Ahh Martha’s Vineyard, where enduring values endure: small country roads lined with stone walls, the simple joy of time spent with family and friends, the siren call of “not in my backyard.” 

You may have read how the Island’s coastline is under assault from the rapid rise in sea level due to global climate change. And how the acidification of the ocean caused by the same carbon emissions driving climate change could devastate the shellfish industry. How warming waters may be changing the migration patterns of striped bass, lobsters, right whales, and other species. How Atlantic hurricanes are poised to become both more frequent and powerful. In other words, you, like I, may have read enough to conclude that with the Vineyard facing the front lines of climate change, we ought to be out front as well on efforts to slow or mitigate those effects.

Or not. Recently the Edgartown Conservation Commission denied a permit to lay the cables needed to bring electricity to the mainland from Vineyard Wind’s proposed offshore wind farm. After hearing concerns from commercial fishing interests, the commission – made up of unelected volunteers with varying backgrounds, such as real estate law, residential construction, and golf club management – came to a conclusion opposite that of the half-dozen other regulatory bodies that had already approved the project. The project suffered a bigger setback a few weeks later when the fossil fuel–friendly Trump Administration announced it was delaying indefinitely the publication of a required Environmental Impact Statement for the wind farm.

“Our cod stocks are finally coming back,” said one fisherman at the Edgartown commission’s hearing on the issue, “and all of a sudden you guys want to sit there on a boat and pile-drive the crap out of the ocean floor for God knows how long.”

Commercial fishing is time-honored work done by individuals with a personal love of the sea and a sincere stake in the health of the fish that live in it. As an industry, however, it doesn’t have a lot of environmental credibility. What cod stocks are “finally coming back” from, after all, is relentless overfishing: far from an oceanic Eden, the seafloor has been scraped by trawlers for generations. The list of officially overfished species in the region also includes mackerel, bigeye tuna, yellowtail flounder, and striped bass. 

As Rip Cunningham reported in this magazine’s Winter–Spring 2018–2019 issue on the underwater impact of wind farms, scientific studies suggest the effect on fish of pile driving will be temporary. Also, there are no known negative effects of the electricity transmission cables that already cross Vineyard Sound. Experience in Rhode Island and the Gulf of Mexico suggests the long-term effect of towers on fish stocks is likely to be a net gain due to the creation of restricted areas and additional benthic structure. But the fishermen are not wrong: there will always be questions.

“What you don’t know, you don’t know,” said one of the commissioners explaining his vote to deny the permit.

There’s only one problem with his rationale. It’s what we do know: the hour is late; it’s getting hot in here.

This article appears in September-October 2019.

Fall is a particularly nostalgic time on Martha’s Vineyard, which is a particularly nostalgic sandbar any time of year. The obvious explanation is that another season of lazy afternoons has passed and another purgatory of premature dusks and howling midnights is only one brief season away. What’s more, each passing summer is a reminder of others gone by: Vineyard memories that can easily be confused, as John Updike warned, with “my children’s childhood, which time has swallowed.”

Sure, your average year-rounder will likely tell you that September is the best month: good fishing, warm water, no crowds. Unless they say it’s June, for the same reasons minus the warm water and plus the peonies. They aren’t lying necessarily, but they likely arrived as summer people and morphed into shoulder season folk as they perceived the high season changing. Like a compass on a ship full of iron, therefore, they are not to be trusted without some careful calibration.

I have no problem with innocent nostalgia. How could I? There are late summer days on certain beaches where the sight of fathers younger than I am giving their children’s surfboards a little push from behind is borderline unbearable to witness. But both here and over in America there’s a brand of nostalgia afoot that doesn’t smell like suntan lotion lingering on warm skin. There’s a lot of appealing to mythical pasts that either didn’t exist at all, or existed only for a select few. Or that may have seemed sustainable with a global population of less than four billion, as it was fifty years ago, but is untenable with a population twice that size. A lot of “you should have been here when,” in other words, is code for “I wish they weren’t here now.”

Here. This place we love. Originally the word nostalgia was not so much associated with the past as with a place, specifically one’s home. Coined in 1668 out of the Greek nostos, which means “homecoming” and algos, meaning “pain,” it meant acute homesickness, particularly among soldiers. It was considered a disease brought on by everything from strange food to love, and it was treatable by leeches, stomach purges, and being subjected to pain.

