Donnie Benefit and his friends Jim and Jane Klingensmith, who all live in Edgartown, have among them about two hundred years’ experience in the year-round economy of Martha’s Vineyard. And on the basis of that experience, this is their advice for the coming winter:
Seal up your house. Turn down the heat. Make a lot of soup.
A dire message perhaps, but one should bear in mind it’s what they would be doing anyway.
To the extent that romanticized notions of Islander frugality and self-sufficiency survive at all, they survive in people like these. Jim is eighty-three, Jane is seventy-eight, and Donnie, a professional fisherman, is a relative youngster at fifty. They are sitting on Donnie’s back deck. Jane has brought an apple pie, homegrown and -made. Donnie shows them the new chicks he recently got. He offers them honey from his hive.
Donnie and Jane were born on the Island and Jim moved here as a youth, and they talk about growing up on rabbit pie, chowder, kale soup, casseroles, fish of course, shellfish, chickens, Island game. Jim regrets that kids today know nothing about fishin’, farmin’, and fowlin’. Everyone used to have a garden. And chickens. Still should. Jim’s just put away enough potatoes from his garden to last until next May.
“A big garden is the only way to make it,” he says. “You’re not going to do it on social security.”
With what Donnie and the Klingensmiths grow and preserve, they’re pretty self-sufficient. They’ve got freezers full of fish. A bit of venison perhaps, maybe from a deer that was shot or from one that was skittled by a car. Winter’s coming and it’s going to be hard just keeping warm for a lot of folks. Time to close up part of the house, turn the heat down, live within your means. Be frugal.
Winter has always been hard on the Vineyard, and the welfare of those who live here year-round has always tracked the weather. It was the case when Islanders were predominantly fishers and farmers, and it still is. You can measure winter’s toll statistically, in fluctuating employment, incomes, mortgage delinquencies, mental health, substance abuse, violence.
Yet those who choose to live here seem to have an extraordinary sense of place. There is far less statistical evidence for that, although the number of books, artworks, and songs the Island has inspired testifies to something. What makes people love this place so, despite its difficulties, is a “curiosity” that writer and storyteller Susan Klein is still trying to work out.
She was born and grew up in Oak Bluffs and still lives there, but has spent a lot of time in Alaska. “When I lived up there,” she says, “I ran into the same thing: the same kind of tight community. People would die for one another, but on the other hand, they could barely live through the winter and they were a mess by spring,” she says.
(Spring, of course, being a relative term when it comes to Martha’s Vineyard. Summer here is busy, autumn is glorious, winter is hard, but spring means only that the winter is not quite behind us and summer has not quite arrived.)
Looking at the year as a whole, there is a sympathetic economic cycle to the seasons, says Chris Wells, president and CEO of Martha’s Vineyard Savings Bank. “The three slowest months coincide with winter: January, February, and March,” he says, “and we typically see mortgage delinquencies climb to levels that are greater than any other time of year.
“It makes sense. By that point, all of the summer needs of business have been met. The non-essential contractor help for builders and plumbers and other trade providers has been thinned out. Landscapers aren’t doing much. All of the build-up to Christmas is done, so all those employees are sent packing. And then tax time is upon us.
“It happens every year. But by August, those people are usually caught up and we cycle on,” he says.
Conversely, people are most flush in September, October, and November; that is when Island financial institutions see the “accumulation for anticipated spending,” as hoarding for winter is described in banker-ese. Bank accounts are whittled down at Christmas, again at tax time, and again in May and June, when all the bills come in for the preparations businesses have made for summer.
“Like everyone else,” says Chris, “we are adjusted to the seasonality, accepting certain things perhaps more leniently than elsewhere in the country.”
That forbearance may be tested this winter though, he fears. But before we get to what might be, let’s go back to what used to be.
It’s always been tough
When she thinks back forty or more years to what things were like, Susan Klein recalls a close community, but not a very exciting one. People shared; they helped one another out, “but there wasn’t much social life that I recall,” she says. “The women had a getting-to-know-you club and a few things like that. The men had the fire department and the Masons. That gave you a reason to get dressed up and go out.
“There was very little entertainment at any time of year; it had to be self-generated. People had parties, but I think basically what we did in wintertime was meet. People would get together to talk about what was best for their towns.”
In that, at least, little has changed. There are times when the off-season Island seems like one giant, floating committee. If democracy means rule by discussion, then this must surely be one of the most democratic places on earth.
But a lot has not stayed the same.
“Things started changing in the 1970s a little bit,” says Susan. “We got on the map. Then everything changed in the ’80s: Things geared up and there was a lot of stuff going on. After that came the Clintons and that’s when the expansion of summer, deeper into winter, began.”
