Like the Mistral winds of southern France, the arctic darkness of Norway, and the fogs of the Faroe Islands, the bipolar shift in the Vineyard seasons (manic summers, lethargic winters) stirs the Island psyche. “You can’t not love this place,” says Vineyard comedian Marty Nadler. “Spring, summer, and fall are great.” Winter, he even admits, is fun right up to, and including, New Year’s Eve. “But,” says Nadler, “on January first, I believe the government should send helicopters, and all Islanders should get airlifted off the Island for their mental health.”
Back in 1961 a handful of Vineyard physicians and clergymen had the equally radical notion that the Island’s mental health needed saving. Rather than export Islanders, however, they would import the Island’s first psychiatrist – a man named Milton Mazer – to found a community clinic. “There was no precedent for so small, so unaffluent, so isolated a community to start its own community mental health clinic,” Mazer wrote in his book People and Predicaments: Of Life and Distress on Martha’s Vineyard (Harvard University Press, 1976). He worried that the Vineyard’s self-reliant rural population would resist therapy. Instead, he found that as he opened up to the community – becoming neighbor and town moderator and counselor – it opened up to him. The experiment, despite the odds, was a remarkable success, and continues to be so over four decades later. Martha’s Vineyard Community Services now staffs 138 people who provide services to over 6,000 Island residents and visitors each year.
“We’re not quite Cambridge,” says Dr. Rufus Peebles, a private-practice psychologist serving Islanders, “where if you get to age thirty and haven’t been to therapy, your friends are saying, what’s wrong with you? But in 2004, the use of therapists is a whole lot higher on Martha’s Vineyard than it was when Dr. Mazer came. I think there are over forty therapists on this Island now.” With so much analysis going on, we wondered, would it be possible to diagnose the Island’s psyche as a whole? Does such a thing exist? If living on a rock separated from the mainland can give rise to a special dialect of sign language, could it not also cultivate a particular type of psyche? What are the “patterns of culture” (as anthropologist Ruth Benedict termed it in the 1930s) that reveal the Island’s “personality writ large”? What is it that makes the Vineyard so Vineyardy?
Womb of the water
Until they put a bridge across the three miles that span Vineyard Sound, the journey over that geographic separation will always make you stop and realize that you are going someplace unlike where you have ever been. “Crossing the water barrier holds a great psychological significance,” says psychiatrist Tom Bennett, who joined Mazer’s team in 1969 and is now program director at the Island Counseling Center of Community Services. “There’s a real sense of security here.”
The water, to a true Islander, is the moat protecting his castle. “People who move here love islands,” says psychiatrist Dr. Charles Silberstein, who has lived on three different islands himself and now has his office at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital. “We travel to islands. It’s not always a conscious choice, but there’s something womblike about being surrounded by water, something comforting. It’s a primal experience for people.”
For non-island-lovers, however, the landscape can be less welcoming. They may see the water barrier as isolating and frightening. “When I think of the bleakness of shifting sands, dunes, stunted vegetation and limited interest,” wrote psychiatrist Vernon Briggs following his study of mental illness on Cape Cod and the Islands in the late-nineteenth century, “I marvel that the whole population did not storm the hospital doors!”
Self-reliant risk-takers
Living on roughly one hundred square miles of land, all Vineyarders must daily reckon with the sea. It pounds their psyche as surely as the surf smashes the Oak Bluffs sea wall. Vulnerability to the natural world, noted Mazer, induces a cultural fatedness in Islanders. Vineyarders, he wrote, are “prone to see the human disorders and tragedies about them as ordained by fate and resistant to human intervention.”
But Mazer and other observers of the Island temperament also saw that challenging conditions give rise to fierce determination and self-reliance. “Why did the people who first settled here choose to live here rather than Cape Cod or Boston or Cambridge, despite the isolation and inconvenience?” says Peebles. “Hey, there was no ferry. The only way to get to the mainland was to sail over. So they must have been willing to take the enormous risk for some kind of benefit. They thought: give me some freedom here and let me get out and live my own life. Risk-taking is a trait that continues.”