The shift in meaning from longing for home to longing for the past was logical enough. One is only homesick when one has left home at some time in the past, after all. But the past is not a physical place to which you can return. The past is a series of stories that groups tell themselves to justify and explain their current place in the world. And even assuming all the individual “facts” in these stories are true, which often they are not, the selection of which ones to remember and retell is a matter of choice: one family’s delirious first day in a new home on Martha’s Vineyard is, after all, often another family’s dolorous last. The past, in other words, is not writ in stone.

Unless it is: there’s a relatively new plaque at Mill Pond in West Tisbury that appropriately celebrates the role of the mill in several centuries of the town’s history. But it says nothing about the thousands of years of fishing for sea-run trout and river herring that were disrupted by the construction of dams along the Island’s rivers. Nor does it say anything, of course, of the pond’s continuing role in depressing the population of both species. Or of some Islanders’ desire that the future both here
and across the Sound will include a healthier approach to our rivers and streams.

But that latter observation is as it should be, I suppose. We don’t make plaques to the future. The future isn’t made by the nostalgic. It’s made by the hopeful.     

Fall Afternoon, Fall Afternoon…

I won’t lie and deny that for many left behind in paradise, fall is the best time of year. And not only because, as a Maine lobsterman told a television-journalist friend of mine, “My favorite day? Labor Day: we have their money and they’re gone.” Though there is surely some of that. Ahh fall, when the leaves turn golden and we happy few, we local cranks, can speak our minds whilst counting our summer dollars.

Nor will I submit you to the usual recitation of how the water is warmer in September than it is in August, the waves more reliable, the produce more bountiful, the fish more varied and hungrier, the nights cooler, the sunsets crisper – though I have just done exactly that.

Here’s the curious thing. If you ask close observers of “summer people” – which is to say, if you ask almost any “year-round” person – they will tell you that August visitors themselves increasingly appear as if they secretly can’t wait for it all to be over. It’s not that August isn’t fun or that folks are not enjoying themselves to the fullest. It’s almost the opposite: the Augustines appear to be engaged in a headlong accumulation of summer pleasures the way a committed birder – a “wing nut” – on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Papua New Guinea checks off species on a life list.

On the Vineyard, the “lazy days of summer” – those “summer afternoon, summer afternoon” times that James praised – come at its beginning, in July, and at its end, in September. August, by contrast, is fun like a roller coaster, or like a scavenger hunt. Fun like those card games that are based simply on who can play faster rather than who has the best strategy.

Just because I myself am not much of a scavenger hunter or roller coaster doesn’t mean this kind of fun is wrong. Nor is the frenetic pace of August anyone’s fault. It’s largely well-meaning year-round Island organizations, after all, that have packed every afternoon and evening with worthy festivals, openings, screenings, signings, singings, and talking eggheads by the dozen. Similarly, the ongoing veneration of wholesome food is good for both farms and taste buds, but woe to the August host who still thinks he can grab a twelve-pack of Hebrew Nationals and a bag of buns and call it a Vineyard beach picnic. July’s “help yourself to a cold one” is August’s “try this evening’s signature cocktail.”

It’s no doubt boring at this point to wonder aloud if the relentless urge to Instagram just how much glamorous fun is being had by any given reveler at any given moment may be playing a role in the amnestic blur that August has become. But my friends and family will attest that the possibility of boringness has never stopped me in the past. So consider it wondered aloud. It was in The Phaedrus, I think, that the great philosopher pointed out that we Instagram things in order to forget them.

Or something like that. I can’t remember. I’ll tell you in October. After the Derby.

Breaking news: another summer has come and gone. But I’ll not bore you with the tried and true recitations of how the ocean is still warm, warmer than July in fact, at Great Rock and Norton Point, State Beach and under the cliffs at Gay Head. Or how the fish are running at Lobsterville and Wasque, more than in July or August, in fact. Or how the crowds have hurtled off to wherever it is they go, like eels to the Sargasso Sea, perhaps to reproduce before mysteriously reappearing right on schedule next spring.

