“There’s no way that was Michelle Obama.” I had to twist around so my boyfriend biking behind me could better hear the argument. The presidential vacation was the furthest thing from our minds when Tim Ashe and I left Cape Cod last Friday for a day trip to Martha’s Vineyard. We planned to cycle from Oak Bluffs to Gay Head, on the opposite end of the island — about 25 miles.

Halfway there, on a stretch of bike path surrounded on all sides by forest, we noticed an SUV coming toward us on the narrow ribbon of pavement. Lights on, New Hampshire plates. “Total idiots,” was our shared assessment. We had to navigate around the vehicle — carefully avoiding the side mirrors — to get past the rig. 

About five minutes later, we passed the first bikers we’d seen in a while: an African American family… normal looking, except for the single white guy trailing behind them. “Whee,” the mother exclaimed as they contemplated the steep downhill we were climbing. 

Once past them, I said to Tim, “God, everyone around here looks like Michelle Obama.” Tim quickly concluded that we had just seen the First Lady, Sasha and two bodyguards. 

I was so busy disagreeing with him that I didn’t even notice the oncoming entourage. Then I heard Tim intone, “Hi, Mr. President.”  

This article appears in Aug 25-31, 2010.

Paula Routly is publisher, editor-in-chief and cofounder of Seven Days. Her first glimpse of Vermont from the Adirondacks led her to Middlebury College for a closer look. After graduation, in 1983 she moved to Burlington and worked for the Flynn, the Vanguard Press, the Burlington Free Press and Vermont Times – in that order. In 1995, she and Pamela Polston started Seven Days newspaper. Routly ran the business and built the news side of the operation, which she edited for years. She has spearheaded...

27 replies on “Biking With Barack”

  1. “How much does the poorest of your five friends make per year?”Living on a pension of around $20k/yr I would guess. Another friend inherited a place that her parents bought for something like $7000 in the ’60’s so although I’d guess her income is in the mid-$30’s, it’s irrelevant since she didn’t pay anything for the place. LOTS of vacation homes are acquired that way.If you want a vacation home, you buy one and rent it out when you’re relatively young. By the time you retire, the mortgage is paid off by your renters and it was basically free. Or you use it for vacation and rent it out the rest of the time. There are plenty of places where you can do this and the property taxes won’t eat you alive. It’s not rocket science, there are millions of working class snowbirds in Florida every winter who can attest to that.

  2. I guess my definition doesn’t count. I’m not anyone.Good for you and your five friends “Jimmy.” How much does the poorest of your five friends make per year?

  3. “‘Many’ middle class people can’t afford a vacation.”That isn’t true either.”If you can afford a ‘vacation home’ you’re rich, not middle class.”Nor is this. I can think of five friends off the top of my head who own second places, and none of them is rich by anyone’s definition.

  4. “Who are you “Jimmy?” The truth police? Who cares? OK. “Many” middle class people can’t afford a vacation. Does that make you feel better? My point is a family has to be pretty well off to own a second home just to vacation in. Would you like to dispute that?”Wow. You state things that simply aren’t true, and then you go all nuts when someone questions you. WTF. Why don’t you take a breath and think for a minute or two before you type? How do you define “middle class”? It’s easy to say the middle class can’t take a vacation, if you personally define the “middle class” as people who can’t afford to take a vacation!!! WTF is wrong with you?

  5. Who are you “Jimmy?” The truth police? Who cares? OK. “Many” middle class people can’t afford a vacation. Does that make you feel better? My point is a family has to be pretty well off to own a second home just to vacation in. Would you like to dispute that?

  7. “…or at least the part of the middle class that can afford to have a vacation home.”Most middle class people can’t afford a vacation, let alone a second house to enjoy it in. If you can afford a “vacation home” you’re rich, not middle class.

  8. Martha’s Vineyard has some extremely wealthy sections, but much of it is middle class, or at least the part of the middle class that can afford to have a vacation home. Most of these homes have been in the family for a couple generations, dating back to when MV wasn’t nearly as pricey.Lots of non-wealthy people go there for day trips to weekend mini-vacays. Also, Oak Bluffs, right in the center of things in MV, is a middle-class African-American vacation community of long standing, i believe the first of its kind and still one of the very few places where black and white home owners and vacationers mix freely and comfortably.

  9. I meant long enough to get a sense of whether people were proud of financial success. I thought that was kind of obvious. Even in VT, I don’t think people are always ashamed of success. Hell, the author of this blog post wrote another post about how she bought an expensive house in Burlington, and how awesome it is to move from a cheap house to a nice one.

  10. Wow, you haven’t been outside Vermont much, have you?I’ve been to a bunch of places outside of Vermont Jimmy. A bunch of places. Udaipur for example. Venice twice. And Ensanda. Never to Martha’s Vineyard though.

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