A few years back, on a wind-whipped January day, a longtime seasonal resident stopped by the magazine office in Edgartown. She had summered on the Island for most of her life but had never visited in the off-season. She didnʼt like what she saw.

For her, the Vineyard has long been a patchwork of pink porches, green gardens, and Black excellence. Here instead were empty streets, shuttered restaurants, and miles of gnarled scrub oak. “This is my first winter visit and it will definitely be my last,” she declared. She didnʼt want to see her beloved Island outfitted in its drab winter coat.

I didn’t share her sentiment, but I understood it. Winters on the Vineyard are unfailingly gray, and even the biggest year-round booster will concede that they can be agonizingly long. Still, if you look beneath the surface, you’ll find that the Island is full of life, I explained. It is, in fact, when some of the most beautiful moments unfold. 

Each year, when the crowds depart and the to-do lists lighten, the hearty and fool-hardy twenty thousand people who stay behind start to slow down and settle in. We gather in libraries and gymnasiums and churches. We root for the home team. We lace up our skates and head to the ponds. We catch up with friends in wood stove–warmed houses. We patrol empty beaches in search of seals and snowy owls. 

We seek out and foster community wherever we can find it, whether thatʼs on a six-person row around Vineyard Haven Harbor or in an entirely volunteer-staffed greenhouse in Oak Bluffs. 

Summer gets all the attention around here, but the spirit of the Vineyard shines bright when the nights are longest. In the coldest months of the year, we create our own warmth.

This article appears in Winter-Spring 2025-2026.

There is a remarkable piece of writing in this issue about Epenow, a Wampanoag from Noepe in the early 1600s, who the writer identifies as the first Islander whose name we know. It’s a small observation that contains multitudes, forcing the reader, as it does, to stop for a moment and consider that every person who lived on the Island in the ten thousand or more years of human habitation before Epenow also had a name. A name implies a family: fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles. A name implies friends, and perhaps enemies.

Epenow had all of those. He also had a temper, which was well deserved, and the kind of personality that allowed him to look back at things that had happened to him in the past and recount them with humor and laughter to visitors from off-Island. These traits, too, are reminders that everyone who lived on the Island in the ten thousand or more years before someone wrote down Epenow’s name possessed not just an identity, but a full human life. A particular tone of voice, a manner of speaking, a sense of hope and of loss.

It’s not entirely accurate that Epenow is the first Islander whose name we know, 
of course, for there is the giant Moshup and his wife, Granny Squannit. You hear occasionally these days the theory that Moshup may not have needed to be a giant, but that the legend may instead harken back to the time some six to eight thousand years ago when rising seas first cut the Vineyard off from the mainland, and it would have indeed been possible for regular humans to wade across the tidal stream separating the new Island from the mainland. Someone with a name would have been the first to realize that the stream they used to wade had become too deep to cross. Someone was the last to insist that her grandparents really had waded it. As the sea rose, Moshup’s body grew – how else to explain his epic wade a hundred generations after anyone remembered being able to simply wait for low tide and walk to the mainland?

Much later, someone else with a name had her tall, strong son Epenow stolen by strangers and taken away across the sea, where his name was written down so that we remember him. Sort of. It’s more accurate to say we remember what his captors and others bothered to write down. There’s a story that Socrates tells in Plato’s Phaedrus of a wise king who is offered the invention of writing with the promise that it will allow his people not to forget. But the king turns it down, saying, “this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.”

It may be true that the highest use of writing is a shopping list, which allows us to temporarily forget the important things we need from the grocery store. But I like to think of the few fragments of written evidence we have about Epenow – including the fact of his name – less like the full story of a person and more like beads in a rosary or a wampum belt: mnemonic windows into a deeper remembrance in which every ancestor is remembered to have a name, even if we don’t recall it at the moment.

There is no shortage of good causes on Martha’s Vineyard. One website that tracks such things reports that there are nearly 400 nonprofit organizations in Dukes County, with combined assets of nearly $420 million and an annual income of nearly $140 million. Put another way, the Island has more than three times the national average of charitable organizations per capita, a statistic that has played a role in Dukes County regularly showing up in various national data-driven rankings of communities with the “highest quality of living” or “most vibrant arts scene.” We even have multiple nonprofits on the Island that consider one of their primary functions to be helping other nonprofits on the Island.

If this sounds like the setup for a joke or a snarkbite, don’t worry, it isn’t. I was recently lucky enough to be out at Thimble Farm as Island Grown Initiative (IGI) was presented with the 2019 Creative Living Award. That prize is awarded each year by the Permanent Endowment for Martha’s Vineyard, which was founded in 1982 and has in the decades since awarded nearly $4 million in grants to everything from Abendmusik to the Zeitz Stained Glass Window Fund. Not to mention another $3.4 million in scholarships to Island students. 