In other news, days are notably shorter, but they are exceptionally well lit, at least compared to mid-summer. Nights, meanwhile, are reliably cool. Those who moved out to rent their places for the summer have squirreled away their real estate taxes for another year and have moved back into their own beds to sleep well. Those who moved out of their winter rentals, meanwhile, have also returned to more comfortable digs, perchance to dream of a more permanent arrangement with this over-loved sandpile.

This just in: the place is generally falling into the sea. Autumn is a great time to watch it happen, however. Along the beaches of Chilmark and Aquinnah, the low light and steady breeze of an October afternoon has a remarkable ability to bring out the poetic quality of the constant hourglass flow of sand trickling down from dunes perched on top of scarps. The great and small pieces of land that have sloughed off and slid down part or all the way to the beach, bringing their plant cover of blooming goldenrod and reddish huckleberry along with them, look less like ruination in progress than like a series of hanging vases. Or a landscape designed by M.C. Escher.

The walls of rock-studded clay where the sea at high tide leaves no beach at all, meanwhile, don’t have the parched look of a quarry or bomb crater that they can have in the noonday sun of summer. Where the sea licks at the clay faces, small polished stones protrude with a seeming pattern, both undeniable and inscrutable. They look like a jewel-encrusted door in the cave of the count of Monte Cristo. The pebbles and stones glisten, flaunting colors forged deep beneath the earth’s crust, sometime before the Atlantic Ocean was born. Forged, it may be comforting to remember, from sediments that were once a part of majestic, if nameless, mountains and idyllic summer islands torn down eons ago by oceans that are now also gone wherever it is that oceans go to die.

Comforting to remember, perhaps, but no reason not to go out and vote for sanity in the short term. Understand?

And that, as the most trusted man and seasonal Vineyarder in America used to say, is the way it is.

During my pre-Vineyard days in Washington, DC, I quickly learned the standard when-you-meet-someone-new questions: “Where do you work” or “What do you do?” Well, not on Martha’s Vineyard. People here ask what town you live in (but that’s a topic for another issue) and what brought you to the Island.

Everyone has their own story about how they came here. Just among those of us in the magazine office, we have a guy with generations of family ties who went from summer kid to year-rounder, a woman who came on vacation in her thirties and saw a classified ad that led to a job here, and an intern who was born and raised on the Island. Over the years we’ve included many personal tales of what brings people to Martha’s Vineyard and how and why they stay; their stories are often fascinating.

In this edition, we hear from six Vineyarders about how they moved to the Island year-round (page 22). We talk with a young woman who grew up here and how she was able to return after college and make a living (page 30). Writer Moira Silva contributes to this conversation with a short essay about moving from Boston one dank March day (page 40).

A natural progression of this discussion leads to where people come from, and to that end we take an in-depth look at the Azores, the Portuguese islands that many Vineyarders’ ancestors called home (page 42).

How did you first come to find yourself on the Island? And do you have a tale about moving here? Perhaps that story is still being written.

When I moved to the Vineyard five years ago this fall, I hadn’t lived here seasonally or even vacationed on-Island before. I basically came here cold. Now I realize there are some basic themes to living here (and many of the articles in this magazine correspond).

It’s a small island: Which means whomever you’re talking to is likely related to whomever you’re talking about. They may know the other half of the story too – which helps keep alive all those little crazy details about this place. (For an even smaller island with its own history of crazy tales, visit Noman’s Land – page 30.)

Joining in: Whether it’s a team, group, class, club, or outing with friends, trivia night or fishing the Derby, connecting with others is a necessity, so the Island isn’t too isolating. (Broga is a new style of yoga with a definite camaraderie – page 22.)

Four seasons: It’s tough to live here year-round without an appreciation for the changing natural beauty and for the varying rhythms of residents and businesses throughout the year. (Our photo essay by Tim Coy evokes some of the Island’s quieter moments – page 66.)

Expect the unexpected: Everything has a story, though thankfully, it’s not always what you might anticipate. I work about a block from a little park where a bustling movie theater used to stand, and I had never heard about it until now (page 15).

Live like you’re on vacation: The people I know who truly love living on the Vineyard enrich their lives by partaking of the same kinds of activities that draw the tourists here. (The Vineyard Artisans Festivals is a perfect example – page 40.)

The diversity of experiences here makes for a richly textured life: Seize the day!