What Martha’s Vineyard do you live on?

The question isn’t as strange as it might seem. All the road maps and atlases agree that there’s just one Martha’s Vineyard, but none of us live on those maps. I’m talking about the map that lives in each of our heads. Call it our psychic map. This is the map we navigate by every day. No two psychic maps are exactly the same, though they overlap at many points. The Steamship Authority dock in Vineyard Haven is on just about every Vineyarder’s map, but no two of our Martha’s Vineyards are exactly the same.

On my Martha’s Vineyard, State Road ends right around my friend Cris’s house, across from Rainbow Farm. Back when the earth was flat, some maps warned “Here be dragons” where terra cognita came to an end. On my map of Martha’s Vineyard, that’s where residents of Chilmark and Aquinnah live. My map also starts to dissolve about half a mile east of Barnes Road. It snaps into existence when I have to go to the dentist or to Edgartown Books, then it recedes back into the mist. At the Edgartown post office, I rarely recognize anybody either in line or at the counter. That’s how I know I’ve crossed the border into another country.

Where do you do most of your grocery shopping? When I go to Reliable Market or up-Island Cronig’s, I recognize the cashiers and many of the customers. When I go to either Stop & Shop, I can’t find anything and I don’t know anyone. Try going to a supermarket or a post office that you rarely visit. See if you don’t feel at least a little out of place, not quite at home.

When a place doesn’t exist on your psychic map, going there can be downright scary. Your imagination fills the void with dragons. Heading into my first winter on Martha’s Vineyard, I had the psychic map of a summer person. On a summer map, Martha’s Vineyard winks out of existence around Columbus Day. By the end of September almost everyone I knew had left. I knew exactly one person who lived here year-round. What was I doing here?

Fortunately some people are very good at expanding the psychic maps of others, and within a few months I had met one of them: the late Mary Payne, founder and artistic director of Island Theatre Workshop. Mary was a pint-sized dynamo who rarely took no for an answer. She thought theatre should be on everyone’s psychic map, whether they knew it or not. I didn’t need much persuading. I didn’t know anybody on Martha’s Vineyard and I needed a life. Come by Katharine Cornell Theatre, said Mary, and we’ll put you to work.

Well. I knew where Katharine Cornell Theatre was, but it takes more than that to put a place on one’s psychic map. Being reasonably rational, I knew no dragons lurked on the other side of the door, or alligators or snapping turtles either. But I couldn’t make myself go in. I imagined a huge, dimly lit space, with ceiling so high and walls so far away I couldn’t see them. In the far distant corner, tiny people would be going about their business, oblivious to my presence. Could I imagine crossing that endless floor and introducing myself to strangers? I could not.

Finally, after at least a week of walking past the theatre and probably some nagging by Mary, I mustered the nerve to open the door and walk in.

Katharine Cornell Theatre looked nothing like the gloomy warehouse of my fears. It was bathed in light from the several tall windows on two facing walls, and not all that much larger than some living rooms I’d been in. Mary introduced me to the people who were painting scenery and testing lights. I was put to work.

Walking through that door more than doubled the size of my Martha’s Vineyard. Theatre people became my first Island family, the ones I hung out with and learned the ropes from, the ones who invited me to join them for holidays and special events. My involvement in theatre also expanded my range as a writer, enriching my relationship to the written and spoken word.

More than a dozen years after I opened that door, I was startled to hear a native Islander, a horsewoman, ask where Katharine Cornell Theatre was. This mystified me — until I’d been involved with horses myself for a year or so. Horsekeeping is like theatre in that it tends to take over your life. If you work full-time, neither leaves much time for other recreation. As a result, horse people and theatre people often live on such different Martha’s Vineyards that they don’t run into each other very often, or know each other very well.

People often talk about Martha’s Vineyard as if it’s one big community. It isn’t. Martha’s Vineyard is made up of many overlapping communities that exist in one geographical space. Our psychic maps are so different. A place familiar to me may barely exist for you. A venue that you find welcoming may turn a cold shoulder to me. The Island’s real fault lines don’t lie between the six towns but between the maps we have in our heads.

Susanna J. Sturgis is the author of The Mud of the Place, a novel about Martha’s Vineyard. She lives in West Tisbury.