The award presentation had been postponed for a week due to back-to-back fall howlers that had shut down the ferries and thrown the usual endless supply of tree limbs onto Island power lines. But the afternoon of the awards ceremony was exquisite, with warm, low sunlight pouring through the windows of the giant hydroponic greenhouse at the heart of the Farm Hub. There, a crowd of eighty or so friends of IGI and the Endowment gathered, surrounded by countless sprouting greens and long tables covered with gleaned squashes and root vegetables.

The Creative Living Award, which usually goes to an individual, doesn’t come with a game-changing amount of money. But that wasn’t the point of either the party or the various speeches, most of which were personal testimonials from representatives of other nonprofit organizations that partner with IGI to provide fresh, healthy food to those on the Island who might not otherwise have access to it. In just one notable example, last summer while the familiar Vineyard “playground of the rich and famous” was in full swing up-Island and down, the 40 percent of Island school kids who rely on free or reduced-priced breakfast and lunch during the school year were on break. Which might have meant no lunch for many of them had IGI and partners such as the Martha’s Vineyard Boys & Girls Club, Martha’s Vineyard Community Services, and the libraries not provided an astonishing 5,500 homegrown and healthy community meals at six different locations.

None of that would have happened without the thousands of hours donated by hundreds of volunteers, many from Island religious groups. Just as it could not have been done without the extraordinary generosity of thousands of donors, some rich, some famous, and many modest. 

As I said at the outset, there is no shortage of good causes on the Island. Which one, or two or three or four, is yours? It’s the season of giving. 

Exactly two years ago we ran a picture of the historic Marine Hospital in Vineyard Haven on the cover of this magazine. The place looked haunted. Almost boarded up and almost falling down, it was more Halloween than holiday, more hopeless than happening. We put it on the cover because after many years and a few false starts the Martha’s Vineyard Museum had irreversibly committed itself to preserving and transforming the old landmark into a new home for itself. (And, full disclosure, I had recently joined the museum’s board of directors.)

What a difference two years can make. That is, two years of beehive-like activity by the museum’s leadership, staff, and countless architects, designers, archeologists, and tradespeople of all sorts. Though the big celebration will take place in summer, during the months that this issue of the magazine is on newsstands the once forlorn building will quietly open to the public as the spectacularly restored and renovated Martha’s Vineyard Museum. 

Of course, there is still much to be done and more money to be raised, but the new galleries and archival spaces will at last be worthy of the world-class collection spanning 11,000 years of human history in the region. The myriad ongoing collaborations the museum has with the Island’s schools, elderly populations, and scholars will at last have room to breathe. The front lawn, with sweeping views of the Lagoon and harbor, will become welcome public space for a town that is woefully short on it.

But to me, the importance of a forum dedicated to exploring the past goes beyond whatever treasures may be on display at any given time. I’m not talking about that venerable chestnut that “those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.” And though there is merit to the idea that celebrating our “shared past” is a tonic for what ails us in an era that feels increasingly divided, it’s not that either. Because despite what you may have heard, “the past” is neither a singular thing nor is it really “shared.”

Rather, it is the countless unique and different pasts that together make up the only two things we inarguably do share: the present and the future. Without a place to honor, explore, debate, create, and preserve the meaning of those countless threads of experience that make the Martha’s Vineyard of today special to each of us, we will be woefully unprepared to face the many changes the future will inevitably require. Without knowing what we have, how can we know what we stand to lose?

But there’s even a better reason to welcome and celebrate the new museum and the opportunities it will provide to all of us. It’s the sports fan who knows the rules and the lore of the game who enjoys it most. The educated foodie savors the sauce more than the shameless slurper. The sailor listens to the wind, and the angler is a  connoisseur of the habits of diving birds.

So it is with living life in the present, which after all is the only choice we as humans really have. The more we are curious about the countless routes we all traveled to get to the present, the more we can revel in it together.

The arrival of winter is a perilous time for boat owners, and not just because of memorable gales. No, late fall is tricky because it is the time-consuming and often expensive season of putting our watery friends away for what feels like the indefinite future. Spring launch is arguably more work and expense, but that pain is instantly forgotten with the first blast of salt spray in the face when on the water again. The winter hauling, cleaning, scraping, tarp-covering, and check-writing, on the other hand, can drive even the most severe sufferer of Obsessive Boating Disorder (OBD) to look at their navy and think the unthinkable: one of these beloved watercraft must go.

I don’t mean to make light of far more serious addictions and afflictions by pointing out one of your Island neighbors or loved ones is probably already a sufferer of OBD, the symptoms of which are multiple tarped-over objects in the yard or a garage full of plastic and fiberglass. For me it began in junior high when I spent my first summer earnings on a canoe that I couldn’t use much because I wasn’t old enough to drive it anywhere. I haven’t paddled it in eons, but it’s my first and oldest, you see? The used sea kayak I got at the end of a season from Wind’s Up and traveled widely in while writing books hasn’t been afloat either, but I clearly can’t part with it. Ditto for the fourteen-foot skiff I got third-hand and took down the Mississippi: just because it hasn’t been in the water doesn’t mean I won’t someday take it up the Arkansas. That dinged-up sunfish that washed ashore twenty years ago was an unbidden gift from Neptune that clearly can’t be de-acquisitioned without serious karmic risk. The antique kayaks someone gave me in exchange for a paddling tour of the north shore? They’re collector’s items!

