Vineyard Blues by Philip R. Craig Page B

left, walking out into the parking lot at the foot of Main Street, where, it being early, there were actually still some parking slots.
    Mike Smith’s pickup was parked in front of the yacht club, which meant that Mike was already at work there, doing whatever needed to be done to keep the place shipshape and functioning, and in the channel beyond the club an early traveling yawl was heading out to sea. Off to our right, among the other moored boats this side of the Reading Room, we could see the
Shirley J.,
our eighteen-foot Herrischoff
America
catboat, bobbing at her stake, her bow toward the small southwest wind that was slowly rising with the sun. Beyond her, in the still not too full harbor, other yachts, both sailboats and power, hung quiet and dewy at their moorings. In another few weeks, the harbor would be wall to wall with boats, but right now many of the moorings were empty.
    Above us the pale blue sky arched toward the horizon, and around us the village was slowly coming to life. Edgartown, with its flowers, trees, and green lawns, its narrow streets and white- or gray-shingled houses, and its docks, boats, and blue harbor, is the Vineyard’s loveliest town and not a place to make you think of smoking ruins or missing girls. Its great captains’ houses, its famous pagoda tree (brought to America in a flowerpot by a long-ago seaman), its church towers, its lighthouse, its shops, and its beaches are almost make-believe in their beauty, and make it easy to understand why tens of thousands of tourists show up every year.
    We too never tired of the village, although we stayed away from it as much as possible in the summer because of the crowds. In the early mornings, before many people were up and around, we’d sometimes come down to the coffee shop for breakfast, but once people got to stirring and the streets started filling up, we stayed at home or headed for the far beaches of Chappaquiddick, where the only tourists were fisherpeople or picnickers.
    Unless we wanted to go for a day sail.
    In that case we sneaked down Cooke Street to Collins Beach, where we kept our dinghy chained to the Reading Room dock to prevent it from being stolen by gentlemen yachtsmen who felt no moral inhibitions about taking other people’s dinghies if they needed to get out to their boats after late-night drinking. From Collins we would row out to the
Shirley J.,
trade dinghy for catboat on the mooring line, and catch the wind for a sail down harbor or out past the lighthouse into Nantucket Sound.
    Now, Zee, holding Diana’s hand, was eyeing the
Shirley J
. speculatively. “What do you think?” she asked. “It’s a nice wind.”
    â€œI think yes,” I said. “How about down to the far corner of Katama? We can do some clamming while we sop up the beneficial rays of the sun, and tomorrow I’ll fry up some of the catch and make a chowder with the rest.”
    Her white teeth flashed. “Let’s do it. Home to get some gear and food, then back again.”
    One of the nice things about living on an island is that you can go sailing and clamming whenever you feel like it. We felt like it pretty often.
    So it wasn’t long before I was rowing us out to the stake, and not much later that we were beating down harbor, against both wind and falling tide, under the warming sun. We passed the huge house owned by the Vineyard’s most famous car dealer, a guy who could fit our whole house in his living room, and then sailed by the lovely ketch
Wynjie
, admiring her as always as she swung at her mooring. In the lee of the hills to our right, we battled through the narrows into Katama Bay, caught the wind again, and headed on to the southeast corner of the bay. There I put our bow on the beach, dropped sail, unloaded family and gear, then pushed the boat back into the channel and dropped the hook.
    The water was warm and the clam flats had risen out of the falling tide. We got the