Vacation blog

Just a skipping stone across Nantucket Sound from Hyannis Port, where Senator Edward Kennedy spent his final hours at the family compound, lies Martha’s Vineyard. The island is one link in the chain of a geological feature that shares a natural history with Cape Cod (as well as Nantucket, Block Island and Long Island), forming “The Outer Lands” of the eastern United States. It also shares a cultural history with all of southern New England, where Ted was more than a headline-maker, sea-lover and Red Sox fan. He was a neighbor.

Last Wednesday I was on vacation on Martha’s Vineyard when Ted Kennedy died. I had arrived between storms, enduring the drip of Bill while escaping the drench of Danny. Here, the harbormasters, watching mariners from other climes scramble to leave their moorings, cynically derided Bill as a “television hurricane” – in other words, a storm that is more hype and hot air than hurricane – even before it arrived. Bill finally showed up sloppily on a Saturday night while friends and I attended a Martin Sexton concert at Nectar’s (the long-ago Hot Tin Roof).

The rest of the week was mostly sunny and breezy and perfect, and the communal feeling took on a Before Ted/After Ted quality, as giddy exuberance gave way to reflective appreciation. We beached and swam at Lambert’s Cove (despite the pink jellyfish warnings) and Long Point (despite seals in the breakers, acting as shark-bait). We biked to Menemsha and Chappaquiddick (despite broken spokes, narrow shoulders and not enough grease on the chains). We took the On Time ferry, which is always on time, because it runs on island time, contingent on tides and moon phases, rendering clocks useless. We pub-crawled in Oak Bluffs and Edgartown, sampling local beers, sushi, crab cakes and calamari. We jogged in a road race along East Chop one morning and watched fireworks and wandered through the gingerbread cottages in Oak Bluffs another night. We shopped for souvenirs at Alley’s General Store in Chilmark and books for the beach at Bunch of Grapes in Vineyard Haven. We happened upon the presidential motorcade twice, once just after the First Family landed while we were coming off a 3-mile dirt road that winds to wild surf and another time on the way back from a road trip to the clay cliffs and clothing-optional beaches of Aquinnah. We feasted on mussels, oysters and lobsters at the Home Port on a misty Menemsha evening, watching state troopers on motorbikes return to their dockside quarters, still on Obama patrol. Most nights we listened to cicadas, slapped mosquitoes, watched lightning bugs and streaking stars, smelled both the ocean and skunks in the pines and ate farmstand corn and tomatoes with our grilled meals.

Later in the week, there were other scenes:
One day after Kennedy’s death, in the harbor at Vineyard Haven, along the beach next to the ferry dock where rows of wooden dinghies are roped together, someone had scratched words out of driftwood in the wet sand: “BYE, TED.”
Buoys painted red, white and blue bobbed in Nantucket Sound, bearing the message: “R.I.P. TED.”
And along Route 195 West just beyond Fall River and the Braga Bridge (and throughout the highways of Massachusetts), LED monitors deleted their road construction warnings to announce: “THANKS TED. FROM THE PEOPLE OF MASS.”

To some, especially outside of New England, Senator Kennedy was a lightning rod for liberalism, cronyism and scandal. Once when I was at a gym in the Florida Keys, I began talking with a Chicago fireman, who said, “You’re from Ted Kennedy country? How can you stand it?” I barked something back about the Daley family, but there’s no sense in arguing without context, so eventually we dropped the politics and picked up the barbells. Last week’s retrospective gave people a fuller understanding of Ted’s whole story, from the flaws, failures and foibles to his countless triumphs. In the end, Ted was many things, but most of all he was a Boston guy. A Cape Cod guy. A New Englander who cared about this place as much as we do.

While leaving the parking lot at the New Bedford ferry, I spoke to the toll-taker. “It’s a shame about Ted,” she said, “but you knew it was coming when he didn’t make it to Eunice’s funeral. At least he had one last good sail, and he’s with Eunice and his brothers now.”

This week’s question: How will you remember Ted Kennedy?