The statistics bear her out. Consider these few, mined from the pages of the Martha’s Vineyard Economic Profile, a comprehensive analysis prepared for the Martha’s Vineyard Commission earlier this year. Population growth in Dukes County averaged 4.6 percent in the seventies, 3 percent in the eighties, and 2.9 in the nineties. (Though the numbers decreased by dec-ade, there was continuous growth.) More importantly perhaps, the growth brought different kinds of people. Sure, the Vineyard had long been a summer retreat for a certain cohort of the comfortable middle class – academics, literary types, and the like – but they ran at a Vineyard pace.
Twenty-odd years ago, though, the pace began to pick up rapidly. From 1990 to 2006, the median cost of a home on the Island increased at an average of 14 percent per year, more than twice the rate of Massachusetts as a whole. By 2006, it was $640,000, about 3.5 times what it was in 1990 and more than twice the state median.
The Island gained a lot of seriously wealthy people, and they were a mixed blessing. They drove up housing prices, but they also created construction jobs and paid the lion’s share of property taxes. They overran the roads and beaches in the season, but they also propped up the retailers, the recreation industry, and those who provided food, drink, and lodging. They idled away the summer, while Vineyarders toiled to service their needs, but then they went away, leaving their money and run of their private beaches. They often lived lives of conspicuous consumption, but also funded community services. Their wastewater contaminated the ponds, but their money paid for conservation.
Economic activity became more year-round, but year-round residents themselves did not get a lot richer for these changes. In 1990, the average wage paid for all jobs in Dukes County was just 70 percent of the average for the state; in 2006, it stood at 73 percent. Yet the Island was enriched. In how many little communities, do you reckon, can every child get tennis lessons on all-weather courts from real pros, with all equipment provided – including a protective bubble dome in winter – all built by a wealthy benefactor who would rather remain anonymous? In how many little towns can one go for free to see seven or eight Harvard professors, plus a smattering of national media personalities, discuss race in politics? In how many can you pick up barely worn designer clothes for a couple of bucks at a second- hand store? Where else is there such a blend of small-town community and cosmopolitanism?
But still Susan Klein is unsure about all this change.
“It’s interesting to have adored something so very, very, very much that you didn’t ever want it to alter, and yet in its alteration, there is still so much to love,” she says. “But there exists here now an undercurrent that the resort concept of the Vineyard is the only concept of the Vineyard. It means that everything is business driven in a commodified kind of way. We’ve sold the Island in many ways.
“Yet what drives the year-round economy is not what people come here for. It’s the opposite. They come for the solace and this underlying thing nobody seems quite able to name. It’s a very tricky conundrum.”
Samantha Look, who owns Crow Hollow Farm in West Tisbury, also is ambivalent about the changes. The thirty-two-year-old says “99 percent” of her seasonal customers who return each year are “like family,” but she also sees increasing numbers of people whose lifestyles are not in sync with the rhythms of the Island.
“There’s always been a wealthy community here, but the people came to be at the speed the Vineyard was, and they were integrated into the community. Maybe you had a biggish house, but it was a funky, old-style beach house, and you piled into the station wagon to go to the beach.
“Now, though, I feel the place has become more trendy, and it’s attracted a lot of money that’s not necessarily here because of a love of the Vineyard or the speed of life here, but because it’s a fabulous thing to have a house here. The speed of life is being increased to meet the needs of these people as they are accustomed to having them met everywhere in the world. I worry that those are the sort of people who would chew the Vineyard up and spit it out.”
Sam is herself a wealthy woman, at least on paper. Her grandparents had land here, and when she was a kid, there were eighty acres to ride her horses on. That land has been both a blessing and a curse.
“In the last ten years in particular, land has become so valuable that if it’s not a very concise family group, you get divisions between those who would like to realize some of that value and those who would not. It became a very bitter thing in my family, and I have watched it happen in others.
“When my parents subdivided the first piece of property here, I would go out and rip up the survey stakes. The thought that houses could be built in the woods where I’d wandered as a kid was too much to bear.”
Yet she now faces such a hard decision again. Like so many year-round Vineyarders, she is land rich but cash poor. The riding school just doesn’t cover the costs of living.
“It’s bizarre to go to the grocery store and stand in front of the fruit, deciding whether you can afford to eat peaches, when you have like a $3 million house,” she says. “It’s a funny thing to have your home so wildly valuable that you start thinking about it – in the back of your mind – not as home but as an asset.”
Much as she finds it “energizing” to live in a place with such swings, both in climate and the rhythm of life, she says, “There is also something hard” about that rhythm.
“We make maybe 90 percent of our money in six or eight weeks. Then in the shoulder seasons, you’re hopefully breaking even, and then the rest of the year, starting in October, you’re spending money. It’s like pushing off the end of the pool and seeing how far you can get towards the other end on one breath. The springtime is the hardest.”
Funny thing is, she might have known it would be like this. She saw her father, a construction worker, forced to go to the West Indies for work during one recession. And it wasn’t as if Sam did not have options. She went off to Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and studied English literature and environmental science. She was contemplating grad school when she says she “swerved back” into Island life.
