A Summer Place

Geraldine Brooks started it. She had no idea what she kindled in one of her Maleny listeners. Discussing her novel Caleb’s Crossing recently, she spoke of Martha’s Vineyard, where the story takes place. A glacial island thirty-three kilometres long, eleven kilometres off the Massachusetts coast, it looks like a child’s drawing of a horse on its back.

I spent ten adolescent summers there in the 1950s. My grandparents owned a house on East Chop in the early 1900s. The Vineyard was embedded in the folklore of our family, in the memories of my mother and in her stories.

My parents rented an old eighteenth-century farmhouse at the back of a meadow on Tisbury Lagoon. We were “summer people”.

In the house floorboards rose and fell. The stairs were short and steep like a ladder. Different coloured layers of paint showed through. Rooms rambled on, smelling of plaster and must. Ivy grew in through cracks in the toilet wall. The house exuded ghosts and adventure.

The sea dominated our lives. I swam, fished, sailed, explored marine life in the shallows. I helped my father dig clams. I lived within the security of my family and nature. Blackberries, huckleberries, the nightly warble of the whippoorwill, Queen Anne’s lace, going barefoot all summer long were deep pleasures.

This was the 1950s, pre-computer, pre-mobile-phone, pre-jetset travel. And for me pre-growing-up and all that adulthood entailed.

But there is another Martha’s Vineyard with its own history rather than mine, one I was then too young to care about. It is like a mini history of the USA. In 1602 Bartholomew Gosnold, an English “gentleman adventurer”, visited and named the island. Never a true vineyard, as people today might think, the place harboured “an incredible store of vines [that] run upon every tree … [where] we could not goe for treading upon them …” The place belonged to the Wampanoag Indians.

Thomas Mayhew purchased Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket and the Elizabeth Islands from two English owners. Unlike other entrepreneurs, Mayhew and his son did not take an imperialist approach. Honouring many Indian rights, they created good relations. They established schools, converting some of the natives to Christianity. Their endeavour was considered the first successful church planting mission in the history of Protestantism.

It was this initiative that led to the first Indian American graduate of Harvard University in 1665—the subject of Geraldine Brooks’s book. Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk was one of three Indian students. He spoke English, Latin, Hebrew, Greek and Wampanoag. It is astounding to think that in so short a time two such separate cultures, English and Native American, could come together as they did in Caleb. This “rubbing together” of cultures fascinated Brooks.

In Caleb’s time and after, whaling and herring were the island’s main industries. The swamps, ponds, marshes and inlets provided an ideal habitat for herring which in spring “showered” and “ran” between fresh and salt water like salmon. Herring and whaling created a way of life. In 1870 when petroleum replaced oil as a source of fuel, whaling died out.

Exotic Indian names remain as evidence of the past. Their sounds have similar impact on Western ears as Australian Aboriginal words: Mattakeesett Creek, Sengekontacket Pond, Nashaquitsa and Cracktuxet Ponds, Chappaquiddick, Nantucket, Wintucket, Squibnocket Point, Menemsha, Nashamois, Cuttyhunk, Wampanoag. In Chilmark some hill names sound absurdly anglicised: Powwow and Shot-an-arrow.

In 1642, 3000 Indians existed on the Vineyard. One hundred and twenty-two years later 313 remained.

A colonial spirit of rebellion showed itself in the island’s debate over secession from Massachusetts as recently as 1977. The islanders were stung by losing a “guaranteed” seat in the state’s general court.

From the beginning the island acquired its own idioms. Everyone if they were anyone knew an “old town turkey” was a herring. Words like off-island, on-island, up-island, down-island, Vineyarder, Chappaquiddicker explain themselves. Those who came to reside were “wash-a-shores”. Spring “peepers” (small tree toads now extinct) were called “pinkletinks”, to imitate their sleighbell sound.

American evangelism also has its story on the Vineyard. Wealthy black Americans established themselves in Oak Bluffs, a site for Gospel Camp meetings. The 200-strong tent city was eventually replaced by hundreds of small filigreed “gingerbread” houses where on one night of the year thousands of Chinese and Japanese paper lanterns were lit and hung to celebrate The Faith. This traditional spectacle known as “illumination night” is now a major tourist attraction.

Proximity to Boston, Salem and the early Massachusetts Bay Colony influenced Martha’s Vineyard. Rich whalers, merchants and businessmen found a retreat here, and an end for their wealth. The heath hen, a “prairie chicken” that once flourished in scrub oak plains, found refuge too, before extinction. From the nineteenth century Portuguese came in search of a better life, and later Brazilians. After 1870 when the railroad came to the mainland, and with a surge in the 1960s, the place became a mecca for tourists, artists, writers and celebrities.

Ulysses Grant, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Somerset Maugham made way for the more recent rich and famous: Walter Cronkite, James Cagney, John Hersey, Katherine Cornell, Patricia Neal, Judy Blume, Meg Ryan, James Taylor, Mike Wallace, Dan Aykroyd, William Styron. President J.F. Kennedy, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama vacationed here. Jackie Onassis maintained a house until she died in 1994. John Kennedy Jr was killed in a plane crash off the coast. In 1969 Edward Kennedy drove off a bridge at Chappaquiddick and walked away, resulting in the death of his passenger. This, more than any incident, focused global attention on Martha’s Vineyard.

Steven Spielberg filmed the three Jaws movies here, employing locals as actors.

The weight of tourism is reflected in the difference between summer and permanent populations. In 2000 the permanent population of 15,000 swelled to 100,000 in the summer.

The cost of living on the Vineyard is 60 per cent higher than the national average. Housing prices are 96 per cent higher.

Over 400 years Martha’s Vineyard has been transformed—though a small Wampanoag population still exists in Aquinnah near Gay Head, and some say a low-key time-honouring spirit remains.

Though many places evolved in the same way, Martha’s Vineyard is unique. It is and has been home to diverse people, permanent and temporary, from the humble to the exalted and in between.

For me it remains a simple summer place in the 1950s, the beginning of the end of childhood, a place permanent and important enough to be brought back to me by Geraldine Brooks, who also discovered it. 

Nana Ollerenshaw, some of whose poetry has appeared in Quadrant, lives in Queensland.