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First, in all fairness, we need to ask ourselves: Do we behave this badly when we ourselves are travelers in faraway places? To answer honestly, we must sit alone in a dark room and go deep within. Finished? OK, I’ve just done my own agonizing reappraisal, and I’ve come up with this response, which I hope matches your own:
No. We are, we Vineyarders, by and large smarter than the small minority of exhaustively stupid tourists who arrive on our shores in the summer. How do we know this?
Well, if we were this clueless, how could we ever manage to put up rosehip jam in the fall, and look after our neighbors’ pipes and call 911 if we see icicles, and cope with the ferry schedule, and keep body and soul together in the poorest, drunkest principality of Massachusetts? Satisfied that we’re basically geniuses? OK, let’s get cracking:
With the help of some of my Facebook friends, I’ve come up with categories of, to use the Latin, stupiditus turistus, ending with a Vineyard doozy of a tourist encounter so dazzlingly dumb it has entered the realm of urban legend (and which I’ve tracked down to its original eyewitness).
Let’s start, however, with the most famous enduring idiocy of all: The Chappaquiddick Question, as in Where is The Dike Bridge or, as one local wag calls it, The Kennedy Car Wash (I know; ouch):
Taxi cab owner, Adam Wilson, once had a passenger comment, “I want to go to Chappaquiddick – you know, to the place where he killed her.”
I do believe interest in this site has waned. It’s even possible the younger generation, apart from those raised on MV, have never heard about that fateful night back in July of 1969, when young Ted Kennedy, with a young lady named Mary Jo -- well, you know the rest. (I’m addressing an extremely smart and knowledgeable crowd here.)
In any event, down through the years, scores of tourists have asked to be pointed to the location of this fiasco. First of all, they need to be apprised that they must journey to a second, smaller island, to whit Chappaquiddick which, eyed from Edgartown, has often been mistaken for Nantucket, which leads to another stoopid turist issue which is:
Some of these people have no idea where they are:
Nancy Rogers confided, “My dad used to work on the boat and people would drive off and ask how to get to Martha’s Vineyard.”
Alana Pagnotti said, “A lady pulled up to me on Main Street in Vineyard Haven and asked me how to get to Hyannisport.”
It’s not atypical, by the way, for vacationers to be totally flummoxed about where they happen to be and what they’re seeing.
Holly Alaimo reflected that during her days as a concierge at a Boston hotel, any number of guests asked for directions to the Statue of Liberty.
Did she suggest, “Rent a car, get on I-95 and drive for five-and-half hours”? No, but she was tempted.
The rascally Warren Gosson, when he spies people pouring over a map, likes to observe, “You cannot get there from here.” After that, he provides authentic directions.
This begs the question of people not quite getting what it means to be positioned on an island. Some people seem to think we’re adrift in the Atlantic, as if our soil sits atop an extremely large floatation device.
Karen Coffey wrote, “I once had a tourist with a thick New Jersey accent ask ‘Is this island surrounded on all four sides by water?’ I thought it was a trick question.”
Carole Flanders wrote, “My mother used to ask if the island was going to sink and spent most of the time in the house praying.”
Hey! It’s possible our rock still floats thanks to Carole’s mom’s request for divine intervention!
A random sampling of mindless queries: Ted Box, boat-builder and furniture-maker, wrote, “When I was doing my driftwood furniture, you’d be surprised how many people asked me if I found my pieces that way on the beach. I, of course, informed them of the difficulty of finding them with drawers still in place.”
Rebecca Gilbert of Native Earth Teaching Farm revealed she established her institute because she was tired of explaining the difference between a chicken and a duck while showing her animals at the Ag Fair.
Paulette Hayes has had guests stop to take pictures of cows – apparently they have never seen them in the “wild.”
And Barbara Beichek reminds us of that perennial question: “Can you buy food here?” As if this is the frontier and the Wells Fargo Wagon has come and done gone.
Two other big areas of cerebral challenge:
1). People who remark upon Oaks Bluff, to which Susan Dawson contributed the following episode: “I have a T-shirt that says ‘Oaks Bluff’ and once, walking down Circuit, a woman whacked her husband upside the head and said, ‘See? I told you it was Oaks Bluff!’”
2). Any question pertaining to the Black Dog tends to sound idiotic.
Tim DeFelice was once queried by a woman, “You know that T-shirt with the black dog on it? Where do you get those?”
Tourists on the snuffle for Black Dog gear simply strike us as, well, sub-par on the intelligence scale. When I shared my first bookstore space with the Black Dog General Store in Oak Bluffs, parents often parked their kids in my shop while they trolled for sweatshirts, key-rings, coffee mugs and stuffed black puppies next door. When they returned to collect their brood and the kids held up reading material, the ‘rents would declare, horrified, “We’re not buying you a BOOK!”
And let’s not forget the visitors who mistake us for Plymouth Plantation.
Ms. Beichek wrote about her pet peeve of folks who wander down the middle of Circuit Avenue, “not the sidewalk, because, after all, this is an amusement park, not a town of real people. We’re all getting paid to look like we live here.”
Similarly, Sissy Biggers, whom I recently encountered in Oaks Bluff, told me that one time when she and some guests sat out on her front porch overlooking Ocean Park, a group of Chinese visitors stood and stared at them as if they were on situ to perform.
Sissy said, “I belted out a rendition of 'Me And Bobbie Magee.'”
And finally we come to the urban legend of all stoopid turist trix, and the attribution goes to our beloved Betty Burton: “A woman asked me if she could get in front of me at Cronig’s. 'I’m on vacation,’ she explained.
Betty blurted out, 'Yes, well, I’m on my lunch hour.’”
Betty admits that she had the usual after-burn wish that she'd come up with a wittier riposte.
Any ideas? Please weigh in. You never know when this could happen to you, and you want to be ready. Winner gets a Black Dog T-shirt.