Part of that risk-taking, Silberstein agrees, plays itself out in the fact that “People who choose to live here like the difficulty of getting on and off the Island.” When bad weather forces the boats to stop, you can sort the residents from the passers-through by this trait: Mainlanders feel marooned if they get stuck on the Vineyard. Islanders feel marooned if they get stuck off the
Vineyard.
Many hats, but no disguises
The challenges of living out here have created a culture of individualists who take on multiple roles out of necessity. It was a former steamboat captain who started the Island electrical company, and a physician who set up the first telephone service in order to talk with patients living in the far-flung countryside. “[I]t was not an uncommon sight for Islanders to see Dr. [Charles F. Lane], tall silk hat on his head, shinnying up a pole to straighten out some tangle, or to replace an insulator,” wrote Henry Beetle Hough in his book Country Editor (1940). “He was both agile and competent, and between calls on his patients he was likely to become, at any moment, a lineman.” In so doing, Dr. Lane added the Island’s particular signature to the business of “house calls.”
Islanders, out of necessity, still change hats according to season and situation. As a result, the culture cares less about what you do professionally than who you are personally. “For me it was a striking thing to come from Manhattan where all my friends were psychiatrists,” says Silberstein, “to find that on the Island my friends were now farmers and nurses and doctors and everything in between. There’s an honesty and comfort in being who you are.”
Mazer and other counselors found that on the Island the professional therapist cannot stand apart as an impartial observer. “Some off-Island therapists practice in one town and go home to another,” says Bennett. “They could be going through a divorce, or loss of family members, and their clients wouldn’t know. That’s not true on the Island, where your clients go through transitions with you. What they know about you is not based on what you want to present about your life, but how you actually live your life. If you are living differently than how you say you are, it will be evident to everyone.”
Living under the community microscope, not even the pretense of financial wealth wins the awe of Islanders. “It will hardly avail [the rich man] to entertain lavish parties for the satisfaction of his pride,” wrote Hough, “when he knows that all the rest of us know what is thrown into his garbage pail, and that his wife makes him wear his rubbers on cloudy days, and that although he wears a yachting cap he cannot sail a boat as well as most twelve-year-old boys.”
A social way of seeing
Who you are, on the Island scale, is also largely
determined by your roots. Kinship is the glue that binds here more than in other towns and cities in America. You can see it in the knowing waves as people pass one another on the street and hear it in the frequent exchanges about family ties at the Vineyard Haven Post Office,
Alley’s General Store, and Mocha Mott’s coffee shop. “More often than not when I go to my local video store,” says West Tisbury writer Niki Patton, “I run into a couple of my neighbors, who’ve run into each other, and they’ve gotten into a conversation – sometimes forgetting to rent a video altogether. I’ve never seen that in an off-Island Blockbuster.”
When it comes to Island affairs, Vineyarders are
passionate about the least little thing, and dive
wholeheartedly into heated debates with the very
same people whom they’ll later encounter in friendly
ways as their child’s teacher, or their contractor, or their psychiatrist. “By coming here,” says Patton, “we’ve chosen to work closer together, play closer together,
and fight closer together – sometimes looking a lot like a dysfunctional family that can’t stop acting out its
neuroses.” She adds the flip side to that: “When catastrophe strikes, Islanders react with remarkable speed
and generosity – giving benefits, holding fundraisers, sending out letters.” She recalls the time that a nationally recognized author came to the Island to talk about America’s apathy toward volunteering. “Hoping to make his point, he asked just how many people in
the audience of 150 volunteered their own time.
Nearly every hand went up.”
Eccentrics unite
Island culture certainly keeps a close watch on, and a constant chatter commenting about, its members, but it also respects certain bounds of civility. A
live-and-let-live attitude prevails. “There’s a strong sense of, ‘We’re all in this together,’” says Silberstein. “We live under a microscope, but people forgive you for your foibles.”
Not only are Islanders free to be eccentric, they claim a high place in Island lore if they develop the talent into an art form. Nancy Luce (the nineteenth-century resident of the Great Plain in West Tisbury who published poetry dedicated to her chickens), and Craig Kingsbury (the Tisbury jack-of-all-trades who was once arrested for drunk-driving a team of oxen), are two examples. There is, in fact, such an abundance of personality quirks on the Vineyard that one begins to wonder: is a nonconformist
living on an Island of nonconformists
actually a conformist?
