The Islands: A Hush Descends

Looking out at the Atlantic from a bench in Oak Bluffs, I can get lost in this azure sea. The haze and humidity from summer have lifted, allowing in their place a cool clear air. A few leaves have begun to fall and scatter. Summer residents have closed up their homes, vacations are over, and kids are in school. It is as if the island has breathed a sigh of relief after the frenzy of the summer. There is a noticeable hush.        

 

“Fall starts the days the kids go back to school,” says Jennifer Ward, a resident who makes her living bartending at the Alchemy Bistro and Bar in Edgartown. “It’s like August, but no one’s around.”

 

Here’s the time of year you get the best of both seasons: empty beaches and warm water.  It’s the time of year when residents, who haven’t seen each other all summer, come together again to catch up on news and rekindle their friendships.

 

“The island rises a couple of inches,” says Emily Reagan, a sophomore at Martha’s Vineyard High School.  Although the sea level doesn’t change, it certainly feels that way when a population of more than 100,000 drops to less than a quarter of that.

 

I pull myself away from the water and walk through the Camp Meeting Grounds filled with gingerbread houses right out of Hansel and Gretel, a child’s delight. I sit in the Tabernacle in Trinity Park and imagine a Methodist Revivalist meeting. Later, I drive up island through miles of rolling hills and moors bordered by rock fences. The landscape, dressed in its autumn palette, is pristine and undeveloped. I stop to view the dramatic clay cliffs at Gay Head, dating back millions of years and sacred to the Wampanoag Indians. The Elizabeth Islands hug the coastline. This is the time to visit the island if you can.

 

From the Shenandoah, a square-masted schooner moored in Vineyard Haven, and the Mytoi Japanese Gardens on Chappaquiddick, to the breathtaking sunsets of Menemsha, you can read every travel guide and brochure, but nothing does the island justice. As an editorial from the 1889 Vineyard Gazette put it: “But all this must be seen – write you can’t – you can’t read it – this beautiful Isle of the Sea, Martha’s Vineyard.”

“We roll up the rugs and strip the beds by rote. /Summer expires as it has done before. /The ferry is no simple pleasure boat.  So goes the first stanza of Linda Pastan’s poem “Leaving the Island.” There is definitely something melancholy about the end of summer.  The afternoon light changes, the greens in the landscape turn red, purple and gold and the nights are suddenly cool enough for that extra blanket on the bed.  Perhaps we say goodbye to family and summer friends.

 

But for many islanders, the fall is their just reward after the intrusion of summer visitors and traffic. Autumn means hot-spiced cider, fresh bay scallops and the return of the harbor seals to the rock jetties.  It means pumpkins and mums at Bartlett Farm. It means summer merchandise at sale prices. It means stretches of beaches to call your own. Without the embellishment of summer’s festivities, Nantucket begins to bare its bones and reveal its stark beauty. Shopkeepers and residents take a deep breath, and shift into an even lower gear for winter.

 

The Nantucket Arts Festival occurs the week before Columbus Day with a varied calendar of events. Visitors have their choice of concerts, auctions, art galleries, theater productions and lectures. Some of the finest chefs will compete for the title of “The Best Chowder on Nantucket” during the Nantucket Chowder Festival.  Bring your palate and pencil because you are the one voting.  The weekend after Columbus Day is the Cranberry Harvest Festival. See firsthand how the cranberry industry, once a recreational endeavor, actually works.  The bogs are flooded, cranberries raked and picked and loaded into trucks. A bog flooded with cranberries in the clear autumn sunlight is brilliant.

 

The Christmas Stroll Weekend, Dec. 2-4, is a child’s fantasy. “I love Christmas on Nantucket.  If you stand at the top of Main and you look down the street in the twilight of a December evening, it takes your breath away,” says Finn Murphy, a Nantucket selectman. During the stroll, carolers perform among the 150 trees decorated by local school children.  Merchants try to outdo each other with their holiday windows and there is a door-decorating contest.  Illuminated strung scallop shells and other nautical adornments make for a unique maritime old-fashioned Christmas.

 

If you truly want to experience what living on Nantucket might be like, spend some time there in the winter. That’s the true test of an islander. But fair warning: Nantucket has a way of creeping under your skin and into your blood. You may not want to leave.