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Editorial: Summer better,
summer worse
September 1, 2005
How to measure the summer season of 2005? It’s difficult because there are so many standards, and most are subjective. If you are a gardener or a farmer, you probably wanted less rain and more sun in May and June, more rain and less sun in July and August. Sun worshippers want the weather dry, sunny, and hot, and no crowds on the beach, please. Fishermen want bass, in abundance. Sailors want fair winds and uncrowded anchorages.
Your test of the summer may have been whether the contractor got the new addition finished on time. Did the landscaper get the flower gardens in shape for the July 4 party? Did the new furniture arrive?
If you are an innkeeper, it may be a question of whether your rooms were full. If you own a restaurant, were the tables full? If it’s a high-end restaurant, maybe sales were down a bit, but if you run a casual place, maybe customers were plentiful. Did the T-shirts sell? Did you find parking spaces downtown when you went shopping? Did the kids get jobs? Did they save any of the money they earned? Did someone get Lyme disease? Did you sell your house and make a bundle, or did you buy a house and spend too much?
Some of the standard measures are open to debate. For instance, it may be deplorable for some of us that Steamship Authority traffic — cars and foot passengers — is off the pace of a year ago. Plus, SSA numbers have been in decline now for several years. And rates have risen.
After all, businesses need customers, and fewer ferry passengers may mean fewer sales. To others, it may be a blessing that fewer visitors came. And really, wasn’t it crowded enough in Vineyard Haven and Oak Bluffs when a ferry arrive? In Vineyard Haven, in particular, it was a nightmare, because the benighted selectmen, trying to pick all our pockets via the SSA budget, made us fend for ourselves on the streets and sidewalks, and public safety and convenience be hanged.
Vineyard summers naturally bear some relation to mainland summers. In simplest terms, the weather travels west to east, so that if it’s raining in Pennsylvania, before too very long it will be raining here. And if the economy to the west is struggling, cash registers will jingle less merrily in Vineyard shops. A Vineyard summer is a species of the American experience, not an entirely distinct genus.
And, of course, all these measures of summer are just your subjective gauges. For this page, using informal measures developed over decades, the summer of 2005 was a good deal like many summers past. The weather was okay. There were too many cars, too many mopeds, too many people, but it was fun. Business was staggeringly good. Prices were too high. People, but not us, were unspeakably rude. It was an all right summer that ended too quickly.
In general, nothing out of the ordinary happened this summer. It was just another summer, not the most brilliant perhaps, but not the dullest either. And, as for its brief duration, aren’t we really ready for fall?
Bring on Labor Day.
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