Provincialism prevails
Though Islanders are worldly in their own right, they prefer to pay closer
attention to neighborly events than
feign interest in the hell-breaking
problems of far-off America. “A typical local headline is likely to read: Cat Finds Its Way Home,” jokes Nadler.
“Or, if it’s a hard-news story: Cat
Doesn’t Find Its Way Home.” Tourists often take it upon themselves to scold year-rounders for their provincial
ways, he adds. “You don’t care what’s
going on in the world,” they say. “You read only local papers – no national news.” The Islander, says Nadler,
responds: “It’s not that we don’t care. It’s just that we think President Eisenhower is doing a great job.”
Whether you call it provincialism
or traditionalism, the Vineyard rock is the sun and the rest of the world revolves around it. “There is the true story,” says Patton, “of a Vineyard elementary school student who began his homework
assignment with ‘Napoleon was an
off-Islander. . . .’ ”
But then comes summer
The summer invasion, which pumps up the population from roughly 15,000 to well over 105,000, has affected the Island psyche so deeply that it’s
surprising no word has been coined for the complex feeling that results. “It’s
difficult and overwhelming,” says Bennett, “especially now that the population in summer is more than it used to be. Services are hard-pressed to the limit here. A lot of people struggle with that onslaught of all the people. Now it’s stretched over more months as more
people have homes and come for weekends throughout the year. There’s less downtime.”
The summer conflict was one of the great stresses on the Island psyche, Mazer wrote almost thirty years ago, putting normal life on hold while people worked long hours to meet the rush. “Islanders have been known to say good-bye to their friends as June approaches,” he wrote, “knowing the relationships will not be resumed until September. . . . While his wife and children work long hours, [the Vineyarder] sees those
they serve engaged in a kind of consumption that he can only identify as thoughtlessly conspicuous. But the very coming of the summer people confirms his belief that he already possesses something of great value. . . . As spring matures and inquiries come in for rentals, one island woman yearly announces to her family, ‘Just think, all over the United States, people are getting ready to come to the Vineyard,’ and then, after a dramatic pause, ‘and we are already here.’ ”
The tribal dance
Of late, summer has created a yearly
ritual unlike any in other American communities: the Island Shuffle. You build a camp, empty your home,
move your family, and sit calmly by
in your hovel watching as the wealthy
invaders stake a claim to your
territory during the high season. You are grateful, you are hateful. At summer’s end, you pack your things, return to
what remains of your home, and are
allowed to inhabit it until the weather breaks again and the invaders return to retake the best of what you have in
the best of seasons.
Granted, it’s not all bad. Marnie
Edwards, who first came to the Island during the “hippie invasion” of the ’60s and stayed on to become a social worker, is among the minority who says the Island Shuffle is cathartic. The house-swap forces her annually to pare down, throw out unwanted clutter, and shift to a simpler lifestyle that involves a closer connection with nature: bigger gardens, outdoor showers, and sometimes no electricity or phone. “I seem to hear a lot of people complaining about the Island Shuffle these days,” she says, “but I don’t mind it. I suppose it’s the old hippie in me. It’s very summery to me to live more simply in a cottage. I’ll be sixty next year, but it reminds me of being a kid in summertime. It’s rich and exciting and fun.”
And the seasonal
psychosis
But summer doesn’t last forever, and the off-season forces a personal and collective reckoning among those who stay. “People move here because it feels so good to be on the Island in the summer,” says Silberstein. “They make an assumption that all their problems are going to go away. But, of course, what they experience on vacation is not necessarily what they are going to experience when they live here.”
No Eden comes without its own snake. The Vineyard, like other resort communities, has a rate of alcoholism three times that of the average county in America, says Silberstein. The increased substance use, he adds, stems in part from the fact that “in the ’60s and ’70s the Vineyard attracted a counterculture that brought with it a culture of higher marijuana and alcohol use.”
