on the Vineyard, of course. After all, he won 75 percent of the vote on the Island in 2008. That was back when “the decider” and his cronies handed over an economy that had been healthy when the Supreme Court put them in charge, but by 2008 was entering a full-on free fall of the sort not seen since 1929. The car industry was disappearing and the housing market was imploding. One war that should have been finished before another was started wasn’t. A second war that never should have been started was also unfinished, though it had succeeded in squandering the nation’s reputation. More than sixteen million fewer Americans had health insurance than today, and millions of people couldn’t marry the person they wanted to marry. In 2012, when Obama ran on his own record against a former governor of Massachusetts, his victory among the voters on the Island was trimmed only by 3 percent, to 72 percent.

So I’m not alone. But I’m going to make a far riskier assertion. Notwithstanding the late Craig Kingsbury’s “Hoo-rah for Bill” sign, normally it is the reflexive position of Islanders to scowl and howl at the inconvenience caused by presidential visits. “The traffic is bad enough,” we moan. “We don’t need more publicity.” “This place was so much better before the Clintons put it on the map and all those fat cats from Hollywood and Wall Street showed up.” We say these things as if there haven’t always been Kennedys and Cagneys, titans of industry and icons of television down the long dirt roads up-Island or at the ends of clamshelled down-Island driveways.

I’ll not dispute that it’s inconvenient to have to wait for the motorcade to pass once in a while; that kind of thing can make you late to one of those parties “the decider” famously derided when he told a reporter “Most Americans don’t sit in Martha’s Vineyard swilling white wine.” (That’s the decider’s preposition “in,” by the way, not mine.) And the year the Secret Service pretty much closed South Road for the duration of the visit wasn’t ideal. Or was it Middle Road?

But despite whatever slight disruptions the visits may cause, I say, “Thanks,
President Obama, from a grateful Islander.” Okay, I wasn’t born here and I am not afraid to drive my car off-Island, but “Thanks from a grateful washashore” sounds
like someone saved us from a shipwreck.

Oh…yeah. Come to think of it, that’s actually what he did do, isn’t it? 

Thanks, Mr. President. Come back any time. And bring the family.

You wouldn’t know it from a trip through Five Corners in Vineyard Haven, or the Triangle in Edgartown, but most Americans don’t take the time off they deserve. It’s not just hard-working laborers who are not permitted paid vacations by their Scroogian overlords, either, though that’s a huge problem and injustice: one in four Americans does not get a single paid vacation day. According to the U.S. Travel Association, an industry group, Americans don’t take advantage of 429 million paid vacation days every year. Divide that by 365 days and you find that otherwise rational people are donating 1.2 million years of their valuable time to their jobs, for free. They are doing this when they could instead be inching along Beach Road toward the drawbridge. 

All joking about traffic aside, it’s a curious thing. According to the study there are all kinds of downsides to not taking a break from work, for both the individual and the employer alike. You can guess most of them: higher stress and related health issues, lower productivity when on the job, declining morale, damaged personal relationships.

And there’s one more downside that I haven’t seen a study about but that I’m pretty willing to bet is true and a fate worse than lower back pain: winding up being boring. Remember the proverb “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”? Write that down a hundred times … or maybe, on second thought, don’t do that, Jack. But do remember the proverb.

The decline in downtime seems to have begun around 2000. Between 1976 and 2000 Americans on average took around twenty vacation days a year: last year the number was down to sixteen. The French, meanwhile, get and generally take thirty-one days, the Germans thirty-four days, and the Austrians thirty-five days. You can probably guess some of the usual reasons Americans give for not taking the time off they were promised by their bosses and have earned. “The company doesn’t really promote taking it,” is a big one. But there’s also “No one else can do my job,” and its rather more pathetic sidekick, “I don’t want people to think I am replaceable.”

You know what? You are, except to your kids. So turn off your “smart” phone, stupid, and take your vacation. Maybe don’t everyone take all of your vacation at Five Corners in the first three weeks of August, but really, how hard can it be to take the time you’ve earned?

I mean, I know how I would use 1.2 million years of accrued paid vacation. I’d do a little fishing. Read a book. Maybe evolve a little.

My wife might like that.

