The Port Hunter restaurant in Edgartown has been booked for 2 weeks and on arrival in Edgartown we come across it quite quickly as it is located on the relatively small high street. Initial assessment suggests that it’ll do nicely as the venue for my birthday supper the following day.
We check into the Christopher Hotel and immediately feel at home, it is clean, light and nicely designed and there is hot and cold running tea and coffee. After a nap and a shower I quickly realise that I’ve left all my boxer shorts in the boot of the rental car back in Cape Cod all I have are the pants that I’m wearing. I’ve heard of people turning their knickers inside out or wearing the same pair for 3 days as on I’m a Celebrity, Get me Out of Here, but that prospect brings a little lump of sick to the back of my throat. Liam offers two further options: wash the pants with the washing egg each night and hope that they dry or alternatively he has brought extra pants and after a rummage through his bag brings up two spare pairs of dolls house sized pants. Well ‘people in Martha’s Vineyard must surely buy pants’ I declare hopefully.
I decide that I’m not going to wear the same pair for 3 days and certainly not for my birthday dinner at the Port Hunter.
I explain to myself that having sat in the car and on the ferry for most of the day it is fine to put back on my previous pants after my shower and we head off into Edgartown for supper and for a game of pant hunters.
There is a broad selection of souvenir and t-shirt shops in Edgartown, from the reasonably inexpensive $20 t-shirt to the unusually pricey Vineyard Vines offer of a $60 t-shirt, in each place I enquire after their men’s pants selection but to no avail, plus as it is after 8pm a number of shops have already shut. We decide to sit at the bar in Port Hunter and have a pre-dinner cocktail, I slide myself carefully onto a bar stool and order a spicy marguerita, could that be a mistake?
We then head over the road to The Covington and ask if we can dine there as we don’t have a reservation and are offered two seats at the bar. A very bohemian young bar-woman immediately greets us with a chatty friendly manner which is unusual to find here where generally the bar people and waiters are a little sullen and unavailable. Her name is Caitlin, she has short hair and trendy big framed spectacles, the Annie Lennox look, she tells us about her wife, growing up in Martha’s Vineyard and her time trying to buy a house on the mainland.
Her fellow bar person is Trevor who is equally friendly and bohemian, possibly has a husband or spends a lot of time on the computer. They serve us our drinks whilst simultaneously explaining the menu in exquisite detail, it seems like the large clams, sourdough bread and kale salad would do for starters and the mushroom ragu and gnocchi for mains. As usual we had happened upon the best restaurant for the eve of my birthday.
The following day we head straight back out and even though it is 9.50am and therefore 10minutes before the shops open we try our luck at some of the shops that are open, I can’t be the only person on the island to have forgotten my pants? There are none to be found even in the sporty adventure store called Backwater Trading that sells the usual assortment of malaria tablets, campsite washing machines and pen knives with an attachment for opening a bottle of champagne.
While we wait for some of the other shops to open we go into the bookshop and peruse the shelves wondering whether Sarah Huber’s book has come out early, we end up standing in front of the section entirely devoted to Jaws, “was that filmed here then’ I ask Liam, before he can answer a woman seems to pop out of a bookshelf as though she had been hiding, waiting there like a spider realising someone had stepped onto his web, ‘it was filmed here’ she exclaims ‘and I am in the film, I was an extra on the beach scene’ she then spends half an hour talking us through her role, how she could name everyone in the film and how the Edgartown town Hall was renamed the Amity Town Hall for the film. We manage to get away from her before she can move onto the filming of Jaws 2,3 and 4.
We step back out onto the street and into the nextdoor store called Lululemon that happen to have a 3 pack of boxer shorts for $34. Never have I been so grateful for finding fresh underwear.
Next stop the bike rental storr next to the hotel where we hire 2 bikes and head off for a 27 kilometer cycle around the island, then a quick nap before dinner at the Port Hunter. A birthday spent pant hunting, with Port Hunter and Jaw dropping.
Mark, Martha’s Vineyard, MA, USA, 18 June 2022