Depression is the other dragon that Islanders combat in the off-season. Statistically, it’s a disease that increases with latitude, says Silberstein; the farther north you go, the more depression you tend to see. Though he himself doesn’t find Vineyard winters to be especially gray or isolating, since Boston and New York are only a boat and highway trip away, he and other therapists do hear many Islanders comment on how difficult they find the dark season.
With so few places open in the winter and so few people to choose from, winter can be especially tough on singles. “Your standards drop a little,” says Nadler. “Him having no teeth means smaller meat bills.” It’s a time when those sticking it out on the Island gather for solidarity at potlucks. “You can tell a lot about people from what potluck plate they bring,” Nadler says. “Who brought the plate of Twinkies? Oh. The guy with no teeth?”
On the plus side, the off-season
offers a time to reconnect with family
and friends without distraction. “The winter malaise may be the price we pay,” says Peebles, “but the trade-off is the peace and quiet and tranquility that nourishes us.”
The Island psyche
at risk
Given all of this, is there really a single, describable Vineyard psyche? If there is, it’s changing even as we speak. Whatever the elusive nature of this little
Island may be, it represents all that is sought after by people around the world. It has drawn mainlanders by the boatload long before and long after Mazer first came to the Vineyard to help the
Island live with itself. In large measure, the Island has attracted like-minded folks, says Bennett – himself a native Vineyarder: people nostalgic for community and nature and safer neighborhoods. But with such a massive influx of outsiders, how long can the Vineyard stay true to itself? Like the old-timer who’s so proud of the trusty hammer he’s had all his life – except that he’s changed the head twice and the handle three times – you’ve got to wonder, when does the Island lose the very soul that made it what it was?
“It’s a struggle to maintain Island
values against the incoming tide of
people,” says Bennett. “A lot of people I know are feeling changes taking place that they don’t feel good about. And
yet many new Islanders are very, very connected to the Island values and
Island ways – that’s why they come here. We’re incumbent to join forces to take the best from the past and go
forward with that in order to make the Island continue to be the wonderful place that it’s been. That’s the tension we’re feeling now.”
It’s impossible to pretend that the
fax machines, the cell phones, the burgeoning population haven’t somewhat suburbanized the original charm out
of the Island, says Marnie Edwards with regret: “The real world is here.”
And yet the Island psyche remains
thick with nostalgia, whether you were born here or just wish you were. Paul Schneider of West Tisbury puts it poetically in his book The Enduring
Shore (Henry Holt, 2000): “There is sweet seduction in nostalgia, and in
impending loss, and in the certainty
that we live in a time that is different from all other times – a time that is
already approaching some kind of an
end, and not just for us. This is particularly true when summer is involved, as if it is the nature of the season, which, after all, officially commences only when the days begin to shorten.”
Heartbreak and
loyalty
The loss of access to the land is the
issue around which that nostalgia crystallizes. A lot of Islanders, like Bennett, grew up in families of hunters and fishermen who shot a duck for dinner or went out hunting rabbit or deer to put food on the table when jobs were scarce. Now those same lands are posted with No Hunting and No Fishing signs. “With the exception of the Elizabeth
Islands,” Schneider writes, “the Vineyard probably has the most restricted beaches of the region.”
Though Bennett understands that the large numbers of people moving
here need space, he is troubled by the fact that the ground he and his friends roamed freely as Island kids is now overcome by No Trespassing signs. “There were some beauties where we used to go,” he says. “Now, one by one, we see a beautiful spot shut off and
we realize we will never see that place again. It makes it so sad.”
A cultural heartbreak, you could
call it, coupled with bittersweet loyalty, for there is still a hard-core group of born-and-bred Islanders who hold
fast to the old ways. “Some people up-Island don’t ever go down-Island,” says Bennett. “I know one person who will not go to Edgartown for years at a time. He says, ‘There’s nothing I need in Edgartown.’ People like that become
really wedded to their town. It helps
the town maintain its own character
and personality and unity, but it does
become a little provincial. Your world
becomes the Island.”
For his part, Bennett has seen enough other places in the world to realize that despite the shifting nature of the Island’s psyche, “It’s still a wonderful place to live.” Like so many other Islanders who call it home, he knows there’s nowhere else he’d rather be.
