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Friday, May 24, 2013

By Doug Cabral
Published: July 16, 2009

Sitting where I am, I see Moll zipping by on the lawnmower every few minutes. She is wearing sunglasses, and earphones, connected to a music player. She looks neither left nor right. Every swath she makes meets every other swath neatly, perfectly. I'm sure she could get a job on the grounds crew at Fenway Park. But, she's our groundskeeper.

A couple of months ago, we came truculently to the decision that we had to replace the mower that had worked for us so faithfully for 10 years or so. It was a walk behind Gravely mower with a powerful mind of its own and a 20-inch mower deck. It took hours, even days at times, to wrestle into submission the lumpy, hilly, weedy, scrub oak-bedeviled turf we call the lawn.

In its early days as a member of our family, the old mower was really a brush cutter. When we bought the place in 1990, it was a house in the middle of the scrub oak, bull briars, and poison ivy. There was six feet of grass at the back of the house and six at the front.

When the afternoon sun shone on the vast expanse of puckerbrush, one could see the tick legions gathering. When the youngest two children were toddlers and they darted off, as toddlers do, toward the wilderness just beyond the deck, Moll and I would run screeching from the house to stop the poor things before they fell among the ticks. If we successfully reclaimed them, they looked like those Christmas decorations you make by pincushioning an orange with cloves.

Widening the clearing around our house over the years took a toll on the old brush cutter, and when there was ultimately grass to cut, we replaced the brush blade with two grass blades, set at right angle to one another. It worked, but not well. It was a brush cutter pretending to do lawnmower work on a pretend lawn that was hardly a generation removed from its former life as tangled, deadly brush.

The question became what to buy to replace the brush cutter, and where to buy it. Among the considerations was the sad discovery that while we bought the brush cutter from an Island outfit that sold those high quality machines and serviced them, but that was then. Now, no Island business sells that brand, and none services it. Not good.

We hunted online. We hunted off-Island at big stores where 10 or 20 mowers were lined up out front, priced from less than we intended to spend to a great deal more. We ended up getting the new mower from Cottage City, one with a 42-inch deck, thus instantly halving the time required to do the job. The price was higher, but they service the machine we bought. And, they delivered it into Moll's clutches a day later.

I was reminded of all this lawnmower business as I read through the pleadings, testimony, and memos filed in the lawsuit against four Vineyard gasoline retailers. The lawnmower decision, the gasoline buying decision, indeed every decision Islanders make about how they will redistribute their family assets stumbles on several familiar and largely accepted characteristics of the peculiar nature of the Vineyard marketplace.

For instance, Islanders accept that most things will cost us more here than they would if we bought off-Island. Generally, Islanders attribute the higher prices to costs of getting stuff here from off-Island suppliers. They also consider some prices to be higher here because the cost of doing business here is higher for business owners, as it is for homeowners. They also calculate, when deciding where to shop, how much it will cost them to travel off the Island and bring their treasures home.

And, Islanders choose the businesses they buy from, as Moll and I did, for reasons at least partially unrelated to price. Not that we don't care about price, but sometimes we prize other considerations more.

Equipment will need servicing. Buying here guarantees that service will be conveniently available. Sometimes we buy gas at the airport gas station because we want to get a car wash or an oil change. Sometimes, we buy tomatoes, even at $4.79 a pound, because they are exquisite. We buy Island sweet corn at a premium because it's fresh and good. As we do so, we realize this is no way to feed a family longterm.

We buy at a friend's store because she is struggling in this troubled economy. Sometimes, we buy at a store in Vineyard Haven rather than one in Edgartown, because we have to go to the ferry to drop a visitor off, and we might as well kill two birds with one stone. Sometimes, we buy gas at Up-Island Automotive to take advantage of the reduced Sunday pricing. Sometimes, we don't, because we don't have time to run all the way up-Island - it's nearly five miles, after all - and besides, we're nearly out of gas. Sometimes we buy in Edgartown because, well, we live in Edgartown, and we never go to Vineyard Haven, if we can avoid it, except to pick up someone at the boat. Sometimes, we buy at the Bunch of Grapes, because it's such a pleasant place to be.

In other words, we've adapted. We've adapted to the limits and exactions of life here. We've accepted our constrained lot in life. Or, rather, we've accepted the restraints but reserved the unrestrained right to bitch about it all.