The forces of nature impose occasional inconveniences upon everyday Island life. A ferry cancelled due to high winds, downtown streets flooded after heavy rains, Beach Road awash with sand and surf during a nor’easter. Lately those vagaries have seemed more dramatic, sometimes even a little ominous. In this issue, writer Peter Brannen explains how our scientific understanding of erosion is finally catching up with the havoc it wreaks upon coastal communities (page 40).

Nature, however, can also soothe, inspire, and exhilarate us, as seven writers describe in our summer immersion guide, starting on page 62. Island blueberries are plentiful in August, and we offer a wealth of growing tips and tasty recipes (page 76). For residents and visitors to Chappaquiddick, the separateness of that little island is an inherent part of its appeal, as they share in their observations and experiences on page 32.

The late artist Thomas Hart Benton found inspiration in the Island’s rural landscapes and its people (page 70); he often joined friends who sought a simple life at Chilmark’s communal Barn House (page 74). And after fifty summers in Vineyard Haven, writer and activist Rose Styron (page 54) has settled here for good and shows no signs of slowing down, a force of nature herself.

We reprise our Best of the Vineyard tally starting on page 82, and say a fond farewell to the magazine’s former editor, Nicki Miller, whose seven years at the helm have served us in good stead. We will miss her. And with that, on to August: Seize the day!

The first time I remember collecting beach glass was around eight years ago. I had met a girl about twelve years old, and she would look for it every day and had amassed an amazing collection. I didn’t begin stockpiling the stuff. Rather, I kept my eye out for particularly good pieces and displayed them at home in a small bottle or bowl.

Last winter, I was in Florida and heard about the “Sanibel stoop.” Even north of there in Clearwater Beach, there were plenty of crookneck walkers collecting shells and other sandy treasures. I happily brought home a few souvenirs of my discovery.

The most impressive find I’ve seen on the Vineyard was on State Beach by visiting friends: a bright blue piece of beach glass about the size of a half dollar. Finders keepers means I won’t see that beauty again. Of course, the likes of it are out there, somewhere (page 68).

If a sea glass safari doesn’t strike you as a fun beach activity, you will surely find inspiration in the other waterside pleasures photographer Elizabeth Cecil encountered for her photo essay (page 42).

August is often a time on-Island when people enjoy visiting family and friends, and it’s fun when a new idea or activity infiltrates the familiar routine. This magazine has some contenders: a new recipe for grilled oysters (page 76) or the Built on Stilts dance festival (page 56). I recall a night when some gleeful, giggling teenage girls came flying out of Union Chapel as they rushed offstage. Their excitement made me wish I had gone to the show – so this summer, I’m there.

I am no birder. That doesn’t mean I don’t like birds. I’ve just never gone out specifically looking for them, so my knowledge is fairly limited. I can recognize the red cardinals and gray catbirds in my yard. And I know that “seagull” isn’t the name of a specific bird, but rather a general word that encompasses many kinds of gulls – such as herring gulls and great black-backed gulls. But that’s far from being an avian expert. More often than not, I simply enjoy the birds I happen to see while going about my everyday life.

Living on the Island, I’ve found that I don’t have to go out of my way to see some cool birds. One of my favorite places to ride my bike is a stretch of Edgartown Bay Road just off Katama Road near South Beach. The birds that are always there – lots of redwing blackbirds, among others – are the perfect complement to the lush edges of Katama Bay with its marshes and fields of beach roses and daisies. And on a bicycle, I love flying down the road with a bird alongside.

Last weekend, my husband and I kayaked across Katama Bay to find our own little stretch of sand. As I sat there enjoying the sun-soaked day, I couldn’t help but notice all the birds around us. Some terns were swooping around. I saw a bigger, brown bird flapping through the air. A couple of birds came teetering down the beach in our direction. Their long orange beaks made them particularly easy to identify: oystercatchers. I recognized them right away from the photographs in this month’s article on the Island’s nesting shorebirds (page 48).

Two days later, I was running along Beach Road and I think I saw a willet. I’d never heard of this bird before reading the shorebirds article, but now I know they tend to feed in marshes, and that’s just where I saw it. I’m still no birder, but I love learning new things.