Of all the flag-burnings, Mothers For Peace marches and students shaking fists at military recruitment centers, the nuttiest protest against the Vietnam War occurred right here on the high seas, if we can call them that, between Wood’s Hole and Vineyard Haven. Only those of us born before, oh let’s say the 1980s, remember Robert S. McNamara, but we remember him with a vengeance. As secretary of defense in both the JFK and the LBJ administrations, it was he who pushed troop levels up up and up until a police action we’d inherited from French colonialists turned into an outrageous war that …

Most Vineyarders stand guilty of it: We don’t lock our doors; it’s too much bother. We tend to be blissfully detached from big-city paranoia. Maybe what it boils down to is we don’t believe we have much to steal. Some of us have never ever locked our doors, even when we scoot away to, say, Costa Rica. Still others have no clue where we stashed our original key some 32 years ago, when a realtor handed it over and sauntered away with a jaunty “Thanks for the commish!” kind of wave. Oh sure, crimes are committed on the Island, but if you follow the court log in the papers, most of the “perps”, …

The late Phil Craig, who died in May of 2007, had a thing for corpses washing up on any one of our scenic shores. In the story-line, J.W. Jackson, ex-cop, fisherman, overall cool guy (just like Phil!), would set aside his fishing rod for a few days, and kiss his super-supportive wife Zee on the forehead before he dashed off to sort out all this sudden skullduggery on our normally calm and safe little island. Whenever J.W. needed to stop and eat before he began to feel peakish, he whipped up something divine, always with whatever fresh fish or seafood had magically jumped into his bucket, and …

Once you learn which of the Campground cottages belonged to them, you will always think of those two ultra-talented petite women as you pass by. It’s that spacious yellow home at Fourth and Rock, set diagonally back from the Wesley Hotel, with views across a wide lawn out to the harbor. And while the Campground cottages are often referred to as “doll houses”, a perfect designation for a dwarf’s dwelling, this one’s designed along ample lines. The famous show-girl dwarfs, Lucy and Sarah Adams had stocked their home with scaled-down furniture, but the house is genuinely large; A-Rod could …

I hadn’t realized at the time that my arrival at Dawn’s house in Chilmark carried with it an omen. It was September of 2007 and Dawn Greeley, a high-powered exec-turned-painter, plus Marcia Smilack, photographer of synesthesia sensibilities (this means you see colors of musical notes and apprehend calendar dates in abstract patterns; yeah, I know; if you don’t have it, you don’t get it), and I, writer, bookstore owner, and local screwball, all three of us met at Dawn’s house for a post-summer debriefing. Dawn lived in a contemporary house on a hilltop overlooking a seven-acre property. As we …

Back in the old days, there were more freaky little tricks and tics for keeping trouble at bay, as well as for crooking a coy finger at good luck, than you could shake a frog at. And while you were shaking that frog, you could rub it on your face to banish freckles. Did it work? Probably not, or we’d still be swabbing swamp crits over all our open pores. Old wives' tales are worth examining because, no surprise here!, we’re still plenty superstitious! It’s intriguing to see if any of these folkloric tidbits might continue to come in handy. For instance, are bushy brows on men an indication of…

It may have started as far back as two thousand years ago when, let’s just say hypothetically, a Wampanoag sachem invited tribesmen to share roasted beached whale around the campfire. Later an assistant-sachem might have taken the honcho host aside and berated him, “Didn’t you know one of your tribesmen resented another tribesman for planting corn too close to his ancestor’s burial mound?” To which the sachem might have responded with the Wampanoag equivalent of “Yikes!” Another for-real sketchy Vineyard dinner, this one taking place in 1874, was organized by a Methodist minister in honor of …

I like to think I was one of the first people to start the cottage industry of guiding folks on walking tours of local ghost haunts. This began back in ’91 when the three Nadlers moved to the Vineyard full-time. We’d been summering here (whoda thought summer would become a verb?) while working as TV writers in LA and NY. But now the time had arrived for us to find so-called real jobs. I got hired by a real estate office, wrote for magazines, and devised a roster of walking tours. In short order, my more conventional tours fell by the wayside, not that I was ever able to keep things perfectly …

You know it’s still winter in New England when you receive yet another invite to a spaghetti dinner or a ham and bean supper. Seems to me, by the way, that the latter option has been going out of style. I like to think that’s because people such as myself email back this ambivalent RSVP: “Will there be a non-meat option?” Look, on whatever day it was that God created humans, care was taken to give us different personalities. To save time, the Creator combined annoying people with vegetarians and, bingo!, that’s why we reply to ham and bean suppers that way. And, truly, if one less little …

There are still a few of them, Islanders who have never departed these hundred square miles stuck in cold New England waters. Every so often you hear about one of them; someone’s great-aunt Jemina who is happy tending her garden down a winding Chilmark lane, with no thought to traveling even to Edgartown, someone else’s grandma who died a virgin to off-island travel. My personal favorite in this breed of Vineyard agoraphobics – not about leaving their homes but about venturing off-island – is Oak Bluffs dweller, Dave Madeiros, formerly that mustachioed man behind the counter at Phillip’s …