Parting with the surf kayaks that were so intoxicating in the early 2000s would be admitting once and for all that I’ll never again do flat spins down the face of a wave and slide into the beach to find my small son relentlessly trying to stand up on a boogie board in foot-high shore break. (Which is also why I can’t quite part with the three mildewed boogie boards and two skimboards taking up space in the garage.) The longboard that my son and his mom later gave me for my fortieth birthday so I could try and keep up with him is in the same “sell that and you’re officially old” category.

Which leaves only Poohbah, the sweet Herreshoff catboat that belonged to a secretary of the Navy and before that to the painter Ray Ellis. Poohbah is kind of the reverse of surfboards: a neighbor and I bought it a few years back because the price was right and we were feeling irrationally exuberant, but we forgot that we’re not yet retired and so never seem to find the time to sail. (Here come the angry letters from young un-retired sailors everywhere.) I’m proud to say I recently took a melancholy deep breath and sold Poohbah, or thought I did until the day the deal fell through for no reason other than that Poohbah, apparently, didn’t want to move to Cape Cod, which I can understand but seemed a bit, shall we say, enabling.

It’s a sickness, I know. But I want you to know that after the catboat deal fell through I did manage to take a garbage can full of old life preservers to the dump and leave them there. It’s a start, right?                   

This issue marks the end of our thirtieth year in publication. Over the past twelve months we’ve had a lot of fun peering back at old issues of the magazine and looking ahead to future challenges to the Island: thirty years of fresh and local food, thirty years of citizen unrest, thirty years in gardens, thirty years of too many houses being built and not enough affordable houses to go around.

You won’t find any birthday roundups in this Winter-Spring issue, because it takes us over the hump into 2016, and thus also marks the beginning of our thirty-first year of publication. That said, there are two unhappy reasons to look back one final time. Not long before this issue went into production, two very different friends of this magazine died, one after a prolonged illness and one quite unexpectedly.

The first was our bird columnist, the gentle genius Wes Craven. Wes’s death was, naturally, front-page news because of his immense fame as a movie director. It’s probably no surprise, given his background, that his bird column wasn’t merely a rundown of what strange travelers blew into the local dune grass in the most recent howlers from the sea. They were instead fantastical feathered flights of imagination, often ominous and just as often hilarious. I remember reading the first one he turned in, about the angry fan mail he was receiving from red-tailed hawks and local free-range chickens, and thinking, “Well, what did you expect when you asked the creator of Freddy Krueger for a bird column?” And also thinking, “This is what makes it fun to create a magazine.”

Just as memorable as his creations was Wes himself. Accomplished as he was in the wide, glamorous world of film, he unfailingly made us feel that nothing was more important to him than making sure his column in Martha’s Vineyard Magazine was word perfect. Nothing pleased him more, it seemed, than hearing how much we enjoyed his writing. We miss him.

The other passing was of William Marks, who founded this magazine in 1985 and ran it for five years before selling it to the Vineyard Gazette. Marks, who later changed his name to William Waterway to reflect his passion for the planet’s fluid resources, was many things to many people on the Island: environmentalist, poet, historian,
Native American flute player. He, too, will be missed.

In one of his last editorials for the magazine, written on the occasion of its fifth
anniversary, he wrote: “We can only say thank you to the Island as we promise to do our humble best to continue giving Martha’s Vineyard its very own magazine.”

Still true today.

Last Thanksgiving I served cranberries grown on Wampanoag tribal lands. Since the Wampanoags were the Native Americans at the first Thanksgiving gathering, those cranberries feel historically significant in their own small way. My link to Island cranberries is through my husband’s work in Aquinnah, and as I think about this year’s harvest, I
realize what makes the Vineyard special are the connections that we share.

The influence of community is strong on the Island. Many are blessed with lots of relatives living here, and others find “family” at a church or a twelve-step meeting or even a book group. People connect in town meetings or on school field trips or on the ferry, and summer brings new and long-standing associations.

These myriad Island kinships are evident throughout the magazine, where we find nature is often a uniting force. The winter walks hosted on conservation lands bring many people together (page 20). For West Tisbury brothers Nelson and Danny Bryant, their love of the outdoors was a strong bond despite their very different personalities (page 38). And Suzan Bellincampi’s back-page essay (page 84) gets humorously creative in naming the ubiquitous ties we share.

The connections we establish radiate not only through our own lives but off-Island as well. The jail in Edgartown works to have a positive influence both behind bars and in the wider community (page 30). Stephanie Danforth’s artwork brightens many homes and helps support children in Kenya (page 64). The outside world can also bring us together: Thanks to the Boston Bruins, we’ve hosted the Stanley Cup twice (page 48).