Middle Road wears an Island necklace in shades of gray. Allow the car behind you to pass and drive just slowly enough to glimpse it hiding behind a blur of trees and vines, or follow after it as it lends definition to the landscape on either side of the road from West Tisbury to Chilmark.

Art is everywhere on Martha’s Vineyard. You can find it in the galleries and shops all over the Island. Its cousin, craft, is easy to find as well, but often it requires a trip outside. Take a drive up-Island, for example, where the weathered stone walls in Chilmark still serve as property boundaries and line the roads. Dry stone walls have existed for centuries, used in all corners of the world and constructed according to the same basic blueprint: fit stones of differing sizes together in a three-dimensional jigsaw.

Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, "Every wall is a door." His friend Henry David Thoreau noted that “Deep are the foundations of sincerity. Even stone walls have their foundation below the frost.” In either case, neither of them could be more right — about stone walls or sincerity.