Summer White House 2010

Air Force One touched down at air station Cape Cod at Otis Air Force Base in Bourne yesterday, carrying its precious cargo: a vacationing American president. It was a nearly identical reprise of last summer’s scene: President Obama and a contingent that included his close friend and advisor Valerie Jarrett climbed into waiting helicopters and were whisked over to the Vineyard, where they landed at the Martha’s Vineyard Airport. First Lady Michelle Obama and their two daughters had landed an hour or so earlier in similar fashion. The arrival was closed to the press and public save the White House press pool, and when President Obama arrived, the Edgartown-West Tisbury Road was lined with well-wishers, waving and hoping to catch a glimpse as sport utility vans carrying the president and his entourage of Secret Service sped down the road. Final destination: Blue Heron Farm in Chilmark. So began the second consecutive Vineyard summer vacation for Barack Obama as a sitting president.

He has come to the Island before, of course, when he was an Illinois senator and even before that. He has friends on the Island, including many in Oak Bluffs whose roots as a summer enclave of upper middle class African Americans can be traced back to the early 1900s. Against that backdrop, much of the recent criticism of Mr. Obama in certain circles, around the Beltway and beyond, for choosing to come to the Island for his vacation seems a bit callow. Nevertheless the shrill cries have filled radio talk shows airwaves and spilled into the news and opinion pages of the print press. He should go to the Gulf! He should stay at Camp David! There is no shortage of Monday morning quarterbacks when it comes to Mr. Obama’s vacation itinerary; yesterday The Boston Globe published a color map of the president’s family vacation route this year, more testament to computer graphics than the substance of the matter.

Of course everything a president does is political, and that includes vacations, so people will have their say. But to his credit, Mr. Obama keeps his own counsel when it comes to time away with his family, and here he is again, on the Vineyard hoping to steal a few badly-needed days of down time. And if last year was a blueprint there will be few public outings by the first family, many rounds of golf by the president and plenty of quiet time out of the public eye at the twenty-eight-acre Chilmark farm that hugs a narrow cove of the Tisbury Great Pond. And Islanders will be welcoming and gracious, as they always are.

Still, not everything is the same. The Obamas are coming for a longer stay this year — ten days compared with a scant week last year cut short by an oncoming hurricane and the death of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. And the tight web of security woven around the president is notably tighter this year — at bucolic Blue Heron Farm, sophisticated, high-tech surveillance cameras peek out from among the deep beds of late summer black-eyed Susans and phlox, a stark reminder that the Island is not really so far removed from the hard realities of a dangerous and unstable world.

Meanwhile, summer is on the wane, melted away in a season of high heat and humidity not seen on the Island in many years. All in a rush it has been this year, and now suddenly the Agricultural Fair is under way and Illumination Night has come and gone. Blueberries and blackberries are picked and in Island home freezers or made up into jam, farm stands are stacked high with sweet corn and tomatoes, and geese have begun their noisy, restless flight over saltwater marshes. Brushed by the Milky Way, the August sky is streaked with a thousand stars. And tonight thousands of people will gather in Ocean Park as the annual Oak Bluffs firemen’s firework display explodes with sound and color over Nantucket Sound.

Summer’s swan song, punctuated by a visiting president. The Vineyard knows the melody well by now.