Quiet Island

The Island in winter is often a calm affair. But during this first week of March it has downshifted to a gear slower than walking, slower even than sitting on a stump and breathing in the landscape. It is as if the Island has been emptied of the last remnant of noise and rambunctiousness left.

It is winter break here on the Island. The schools are all closed.

Last Friday, reservations at the Steamship Authority were at their peak. Almost everyone with children was heading somewhere, anywhere, warm places for beach-going, cold places for skiing. For a community so global in scope and variety in the summer that returns to its small town roots each off-season, the web of connection runs deep.

The school system here, from kindergarten to senior high school, hosts approximately two thousand children. Dentists have children, so do doctors, haircutters, coffee servers, chefs, the list goes on. Most have vanished.

Even more offices and businesses are shuttered this week. The streets appear a bit grayer too without the children dressed in brightly colored hats and coats waiting at the end of driveways and pick-up spots for the yellow school buses to come chugging along.

The few places open are booming. A line rivaling summer standby snakes outside of Mocha Mott’s in Vineyard Haven. But there is no ill will, no rush to be onward and upward, to begin a summer vacation or head back home to work. Standing in line for a coffee with the remaining few still on-Island huddled together of a cold, wet morning can, oddly enough, be comforting.

In a world of increasing divisions and factions and where technology can make a person feel ever more anonymous, this near-complete shutdown of a community due to something so innocuous as winter school break feels wonderfully remarkable.