The Three Big Questions

If you work in any of the down-Island towns in the summer, you’ll be on the receiving end of three immutable queries, hour after hour, day after day, for twelve weeks, mid-June through mid-September. For the (happily) uninitiated, the questions are:

1.     WHERE DID THE MARTHA COME FROM IN MARTHA’S VINEYARD?

2.     WHAT’S THE STORY WITH THE BLACK DOG?

3.     WHAT DO YOU DO IN THE WINTER?

Oh, and there does exist a fourth question, but we’ll give it short shrift right here, right now:

4.     MAY I USE YOUR BATHROOM? (Hint: most Island merchants have maps Xeroxed – hundreds at a time – to direct interested parties to the towns’ public johns. My own policy from the six years that I ran a bookstore: If the customer showed any indication of extracting a wallet to buy a $9.99 John Grisham trade paperback, or had even evinced the good taste of having already purchased a book or even a stack of books, I graciously waved this wonderful person to the store’s restroom behind my office.)

Let’s start with the Martha question. You’ll find, as you dip into Island history, that chroniclers are of different minds about this salient point. The most popular and oft- repeated story is that the English explorer, Bartholomew Gosnold, who may have anchored off the northeastern shores of the Vineyard in 1602, and who certifiably hunkered down on Cuttyhunk in that same year (hence the name Gosnold for today’s modern metropolis of 52 souls), went ahead and named the surrounding archipelago as follows: Elizabeth Islands for his daughter Elizabeth, Martha’s Vineyard for his daughter, duh, Martha, and as for that farther-flung island that would eventually provide summer homes for millionaires with even more millions than the millions possessed by other millionaires in other resorts, Mr. Gosnold tossed into the naming field yet another daughter, Nan. “Nan took it!” he decreed, as legend has it, as an after-thought, and that airy response changed to Nantucket.

Capt. Gosnold also named Cape Cod Cape Cod, but we may safely assume he had no daughter named Cod.

Now, because we get bored answering question #1, for the simple reason that repetition is painful, some of us have improvised. Here are a couple of favorites:

“Martha was one of the early settlers. She noticed all the wild grapes growing here, and decided to start a winery. She over-tested the bottles from her first harvest, and died of liver failure before the second crop came in.”

Or . . . “You’ll see on some of the old maps that this was once called Martin’s Vineyard. [This is true.]. Martin and his wife, Martha, divorced, and she got the Vineyard, or at least the naming thereof, in the settlement. Martin moved to a tiny island due east of Maine that sank a few years later.”

There’s also the anecdote about Martin dressing up as a Colonial lady, but we reserve that story for people who we decide in advance can handle this particular version. . .

For question #2 RE: The Black Dog, our answer is curt. We’re like Parisians with their Eiffel Tower; we take a look at the object of touristy interest, and perform a New England version of the Gallic shrug. Our answer is brief and basically the truth as we know it, or the truth as purveyed through Black Dog children’s books: First there was a Black Dog tavern on the Vineyard Haven harbor, then the owner, Capt. Douglas found a black Lab puppy with sea legs. The pup became first mate of The Shenandoah, which we’ve all seen under full sail in Vineyard Sound, inspiring us to stop and snap pictures. Like every other company logo, a black dog was stamped on tee shirts. The brand, much like the Lacoste croc, went global, and BD boutiques sprang up all along the eastern seaboard.

That’s about all the info we care to impart because, at this point, a strange languor takes hold of us, and suddenly we’d rather enroll in an algebraic geometry class than explain anything further about Black Dog biz.

However, to people we’ve taken a shine to, we might add the following "true facts", as they say:

 “A Black Dog waitress originally created the doggy doodle on a menu before she left for art school in New York. Later, after her squiggle morphed into THE Black Dog and dazzling success, she sued the Lab hide out of the outfit, and settled for an undisclosed sum.”

Another tidbit: “Islanders don’t wear Black Dog gear unless we’re going to, like, Hong Kong. Then we’re able to identify other Vineyarders because they’ll be wearing the club shirt too. It’s similar to colors for Crips and Bloods”.

Finally, oh the existential despair of it, question #3, What Do We Do In The Winter? Well, what does anyone do when 96.07 % of local shops and restaurants are closed, when all of the homes surrounding yours are boarded up and collecting mold on their Doric columns, when your departed summer neighbors think it’s okay to cover a patch of ground, porch or roof with one of those horrendously ugly blue plastic tarps because only a few pathetic winter souls are forced to look at them (and am I right, gang, can you stand outside your house, glance left, right, forward and back and see a floppy, flappy blue tarp in every direction?!), and although the natural views are more stunning than ever because they’re empty and wind-swept, many days, even in this so-called mild winter, it’s too cold to enjoy them for any length of time and . . . can I end this sentence now?; are we all set with nouns and verbs?

So what do we do in the off-season? Some of us read and/or watch way more TV than could ever be deemed healthy. The more extraverted among us sally forth to places like the exciting new Pit Stop in Oak Bluffs for live music. Two separate film societies screen movies to provide us with enough patter to chat with Martin Scorsese, should we bump into him at a fund-raiser next summer. There are poetry groups, book clubs, library lectures, and knitting klatches.

There is absolutely no time to be depressed, but if you’ll excuse me, it’s 9:39 on a Monday morning, and I’ve got to polish off this bottle of scotch before my 10 o’clock with my psychiatrist, after which I intend to mope around the harbor looking for still-feasible cigarette butts while the pharmacy fills my psych meds.

LOL & Happy March!