Commentary
I love The Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York city. Buses, more than planes or trains, make me feel as though I’m sneaking away, as though I’m escaping. With my big bag packed on this autumn day, few know that I’m leaving town for Martha’s Vineyard or when I’ll be back. This is how I like it. Nobody buys a round-trip bus ticket.
There’s more than high school team rivalry that keeps people on the Vineyard and Nantucket braced apart from one another. Unless you’re one of the lucky wanderers who has traveled back and forth with enough frequency to consider both Islands home, a chance visit to the Island You Don’t Know could make you almost-imperceptibly-but-ever-so-slightly uneasy.
It is now safe to speak openly about beach plums. Here on the Vineyard they are almost all gone, picked by the fanatics or eaten by the birds. Yet on a recent Sunday morning I managed to cadge a perfect six cups worth in a heretofore-unknown-to-me location. They have been cooked down and are currently dripping through the jelly bag (to ensure clear jelly I must not squeeze the bag).
Three years ago in my sophomore history class, a young woman sat in the corner, deliberately placing herself outside the circle of activity in the room. I recall we were busy fund-raising for money to send books to a school in Mississippi, and later in the year for disaster relief in Haiti.
The Mill Pond and its upstream cousins: Mill, Priester, Crocker, Fisher (also known as Woods), plus two or more smaller ponds, each with dams, are eco-gems strung together by a silver chain — the Mill Brook.
It’s a staple of local conventional wisdom that one of the reasons famous people love our Island is that we encounter them with a nonchalance that puts one in mind of an English butler escorting a carpet-installer to the rear wing.