The Vineyard at Summer’s End!

Our book today is On the Vineyard, a 1980 collection of short essays and reflections about Martha’s Vineyard, accompanied by stunning black-and-white photos by Peter Simon, and the impulse that drove me to take it down from my shelf is akin to the impulse that always makes me think of Cape Cod at summer’s end. The “summer’s end” part has been exceedingly grudging here in Boston, which has had two separate heat waves in September and where, here in the last week of the month, the days just routinely warm up into the mid-80s. But it’s an illusion, naturally – winter will come, although we can hope it’ll be gentler than last winter – and the gathering chill in the early mornings when I’m standing outside with two sleepy old dogs, well, that early-morning chill speaks more clearly about the changes coming than any aberrant daytime high temperature could do. The summer is ending, and that always makes me think of the Cape and the islands.

The Vineyard has always been, for me, the third in rank – behind Nantucket, and behind the Cape itself – and I don’t really know why. I’ve had many wonderful experiences at the Vineyard, walked its wildernesses with many friends and many, many dogs, even attended two weddings there (my final two such attendances, I’ve gradually come to realize), and yet I’ve always found Nantucket the more beautiful and the more inviting, and even exotic Nantucket has always paled for me beside the quiet glories of Cape Cod, where I have sailed and trekked and napped and laughed and lounged and gorged on sea-shack food so many times that its towns and inlets and scrappy woods feel like a part of me.

Paging through On the Vineyard therefore served as a very good reminder to me of all the memories that come from there as well, that rise from its marshes and lakes and farm pastures and shade-dappled forest floors and endless beaches. There’s an undeniable magic to taking the Port Authority ferry to the island (I’ve only reached it three times by other means) and then watching the passengers scatter each to their separate havens, for however long they’re lucky enough to be staying.

The essays in On the Vineyard capture quite a few of those havens, from sybarite author Vance Packard’s evocation of Chappaquiddick, a beautiful little island whose name is now tarnished forever by one act of panicked cowardice:

Most of Chappaquiddick is covered with dense woodland: scrub pine and oak. Near the shore there is much sea grass, wild grapes, beach plums, blueberries, wild roses. A few dozen deer roam the interior. The alarmed flutter of ring-necked pheasants is a common sound. Along the beaches, in addition to the gulls and the terns, are egrets, yellowlegs, and great blue herons. In the fall the waters fill with squadrons of diving ducks.

To columnist and ex-paratrooper Nelson Bryant’s ode to Chappaquiddick’s Cape Poge:

In winter, when a northwest gale shrieks across the bay, piling whitecaps, eelgrass, codium, scallops, quahogs and other shells on the shore, and carrying the indescribable aroma of the salt flats when the tide is down, the first ranks of cedars shudder and reel. But beyond them, deeper in the grove, so dense and intricate in their design, no wind invades. Often the outer trees are killed, but their writhing and sun-bleached forms stand for many years.

Chickadees and other songbirds hide in that sanctuary all winter, and deer are also frequent sojourners there.

To the great Boston bookman Stan Hart, who’s here given the honor of the last word even over Vineyard legend Henry Beetle Hough, and whose life-long love of the Vineyard extends to all havens in all seasons:

And beauty there was. The up-Island South Beach, as an example, was heavy with beach grass and Sahara-like with its dunes and hollows. The upper and lower Chilmark ponds were connected by a navigable stream, which I used to canoe on moonlit nights. Slipping along those still waters right inside the edge of the ocean, I could hear the plangent thud of surf breaking on hard sand to my left and the rustling of herons in the marsh grass on my right. The mosquitoes could be awful but it was like finding a Northwest Passage slipping along those lambent waters. And when I entered Chilmark Pond it was always a discovery, consumed with raw nature, each ripple of the pond picking up the moonbeams, and the ocean white from the light above. I used to think then that I could never leave the Island no matter what.

Many of the short recollections in this book lament how ‘built up’ the Vineyard is becoming, and in the thirty years since this book was on the New Books display in the Edgartown bookstore, that process has only accelerated (back in the 1990s, one New York investment broker was confronted by locals about his plan to build an enormous, landscape-blotting mansion and his announced intention to use it only two or three weeks a year; when the locals complained that his mansion – the very first of the so-called ‘McMansions,’ if I recall correctly – would blight the beautiful natural surroundings, he said, “I want it to be ugly”). But even in reading these old complaints, there’s a perverse element of comfort: I’ve visited the Vineyard many times since the year this book was published, and I’ve been relieved every time to discover that its soul is untouched. It’s still easily possible to sit at a shady pine-smelling picnic table with an old friend; still easily possible to walk the long beaches in the late afternoon when the sky is a deeper blue than the sea; still easily possible to bike along quiet broadlands and watch a hawk lazily circling up on the sky.

Peter Simon’s photos catch quite a bit of that soul, and like so much of the best photography, they don’t need color to work their magic. And in On the Vineyard there’s an extra bit of magic for me personally: this is certainly the book that contains the most photos of people I actually knew myself – by uncanny coincidence (or maybe not quite coincidence – maybe it’s an unintended token of how much time I spent on the Vineyard in the 1970s), the book’s photos contain five people I knew personally, laughed with, walked with, and four of whom I later corresponded with for years (the fifth wasn’t lazy – just not human). It adds an element of sweet melancholy to the book, especially since I knew so many of those people in the thinning light of late summer.