Monday, February 4, 2013
The Iceman Cometh (And Went) in the East Chop Ice House From 1906 Until The Refrigerator Was Invented
It was a nifty little operation that few of us ever knew about. It serves as a perfect example of how cultural artifacts bite the dust, items such as typewriters and telephones attached to jacks on a wall (what?!). Back in the early part of the 20th century, alongside the spring-fed pond called Crystal Lake – hang on a minute here! This Cali girl has always enjoyed a private chortle at New Englanders granting the name of “lake” to a body of water barely bigger than a swimming pool. Out west, when we say “lake” we mean Tahoe, Big Bear and Salt [Lake], although even westerners get grandiose at times. Salton Sea? Really? Point is, Crystal Lake used to be the site of an antediluvian money-maker known as ice harvesting. Each winter the …
Monday, January 28, 2013
The New Lyme Or Just A Way To Spoil A Wedding?
If you’re about to take a bite of an egg salad sandwich or a falafel wrap with cucumbers and tomatoes, or something equally delicious, stop right here. Eat no more until you read the following story or, still better for you and your lunch, forego the story and tuck in! Bon appetite! Still with me? It was a Sunday in October 2009 and I was living with a fellow journalist named Jack Shea. Jack was ostensibly my fiancée, but since I’m slightly allergic to terms of conventional endearment, let us call him my friend and soul mate with whom wedding plans had been successfully hatched. Only problem was, I’d developed a rash from my neck to my ankles. This wasn’t a simple, uniform rash. No, the surface of my skin was some kind of mapping of all…
Monday, January 21, 2013
We don’t think we can vanish here, but it happens.
My buddy Gwyn and I walk our dogs on Martha’s Vineyard all the time. We ramble over Land Bank trails, beaches and, most commonly, the Trade Winds dog park where domestic beasties frolick in open fields, their owners fond as nursery school parents. But there is one set of woods on this island that reminds me of the "Blair Witch Project." Twice I’ve walked there with Gwyn, and twice we became seriously displaced persons. Two Sundays ago, she suggested we stroll once again in the forest above Featherstone Center For The Arts, off Barnes Road in Oak Bluffs, an area also known as the Southern Woodlands. I said to Gwyn, “No way. We always get lost.” She said, “I’ve been there hundreds of times since then, and I never get lost.” Fair enough. …
Monday, January 14, 2013
The Lengths We Islanders Will Go To Save On Heating Bills
It’s a Yankee thing, like the rule for switching off lamps if you’ll be out of the room for more than fifteen seconds. Yikers! For those of us with addled minds, we might stand stock still as we reason, “Brushing my teeth will take a good two minutes, if I include twisting off the cap, wetting the toothbrush, plus I’ve been allotting extra time for those molars. ..." Even stopping to over-think this question burns up energy in those lamps still glowing away incandescently, expensively. Hmm, maybe it’s better to stand and ponder in the dark? Vineyarders are Yankees in a plus size. If you place these already insanely frugal, spartan New Englanders on an island where in the winter creature comforts are few and far between, deprive them of …
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
A Magical Long Ago Night At The Lamp Post
So I met this guy, Marty Nadler, on the Paramount Studios lot, he gave me a job writing a script for Laverne and Shirley, and I was so grateful, I agreed to marry him (like that’s doing anyone a favor) but, before we got that far, he brought me to Martha’s Vineyard. It was April of 1976, kind of grey, and seriously cold for this Valley girl who had never spent that particular month in a place where the land was still frozen and you’d need a microscope to see tiny green buds on a grey brittle branch. But still, the island was pretty, nice ocean and all that. ... We were walking up Circuit Avenue in Oak Bluffs, and we ran into a short, stocky, muscular guy with a brush-cut of dark hair. He wore baggy jeans and a tan combat jacket. He …
Monday, December 31, 2012
The most famous Vineyard visitor we never recognize.
I have my own Chelsea story but I’ll save it for last because . . . because it’s embarrassing, that’s why. It’s an “Oh God, I can’t believe I did that!” kind of riff, like tales about the time the hook wrapped around one's teen neck for shoplifting do-dads. So Chelsea has vacayed on our Island many times, virtually every summer with her parents, whether her father was a sitting president or a standing and schmoozing one. This is a girl who since the age of four has possessed the potential to be blazingly famous. Instead she’s the anti-Paris Hilton; a young lady in a kingpin position – or perhaps princesspin is more apt – so ingeniously protected from the spotlight, you would fail to recognize her if she stepped right up to you and …
Monday, December 24, 2012
Let’s Jump Right In With January!
If you live on the Island and you’re not constantly yammering on about your acer rubrum or hammamelis japonica, you clearly need to go back to whatever misbegotten suburb or metropolis you came from. In other words, you are making no effort to fit in. So let’s get fitted. First, to assure you of my own bona fides as the Island’s most idiotic and clumsy gardener, I started out in 1981 with a quaint little cottage in East Chop. The front yard faced the frigid winter winds they call the Canadian Express. The only things we could grow there were a green lawn and a white picket fence (yes, white picket fences are one of those perennials that hold fast year after year, unless a tour bus smashes into them). I also had some luck tending …
Monday, December 17, 2012
Do you have your final resting place picked out?
Sometimes you just know when a story is crying out to be written. I'm willing to bet that anyone who has ever set all 10 toes on this Island, strolling along any one of our astonishing harbors, then planting a face into two scoops of Ben & Bill's ice cream, this is a person who has turned to his or her companion, and mused out loud, "Wouldn't it be lovely to be buried here?" (I know, I know; most guys don't say 'wouldn't it be lovely?', they just grunt and point with their ice cream cones, and their partners get their drift, should they be remotely interested.) Thing is, when someone speaks of the "loveliness" of being buried somewhere, they don't mean, like, now. But a final resting ground, in a setting dear to our hearts, is a romantic…
Monday, December 10, 2012
How The Jersey Turnpike Is coming to our Island.
We were blissfully unaware, taking our walks in the sweet fragrant air, in whatever season. Even on our most casual errands, we beheld beauty on all sides – on the way to the supermarket, a saltwater inlet to the right, Nantucket Sound to the left, on the drive home from Menemsha, an ancient stone wall bounded by open fields and, in the distance, a doe and Bambi. Then . . . in a room somewhere, under fluorescent lights, town officials began to play with an idea for a quaint-sounding “roundabout” that would ease drivers through an intersection that sometimes jams up in the summer. And in another fluorescent-lit room in our capital city, state officials began to assemble suitcases of money. Beware government dollars. They come with a price. …
Monday, December 3, 2012
Yes, they visit here and God bless them everyone.
First, in all fairness, we need to ask ourselves: Do we behave this badly when we ourselves are travelers in faraway places? To answer honestly, we must sit alone in a dark room and go deep within. Finished? OK, I’ve just done my own agonizing reappraisal, and I’ve come up with this response, which I hope matches your own: No. We are, we Vineyarders, by and large smarter than the small minority of exhaustively stupid tourists who arrive on our shores in the summer. How do we know this? Well, if we were this clueless, how could we ever manage to put up rosehip jam in the fall, and look after our neighbors’ pipes and call 911 if we see icicles, and cope with the ferry schedule, and keep body and soul together in the poorest, drunkest …
Holly Nadler
12:40 pm on Monday, February 4, 2013
Maybe we'll return to the old-fashioned ice chest as a way of conserving energy? more ›