New England (Martha's Vineyard)
7.1.24 (Part 4 of 5)
7.1.24 (still)
Blueberry banana muffin (me) and blueberry crumble muffin (Sylvia). We shared and they were both good. I finished mine while waiting in the line to board. We finished hers on the boat later.
The guy in front of us struck up a conversation. That happened a lot on this trip. People randomly talking to you about their life. Just, kind of, unprompted info dumps about who they are. I don’t remember much about what this guy had to say – I was trying to eat my muffin – but he said he visited Tucson a long time ago.
I don’t so much wonder why people do that – deliver chunks of their life story to strangers – but I do wonder what it is like to be the kind of person who just does that naturally while in line waiting to get on a ferry or at some wedding party or to someone who is standing on a beach watching their girlfriend frolic in the ocean spray.
I guess I’m kind of doing that here, though, aren’t I? I guess most of us want to be known and just have different ways of going about trying to be known. Thanks for reading this, by the way. I appreciate your attention.
Muffins, ferry, steel chairs bolted down, and wind. Oh my gosh there was so much wind on the way in! At the front of the ferry it felt like there was a realistic chance that my sunglasses were going to be blown off my face, so I held onto them as I walked around exploring.
We put on sunscreen (we were good about that on the trip thanks to Syl) and finished the muffin before the boat started moving. I stared out at the water for most of the trip from the mainland to the island. I was looking for a whale, still holding out some modicum of hope that I would get to see one spray mist into the sky. I was marveling at the mid-ocean waves that were breaking in fierce enough wind to throw white froth lines horizontally unto the horizon.
“Wouldn’t that make a good pattern for a shirt?” I said to Sylvia, pointing at the dark green/blue waters with the randomly but mostly evenly distributed wave froth.
She agreed.
“And look at that,” I said, pointing to close waves that seemed to endure several moments of stasis. I don’t think I did a good job explaining then and I doubt I’ll do a good job explaining now, but it was like the waves would form up and rise but that they would just stay where they were. It was more like they were sound waves that were fixed to timestamps rather than rolling waves crashing their way onto a shore.
Do you ever get partway through explaining something and realize that you’re not doing a good job and that you want to give up but that your listener is kind enough to be affording you their attention and so you kind of feel like you can’t give up? That didn’t happen then, I kind of just fumbled to the end of the explanation and Sylvia engaged enough that I could exit that conversation telling myself I had succeeded. Maybe I had. But looking back now, I’m struck by moments like those when we’re not really trying to say anything of substance and are just talking to talk but then it slips into something that is close to substance and you start to wobble like you just realized you’re walking on a two-by-four between skyscrapers.
Maybe there’s some insight to be pulled from the moving but not moving wave imagery that I still can’t find. I’ve got a poem titled Fert the Imp scheduled to post on 8.24.24 that feels like it applies here.
Anyway, I didn’t get sick on the boat and we made it to the island and disembarked with the rest. Instead of heading straight to pick up our day-rental bikes, we wandered about the nearby town on foot. Vineyard Haven is a quaint touristy place that is also very much a port. We got wraps at an Italian place because we needed more than muffins for lunch if we were going to bike around all afternoon.
Above is a shop my brother Nolan would have liked, but we didn’t see much that kept our interest, so we went to All Star Martha’s Vineyard Bike Rental where Henry hooked us up with some bikes. Henry was great at the beginning and end of the bike trip – he gave us some physical maps and warned us about the hilly areas and explained the trip most people take.
Thank you, Henry. The flat path was tough enough for me…
We biked 6 miles from that rental shop to the Jaws Bridge – the bridge where they filmed part of Jaws. This happens to be on Joseph Sylvia State Beach, so we got a good picture of Sylvia with an informational sign about her beach.
The ride was pleasant there and back but boy when I was faced with headwinds, I was having a tough time. I like biking with Sylvia but boy howdy is she in better shape than I am.
On the way there and on the way back we passed Ocean Park in Oak Bluffs which was lined with picturesque houses and made Sylvia say multiple times that it looked like a fantasy place – a place out of a Disney movie or something. She was not wrong.
At Jaws Bridge, we saw two people kiteboarding. They were a treat to watch and so we did for quite a while. After that, we went out onto the beach and Sylvia got into the water despite the beach feeling quite vertical - almost like the downhill into the hydrangea ocean from the shuttle trip. She sat her butt in the sand and, like me and my father, she let the sand sink her in. She would later have to address the consequences of that decision on our bike back where she had us stop so she could clear sand from between her cheeks.
After beach time, we sat back on the bridge benches from where we watched the kiteboarders and here we saw a little girl of maybe 9 or 10 not jump from the bridge. Her little brother reminded me of my brother Cody, who would absolutely have matched this kid’s energy as he “3, 2, 1” flung himself into the water from the bridge and then rapidly climbed the rocks back up for another round.
I resonated much closer with the sister who just sat there, enduring goading encouragement from her father who tread water below.
“Think they will push her?” I asked Sylvia.
“I hope not,” she replied.
They ended up pushing her, which I would not have appreciated. Well, the brother ran up one time saying, “Dad said I can’t push you.” This was after he yelled from the water below that he was going to push her.
It was her dad who ended up lifting her from the railing and dropping her in.
We didn’t stay much longer after that, but we did not see her go back to the rail.
I guess the last thing to note from Sylvia Beach is that we saw some guys fishing and cooking fish they had caught. That was cool and it smelled good, actually. Food.
We biked back and took the above picture in Ocean Park, walked around a bit again in Vineyard Haven and then spent the rest of the time on the island in a restaurant called The Attic. Did you know they don’t actually have vineyards on Martha’s Vineyard. What’s up with that? Sylvia checked online before asking for a local wine, so she deftly avoided looking like someone out-of-the-know but still. The place is called Martha’s Vineyard. Bit weird.
The trip back on the ferry was fun. It was almost at sunset, there was a whole baseball team of 13 year old boys, and we saw some jet skiers getting some pretty serious air as they skipped across the ocean’s surface.
While I was out there on the ferry watching smaller boats hurdle and hop, I became quite grateful that things played out as they did. I much preferred the bike ride with Sylvia than, I think, I would have liked having to navigate a car around Martha’s Vineyard. And, man, am I glad we did not take a small boat out onto those waters trying to find whales. Dramamine or no, the kind of movements I saw those boats made me nauseous just watching from afar. No question, I would have wanted to hurl out there.
The shuttle back was not particularly eventful. Everyone was exhausted from the day and I can’t actually remember a single face from the trip up to the parking lot. We got in the car, ordered two pizzas from a place I don’t recall even though we carried the pizza box with us all through Plymouth and all the way to the Boston airport. It was good pizza.
After eating, we read Hyperion aloud to one another at the Airbnb and then slept hard.