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The
Martha's Vineyard Times is a weekly publication.
July 28 - August 3, 2005 Edition
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Well, excuse me July 28, 2005 By Doug Cabral You know how we year-round residents deplore the way our summer visitors behave, and especially the way they drive. I was explaining all this to a Midwesterner the other day, a devoted, long-time visitor to her family’s up-Island, waterfront house, which began as a typical down pond, one-room camp with a sleeping loft, no interior walls, no electricity, a gas refrigerator and a barrel stove. She inherited it from her father who was a banker or hardware store owner from Dubuque. Sentimentally, she still calls her house a camp, but actually it is more like a camp slash mansion, with about 8,000 square feet of architect-designed, splendiferous living space, a barn with a basketball court and second floor guest quarters and those windows that become opaque or function as rear-projection televisions, depending on which way you toggle their switches. It’s a hell of a house, and the expansion was mostly dictated by the kids. There are two of them, but they have friends over all the time, and they’re so noisy, a little space was required, especially when Midwestern friends visit for a week or so while they travel the country in their RVs. But I understand all that, and I’m sure you do. You know, the need to grow the house with the family. Everyone does it. One summer we had a tent in the back yard where the kids slept. They had an extension cord run out from the house to power the portable DVD player so they could watch American Pie whenever they wanted. But they used a battery-powered Coleman lantern to read. I didn’t think it was bad, because it wasn’t a permanent structure, so it didn’t threaten to advance our frightening progress toward buildout. Anyway, what shocked me was how she reacted when I itemized the typical driving habits of a visiting New Yorker. You know, how they stop all the traffic on Main Street when through binoculars they see a couple heading for the parked VW just ahead. I’ll never know how they know those people are headed for that car. Or, how they glare at you as you step aside and touch your forelock as you let them drive by you on the narrow boardwalk out to the slips at Menemsha. Or, how they proceed slowly along Middle Road feinting a turn into this driveway – oops, wrong one – or the next one – oops, wrong again – with nary a turn signal. Well, she turned on me. Apparently, these visitors have some complaints about us and the way we drive. Can you believe it? She said she hates those bumper stickers some of us have that say, more or less, Back Off, I’m an Islander. She hates getting behind some of the elderly among us who travel at 20 miles an hour down the Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road when she has to get to a tennis date at the yacht club. She can’t stand the way these carpenters in their pickup trucks like to just graze the joggers and bicyclists as they pass. She said once, she had to jump into the ticky woods to avoid being swept away by a big truck with side mirrors that stuck out three feet on each side. The driver stuck his tongue out at her as he passed. She hates how Island drivers like to wait till you are almost at the driveway before darting out in front of you and then slowing down so you have to slow down too. She can’t stand the way Islanders blow their horn at the slightest holdup, for instance when she’s stopped on Main Street waiting for some Islander to load all the kids into the car seats before backing out of a parking space. The other day, she almost gave the finger to some plumber in a van, but thought better of it because of his Poor Martha bumper sticker. She figured he was in no mood to discuss the matter reasonably. She cannot, for the life of her, understand how we get our cars inspected, with the mirrors hanging off and the blue smoke cascading from the exhaust. She is terrified the way Island drivers swoop across from State Road onto Old County Road, just inches ahead of her when she’s heading down-Island. Can’t Islanders ever wait patiently? She loathes the way Islanders bully their way through Five Corners because their cars are wrecks and what do they care if some Lexus SUV impales itself on their three-foot, 1950s fins. She went on and on. I haven’t told you the half of it. But, now I’m convinced that there is some hostility out there directed at us, and it matches the hostility that we send their way. What a shocker. So, I said to her, You may be right, who knows, but can’t we all just get along? |
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