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Tuesday, May 21, 2013

By Doug Cabral
Published: June 4, 2009

Mostly, we Vineyarders have an awfully good opinion of ourselves. We are complacent about our place, our attitudes, our accomplishments, and our future. We are generally dissatisfied with the others, that is, the others who visit; the others who build the big houses, own the fancy property, and pay the fancy tax bills; the others who would rule us from afar; the others who get off the boat, delighted with what they find, and onto the Martha's Vineyard Commission, to regulate the delights available to their successors; the others who are among us but, inexplicably, see things differently; and the others whose ways of doing things are not our ways.

To preserve all that we have to be complacent about and all that there is about ourselves that is so gratifying, we hedge our bets with rules intended to correct, improve, and if necessary impoverish the others who would change the course about which we have become so self-satisfied. In addition, we imagine ourselves as more uniform in our views, attitudes, opinions, and tastes than we are. And, to the extent that there are differences among us, we prefer they remain veiled.

Writing regularly on the Editorial and OpEd pages, as I have done for the better part of 40 Island years, there is the tendency to become entranced with the obvious wisdom and cleverness of each weekly installment. The foolish writer ought to know better, but it's hard. There is no prophylactic for the complacency virus.

Fortunately, newspapering is multi-dimensional. Fundamentally, it's observe, show, and tell, on the one hand. But, there is also a conversational component, and in that way, it's a two-way street. And, in that way, stern correction and illumination are ready to hand for the journalist.

In community newspapering, there are the facts, the photographs, the lists, the dates and times and deaths and births, and the gossip and advertisements and news and opinions and editorials. It's a lot. But, all this is our side of the weekly klatch. Then there are the letters and now the comments, which are the other side, the readers' side. They act as the anti-viral medicine for the complacency disease we have contracted.

Some of these communications are funny, some are warmhearted, reminiscing about a loved one who's died. Some are caustic. Some profane. (You don't get to see those.) Some letter writers and comment posters bray irritatingly and predictably over just a few subjects. Others spread themselves like cluster bombs over anything that moves on the political landscapes. Some are composed by deranged haters, many of whom have The Times itself in their sights. Recently, comment posters have taken the newspaper to task for publishing information about a choice selection of Island miscreants, drug dealers, troubled young people, thoughtless animal owners, as well as warring police officials and their politician bosses. Other reader/communicators have their say privately, asking in a personal email if some information in a published news report of misbehavior could please be removed. Oh, and why must we publish the court news every week? Have guilt and shame lost their salutary value as correctives in human community relations? - I ask you.

In general, the debate is between Islanders who would like to apply enhanced incarceration techniques to people whose cats attack the neighbor's guinea hens and Islanders for whom every young mugger of the elderly is a victim of Vineyard society - or Republican values - and certain to be redeemed with some counseling and something to do in the evening, because everyone knows there's nothing for kids to do on the Island. On the fence, there are the Islanders who are dismayed to have all this played out on a website visited by thousands around the globe every week. It spoils the picture.

You may have heard of the James Thurber story entitled "The Departure of Emma Inch." Thurber was an occasional Chilmark summer visitor. He liked the beaches but didn't like to get wet. In his story, Emma was recommended to a Manhattan couple, the Thurmans, who needed a cook for their Martha's Vineyard summer holiday. Emma was unremarkable, Thurber as Mr. Thurman wrote: "Her hair was drab and unabundant, her face made no impression on you, her voice I don't remember - it was just a voice."

She came with a Boston bull terrier named Feely, who was 17 years old, did no walking, but "grumbled, and growled and snuffled all the time."

Every part of the journey from Manhattan to Woods Hole was a challenge for Emma and Feely. She was afraid of the taxi to Pier 14. She was terrified by the Priscilla, the Fall River Line steamboat that carried her, Feely, and the Thurmans overnight from Manhattan to Lizzie Borden's hometown. Then it was another taxi ride to New Bedford for the smaller steamboat that would take them to Woods Hole and on to Vineyard Haven.

"Each move," Thurber writes, "was as difficult as getting a combative drunken man out of the night club in which he fancies he has been insulted. Emma sat in a chair on the Vineyard boat, as far away from the sight of the water as she could get, and closed her eyes and held onto Feely."

Just before they landed mid-voyage at Woods Hole, Feely got sick, or at least Emma said he was sick.

"He didn't seem to me any different from what he always was - his breathing was just as abnormal and irregular," Mr. Thurman explains. "'I'll get off here,'" said Emma, "firmly, or with more firmness, anyway, than she had shown yet. I explained to her that we would be home in half an hour, that everything would be fine then, everything would be wonderful. I said Feely would be a new dog. I told her people sent sick dogs to Martha's Vineyard to be cured. But it was no good ... I talked to her eloquently about the loveliness of Martha's Vineyard and the nice houses and the nice people and the wonderful accommodations for dogs. But I knew it was useless. I could tell by looking at her. She was going to get off the boat at Woods Hole."

Emma got herself and Feely ashore. As the boat cleared the dock, Thurman watched Emma Inch on the dock, "standing there, her suitcase at her feet, her dog under one arm, waving goodbye to us with her free hand. I had never seen her smile before, but she was smiling now."

What did Emma Inch know?