The summer traffic jam is past, but I’m not yet used to the novelty of finding parking in front of the places I want to go. Leslie’s, the Reliable, the Steamship Authority lot. Space! But I got through this season without losing a fender, my temper or my driver’s license; well, you can’t lose what’s gone, namely your temper. We would compare tie-ups, which town was the worst and what back roads to take around them; how there had to be a traffic cop at Five Corners a couple of times, and how you got held up at the bridge for 20 minutes one morning, and the bridge wasn’t even up.

One day I was stuck on Barnes Road in slow-moving traffic, when here came the Harley-Davidson riders toward me; I counted 23 of them, just off the boat I guess. A few cars and a truck passed, and then a half dozen more bikes. It certainly was diverting, like watching a parade, and they are the elephants. Powerful, elegant, and what could be called, comparatively speaking, quiet. The deep bubbling of their motors sounds like power and the potential for going an easy 100 miles per hour if the road is right; they are the Rolls Royces of bikes. The brat in the next street who roars down past your house at six in the morning is not in this league. I expect one costs about 25 times what we paid for my little Renault in the 1960s. (Shiny white, with manual shift and a sun roof, the love of my car life). Later, on the ferry, I struck up a conversation with Vineyarders Jack and Maggie, down on the freight deck with their Harley. The “25 times more” was just about right. Maybe a little low. We were docking, just as I was getting up my nerve to ask if I could climb on.

The Harley-Davidson riders do charity rides around the country. In Kentucky for instance, this past fall there was the Gaslight Thunder Rally, the Lonesome Dove Charity Ride, the Benefit Poker run, and Riding for a Cure, to benefit the American Cancer Society, to name just a few. They are often related to children’s issues, i.e. children’s hospitals, a juvenile diabetes research foundation, the Vineyard’s own Red Stocking Fund, and to benefit families with steep medical bills. A few years ago we watched a long parade of Harleys rumble down Main street in Louisville. It was Easter Sunday and on the back of each cycle were baskets of toys and candy, and rabbits and games and flowers, headed for the Children’s Hospital. You have to think about it, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, huge and shining, its chrome sparkling in the sun, growling along with a basket of flowers and baby chicks.

A few days ago I went to the P.A. Club to see the Harleys gather for the annual Red Stocking Fund ride here on the Island. It was 10 in the morning, and a crisp sunny day — more bikes than I could count and folks strolling about with their coffee and doughnuts. I saw a couple of people I knew, as one does here on the Island. “Where’ve you been, have you moved yet? Want some coffee?” Then I found I knew a couple of the guys in this milling crowd of black leather and gray beards and helmets, or they knew me. “Hey, Mrs. Hewett, what’s Ainslie up to?” and “Say hello to Rob for me, okay?” These were my kids’ classmates here in the 1970s. Sooner or later, you run into everybody you ever knew, somewhere.

The ride starts at the P.A. club, Santa Claus in a sidecar leading the parade, and goes around the Island with stops in Oak Bluffs and Edgartown, West Tisbury and Vineyard Haven. It is a heads-up for the Red Stocking Fund, which makes it possible for so many kids and their families here on the Vineyard to have a cheerful Christmas, and the Harleys help to gather in a lot of donations: toys, and gifts and money.

The Harley-Davidson Company began in 1903 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The Red Stocking Fund began on the Vineyard over 70 years ago. They come together here in 2010, as they have done for a number of years, to help make a happy Christmas for a lot of folks.

Gazette contributor Jeanne Hewett is a writer and fabric artist who lives in Edgartown.