Sitting with knickers on my head, back door donuts.

I think, after nearly a week, that I have got a handle on Oak Bluffs and then by accident wander off the beaten track and find myself at the heart of the Camp Association Meeting Ground. As I wander, jaw slack with the quaintness of the little avenues of tiny wooden gingerbread-style houses and the open air church (the Tabernacle) at the centre I miss the traffic calming bump across the path and sprawl headfirst across the tarmac. It is the first proper outing of my first aid kit. The camp association was a small gathering of Methodists who used to meet every summer just outside Edgartown starting in the early 1800s. The  summer retreats grew, the tents got bigger, then became permanent, highly decorated and elaborate.  The occupants cultivated small gardens.  In the end the canvases were torn down and replaced with tongue and groove. Each year there would be a secret meeting-come-gathering where guests and visitors were invited.  At the height of these gatherings, known as the illumination, ten thousand people attended. Cottage city as it was then known formed a break-away group, split with Edgartown and became Oak Bluffs.  Because the Camp Assocation meeting ground is tucked away behind the row of shops which make up Main Street, it is quite possible to come to Oak Bluffs and completely miss what is really the whole spirit of the place.  

As we sat in the Lookout Tavern on Saturday having lunch the place became a veritable frenzy of day trippers and weekenders who stream off the ferries coming from the mainland.  There were folks from New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maine and Philadelphia and most of them looked like they had made careful consideration to pump up a couple of car inner tubes and stuff them up their sweater before they came.  Couldn't manage the steps to the Lookout Tavern?  Had to have a special chair on the ferry?  Have a triple heart by-pass scheduled for the week after next? What the hell, lets have the double cheeseburger lunch special and follow it up with an ice-cream the size of a small child's head.  But who am I to  criticise?  I ordered deep-fried coconut shrimp and nearly fell off my chair after having two Long Island Iced Teas, which incidently, I found, contain no tea.   

We walk to Vineyard Haven which is all of three miles but which invokes the usual degree of disbelief as had our decision to walk to Edgartown, especially as we do it in the rain.  About half way there a police patrol car passes us and as it makes its slow way past, two heads swivel and take a long hard look at us. It does a u-turn at the next corner and make the same long slow pass on then other side of the road.  I wonder if we are breaking some obscure local law that dictates that any distances over one hundred meters have to be made in some kind of motorised vehicle.  In Vineyard Haven we make a detour into Carly Simon's shop Midnight Farm  (midnightfarm.com) which is filled with beautiful homeware and clothing.  It might be sale time but even with 50% off I can't afford anything.  In an effort to slow the steady slide into bankruptcy which this holiday is sending me toward (average price of an entree on Martha's Vineyard is $35, glass of wine $12), we get a tub of coleslaw and an apple from the supermarket and sit and eat it, looking out at the  harbour and waiting for the bus back to Oak Bluffs.  In the evening we stumble upon Back Door Donuts, a uniquely Martha's Vineyard phenomenon. Whilst the bakery store are cooking the next day's stock of cakes and donuts you can line up at the back door between 9pm and 1am and get a donut, or two, fresh from the fryer.  We eat them, washed down with tea, and watch the Emmys.

We take the bus to South Beach, a long beautiful quiet golden stretch of sand backed by sand dunes spiked through with long grasses, about a mile beyond Edgartown. We pass houses the size of 'Southfork'. In moving guest house I have left my sunhat behind and the sun is so strong I am forced to sit on the beach with knickers on my head instead.  My farmer's tan is highly developed and I am keen to keep the sun off my face and focus it instead on the insipid white parts that remain.   On the bus on the way to the beach, clad in shorts and t-shirt I look at the guy opposite clad  in a ski-jacket and jeans.  I think we were both wondering who had got it wrong.