Each time I pull out of the driveway on my bike or in my car,
I get to choose: the inland way or the water way?
I can ride out to the bluffs (threatened by erosion, no climbing!),
past grey-shingled summer cottages, past the stark-white
East Chop Lighthouse (once painted a chocolate brown),
past beach plums and sea grass buffeted by wind,
and look out across Vineyard Sound at the Cape (north) or
Europe (east), and who wouldn’t want to let the gaze escape
across an expanse of ever-changing (depending on light
absorption and phytoplankton) hues of ocean blue?

The inland way takes me past deBettencourt’s Service Station,
with its resident collection of old cars and buses and vans,
past the VFW post (what’s Chef Deon listed on the menu
board today? Island Conch Fritters or Curried Goat or
Prime Rib Tonight!), past the old state lobster hatchery
and the expanded hospital, and onto the drawbridge
spanning the entrance to the Lagoon, a more direct route
into town, a more work-a-day route with its tarmac and
traffic and road around the harbor where ferries surge
back and forth between the Vineyard and mainland.

Why, I wonder, as I make my choice of inland way or water way,
do I choose? Is it partly because I can or partly habit?
Is it a continuation of a tug-of-war with my long-dead mother
who preferred the inland way while I favored the water way?
Do I like it because I can think of Proust in Swann’s Way
and his family’s daily choice of direction for a walk:
the Méséglise way or the Guermantes way? If I slip
into a Proustian reverie (minding the oncoming cars,
the wobble of my bike), perception telescopes and I seem
to see from a long way off lights at sea, lights in town,

the revolving beams of lighthouses picking out the ever-
changing curve of coastline, land rising from the sea
and returning to the sea, an Island life emerging and eroding.
Like waves along the shore, we head toward land, reverse
direction and head back out to sea. “I like being out on the water,”
says the boatman who delivers the Island’s daily newspapers
and morning bagels from the mainland. He sets out from port
in the dark at 4 a.m on a steady course toward land (no choice),
bringing news from the rest of the world to those of us asleep
and dreaming of how to navigate life on land and sea.