Martha's Vineyard

(This column was published in the April 6, 1992 Buffalo News.)

   About 20,000 years ago a glacier pushed down over all of New England. It 
plowed up and pulverized soil and rock, depositing that debris at its 
southernmost edge in a long east-west hill called a terminal moraine. That 
hill stretched from where New York City is now located, along Long Island and 
out through that island's south arm, continuing eastward in a jagged line that 
passed a few miles south of present Cape Cod.

   As this and other huge glaciers retreated, their two mile thick ice masses 
melted causing ocean levels to rise more than 100 feet and cover most of the 
eastern end of this moraine. Today the only hill crests remaining above water 
there are Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket.

   My friend Herb Foster and I spent a spring like day and a half on Martha's 
Vineyard in mid-March, just before the recent blast of snow and cold moved in 
from the west. This was my first visit and we could not have picked a better 
time. The island's population is now about 10,000; in a few weeks it will be 
ten times that number. Having suffered Cape Cod's summertime miles long 
traffic jams, I found the Vineyard at this time of year a special delight.

   To cross Vineyard Sound we took the 40 minute ferry ride from Wood's Hole 
to Vineyard Haven. Bracing the icy northeast wind on deck, we were rewarded by 
seeing a few loons still in their gray and white winter plumage, some red-
breasted mergansers, the dapper males as always needing to run a comb through 
their unruly topknots, and several flights of common eiders. Female eiders 
look like big chunky black ducks, but males show much white in their head, 
breast and back. When they fly, they appear white forward, black aft.

   We had, of course, too little time. On our first afternoon we spent several 
hours in the north shore Audubon sanctuary at Felix Neck and the next morning 
I hiked alone for two hours along the south coast barrier beach leading to 
Wasque Point on Chappaquiddick. At neither place was there another soul!

   These were, of course, very different areas, the sanctuary mostly wooded 
with beech, red maple, several oaks, sassafras and pitch pine predominant. The 
trees were only about half the height of the same or similar species in the 
Buffalo area. There are a number of reasons for this: earlier clear cutting, 
the poor sandy soil and hurricanes, one of which wreaked havoc on the island 
just last fall.

   Following good New England tradition, residents assign their own unique 
names. I looked for the tupelo tree, here called beetlebung, and listened for 
the spring peeper -- pinkletink is its delightful local name -- but could find 
neither.

   The desolate character of the barrier beach of Norton Point that separates 
Katama Bay from the open ocean I found equally pleasing. What surprised me was 
that it shared with Felix Neck an attraction that I had never investigated 
closely before: seashells.

   At Felix Neck seashells had been driven all the way across Sengekontacket 
Pond from Nantucket Sound to lie high in the bushes back from the water's 
edge. On the barrier beach they were in the detritus left at high watermark.

   Both areas provided rich treasures, everything from tiny bay scallops to 
channeled whelks, the big curled shells in which you can indeed hear the ocean 
roar. My favorites were the inch long slipper or boat shells, aptly named 
because each half shell has an interior shelf like a boat seat or the top of a 
floppy slipper.

   Here too were moon shells, seven inch surf clams and heavy oysters, cast 
off horseshoe and spider crab shells, a skate's egg case and even a zebra 
mussel look-alike that turned out to be a small blue mussel.

   I know better now the beachcomber's attraction to the seashore.