In high school, she was part of a tight-knit group of four girls. All of them left the Island. “One of us got it figured out; she got her master’s and can use it on the Vineyard. Two others were doing very well, in well-paid jobs in New York and Boston, but now they’re back here. They’ve gone from fully and easily supporting themselves to spending their savings down to almost nothing. Each has had to move three times in the past twelve months, because they don’t have year-round rentals. They’re doing whatever it takes to stay,” she says.
Sam is too. Friends have gathered around, and they are exploring the option to keep the farm going, by running it as a foundation or a not-for-profit, instead of selling it.
The challenges of today
But not everyone is so resilient. A comprehensive study of the health of Island residents, completed in 2004 under the direction of Dr. Diane Becker, a professor of medicine and director of the Center for Health Promotion at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, found unusually high levels of depression and substance abuse here.
Tom Bennett, the associate executive director and senior clinical advisor at Martha’s Vineyard Community Services, sees that too, and also notes it is a seasonal thing.
“The demand for services usually drops off in summer, and then grows again once the kids go back to school,” he says. “After the holidays, in January, February, March, there is a real uptick – real trouble with alcohol and substance abuse. And when people are out of work, they don’t get out of the house so much; there is an increase in domestic violence too.
“It’s a hard place to live. There is a sense of isolation in the wintertime when there is little to do,” he says. “People will come here on vacation or stay here a couple of months and think they could live here. They have this romanticism about an island; they think there is a geographical cure for their problems.”
Tom says the indications this year are that people are doing a bit worse than usual: This summer the normal drop in demand for help from Community Services did not happen.
And Chris Wells, the banker, also sees warning signs.
“Last year at this time, contractors of any sort – plumbing, heating, construction – were probably pricing one, two, or three jobs,” he says. “This year across those same categories, I’ve seen a lot pricing into one job or no jobs. The backlog is not there. People who had projects in mind have put them aside.”
What makes it particularly worrying is that even those people who were once considered recession-proof, the big money people, now appear to be cutting back. People who were not burned by the real estate meltdown here might be, now that the heat is up on Wall Street. Says Chris Wells: “Island visitors and seasonal homeowners are very heavily connected to the results in the financial sector. There’s no way we can’t be affected.”
Let us not forget either that these are the people who fund so many of the Island’s good works. In May last year, for example, the capital campaign for the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital ended with the announcement that $42 million had been raised – most of it in cash, and more than 85 percent of it from people who do not live here full-time. A few months later, the man who made that announcement and who did the most to make that fundraising effort a success, Warren Spector, was forced out of his job as co-president of one of the big Wall Street firms, Bear Stearns, which subsequently became the first big casualty in the so-called sub-prime mortgage crisis.
So, what have we established here? That winters are hard on Martha’s Vineyard and the cost of living is high, that wages are relatively low and employment seasonal and insecure, that life is hard and may be about to get harder. The question then is why would people want to live here? Why is it everyone we spoke to would not want to live anywhere else?
Well, there are a lot of practical reasons actually. Rachel Orr, of Tisbury, arrived here in 1990 and lived for a while in a tent before she got married and bought a house and had kids. She quickly learned that those things that are not prohibitively expensive here are often ridiculously cheap, or free.
“People have gotten very creative here in figuring out how to make do,” she says.
“They do that by thrift shopping, going to the Dumptique [at the West Tisbury refuse station], offering scholarships, helping each other out. Whatever is left over from the fishing derby is distributed through the Council on Aging. We’re not hunters, but we’ve got more meat in the freezer than we can eat this winter – venison. I’ve had people ask, ‘Can you help me with a project? I’ll pay you in food – local lamb.’ There is a lot of bartering. I used to [house] sit for an elderly woman who had done well financially. I paid to heat it, I finished her counters, I kept it spotless for when she came. And I didn’t pay rent.
“When I had kids, I found, thanks to Community Services and the community center [the family center operating out of the high school] and the towns, we had all these life enrichment programs that cost nothing. I attended infant massage classes; I attended parenting classes, where there was child-care provided free. When I had trouble with some [kids’] behavioral issues – counseling, totally free. The kids are in class with a dozen other kids and a teacher and an aide and a computer. There are language classes, art, shop, home economics. It’s all part of the tax base.
“I’ve done the math on living somewhere else – when I’ve got sick of struggling to pay for housing here – but to have the equivalent quality of life, the numbers don’t work at all,” Rachel says.
But wait, there’s more: safe streets, good public transport, a clean environment, natural beauty, strong community bonds.
Does she worry about the future? Does she resent the summer people?
“I’m more worried about there not being an Island left due to global warming than about the Island losing itself,” says Rachel. “And the Vineyard would not be the wonderful place it is if it didn’t have this regular influx of people from elsewhere. You can look at them just as money, but that’s short-sighted, because a lot are not fabulously wealthy but are people with big ideas, and this is a place where it’s comfortable to be a person with big ideas.
“We would be just another isolated, inbred, unhappy little place otherwise.”