Yes, we adore our dogs on Martha’s Vineyard, almost to the point of obsession. Once you get us talking about our pets, should you need to distract us, you’d have to wave chocolate cake in our faces, and raise the topic of senators streaking in the nude during a big vote. So it was the other day when I dropped in on Kerry Scott, owner of Good Dog Goods in Oak Bluffs, and fairy godmother to all the dogs and dog owners who’ve ever met her. As an example, I first encountered Kerry one night back in 2002 when she and we lived off Wing Road. My cocker spaniel, Chopper, unbeknownst to me, had made …

These kiddos would be adrift on the high seas for seven days around the Elizabeth Islands. Could they stand it? Could we? On the seventh day, when they returned to port, they would be totally transformed; diminutive pirates, tanned, tattooed with skulls and crossbones (these washed off over time), snarky and gnarly, and hanging from the bow-sprit. Later, back home, we heard our own sweet children belt out, “What do you do with a drunken sailor? ...  Put him in bed with the captain’s daughter!” What elements went into making them hooligans and into granting them the greatest adventure of their…

  It was a nifty little operation that few of us ever knew about. It serves as a perfect example of how cultural artifacts bite the dust, items such as typewriters and telephones attached to jacks on a wall (what?!). Back in the early part of the 20th century, alongside the spring-fed pond called Crystal Lake – hang on a minute here! This Cali girl has always enjoyed a private chortle at New Englanders granting the name of “lake” to a body of water barely bigger than a swimming pool. Out west, when we say “lake” we mean Tahoe, Big Bear and Salt [Lake], although even westerners get grandiose …

  If you’re about to take a bite of an egg salad sandwich or a falafel wrap with cucumbers and tomatoes, or something equally delicious, stop right here. Eat no more until you read the following story or, still better for you and your lunch, forego the story and tuck in! Bon appetite!  Still with me? It was a Sunday in October 2009 and I was living with a fellow journalist named Jack Shea. Jack was ostensibly my fiancée, but since I’m slightly allergic to terms of conventional endearment, let us call him my friend and soul mate with whom wedding plans had been successfully hatched. Only …

  My buddy Gwyn and I walk our dogs on Martha’s Vineyard all the time. We ramble over Land Bank trails, beaches and, most commonly, the Trade Winds dog park where domestic beasties frolick in open fields, their owners fond as nursery school parents.  But there is one set of woods on this island that reminds me of the "Blair Witch Project." Twice I’ve walked there with Gwyn, and twice we became seriously displaced persons. Two Sundays ago, she suggested we stroll once again in the forest above Featherstone Center For The Arts, off Barnes Road in Oak Bluffs, an area also known as the Southern …

  It’s a Yankee thing, like the rule for switching off lamps if you’ll be out of the room for more than fifteen seconds. Yikers! For those of us with addled minds, we might stand stock still as we reason, “Brushing my teeth will take a good two minutes, if I include twisting off the cap, wetting the toothbrush, plus I’ve been allotting extra time for those molars. ..." Even stopping to over-think this question burns up energy in those lamps still glowing away incandescently, expensively. Hmm, maybe it’s better to stand and ponder in the dark? Vineyarders are Yankees in a plus size. If you …

So I met this guy, Marty Nadler, on the Paramount Studios lot, he gave me a job writing a script for Laverne and Shirley, and I was so grateful, I agreed to marry him (like that’s doing anyone a favor) but, before we got that far, he brought me to Martha’s Vineyard. It was April of 1976, kind of grey, and seriously cold for this Valley girl who had never spent that particular month in a place where the land was still frozen and you’d need a microscope to see tiny green buds on a grey brittle branch. But still, the island was pretty, nice ocean and all that. ...We were walking up Circuit …

  I have my own Chelsea story but I’ll save it for last because . . . because it’s embarrassing, that’s why. It’s an “Oh God, I can’t believe I did that!” kind of riff, like tales about the time the hook wrapped around one's teen neck for shoplifting do-dads. So Chelsea has vacayed on our Island many times, virtually every summer with her parents, whether her father was a sitting president or a standing and schmoozing one.  This is a girl who since the age of four has possessed the potential to be blazingly famous. Instead she’s the anti-Paris Hilton; a young lady in a kingpin position – or …

  If you live on the Island and you’re not constantly yammering on about your acer rubrum or hammamelis japonica, you clearly need to go back to whatever misbegotten suburb or metropolis you came from. In other words, you are making no effort to fit in. So let’s get fitted. First, to assure you of my own bona fides as the Island’s most idiotic and clumsy gardener, I started out in 1981 with a quaint little cottage in East Chop. The front yard faced the frigid winter winds they call the Canadian Express. The only things we could grow there were a green lawn and a white picket fence (yes, white…

  Sometimes you just know when a story is crying out to be written. I'm willing to bet that anyone who has ever set all 10 toes on this Island, strolling along any one of our astonishing harbors, then planting a face into two scoops of Ben & Bill's ice cream, this is a person who has turned to his or her companion, and mused out loud, "Wouldn't it be lovely to be buried here?" (I know, I know; most guys don't say 'wouldn't it be lovely?', they just grunt and point with their ice cream cones, and their partners get their drift, should they be remotely interested.) Thing is, when someone speaks…