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Camp Nostalgia
As a traveler, my favorite trips are always the repeats. Do I dare head back to camp?
By Louise Rafkin
[07/20/99]

"Water" and other stories
A drowning, porcelain cows, a chubby sultan and more: Six original pieces turn travel on its dreamy ear.
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[07/17/99]

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They cast me as the white guy with the Indian lover. But my Indian lover found me untouchable.
By Jonah Blank
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Travel Advisor
Too much duty
Our expert offers advice on duty-free goods, allegedly smoke-free rooms, golfing packages and San Francisco lodging, revisited.
By Donald D. Groff
[07/15/99]

Book Bag
The art of survival and other stories
Two new books offer tips and tales from the wild wide world.
By Don George
[07/14/99]

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Within hours, though, it was impossible not to know what was going on. With the discovery of some luggage from the plane on Gay Head's Philbin Beach, the search parties and the TV crews closed in. Scraps of wreckage, reports said, were being found all along the southern shore, from off Gay Head light house in the west all the way to Edgartown Great Pond at the island's eastern end. The search planes, TV choppers and rescue boats seemed to encircle the whole island.

Of course, this sort of hubbub could happen anywhere, but the local reaction to it was pure Vineyard. Off island, in New York, Boston and Washington, the Kennedy plane crash was all anyone could talk about, but here there was nary a peep. West Tisbury summer resident, Nell Broley, who spends her winters in that well of gossip which is the nation's capital, commented, "It's bizarre, no one is mentioning it. You turn on the TV and see the mainland stations from Providence and Boston, and it's all they're running. But no one here is talking about it, beyond perhaps saying how sad it is."

One Harvard faculty member I spoke with was dining Saturday night with a national magazine editor, an acclaimed Washington novelist and a smattering of other Vineyard A-list types, and reported that the Kennedy crash was not even alluded to.

Martha's Vineyard cherishes its reputation as a place where the famous can congregate unmolested. Nobody bats an eyelid when Mike Wallace walks into Leslie's Drugstore on Main Street in Vineyard Haven, or Carly Simon cruises back and forth between her Midnight Garden shop and her fairyland Lambert's Cove estate. I've been picked up hitchhiking by James Taylor and seen Alan Dershowitz actually relaxing without a phalanx of TV crews and bright lights.

The Vineyard is about as nonplussed by celebrity as anywhere can possibly be in this era of the cult of celebrity. People take a quiet pride in their nonchalance. Tuesday's national papers were full of stories about the crash, but the feature story in the day's edition of the twice-weekly Vineyard Gazette was an in-depth report on the problems cormorants are wreaking on the island's fish and osprey populations.

This island is all about that unique Yankee brand of inverted-snobbism. Roll up in a stretch limousine and islanders will roll their eyes; putter up in a beat-up old station wagon and you'll be invited to the most select cocktail parties. Automotive magnate Ernie Boch is the butt of many a joke for his Gatsbyesque mansion on Edgartown Harbor, all lit up 365 days a year. The Hamptons this is not.

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