New England summers. The north-east coastline sparkles with clusters of affluent, summer communities in well-kept, breezy seaside towns. Each built around a scenic lighthouse, perhaps, or its own marina. There is an abundance of white-spired churches, clapboard houses, clam bars, fish markets, ice cream parlours and Ye Olde sort of shoppes.
More mundane commerce is parked on the fringes; more modest life is housed in unremarkable inland towns.
Americans at leisure: cycling, jogging, walking, roller-blading. The roar of motorboats, the flap of sails. Bodies, if not overfed, are zealously exercised, carefully suncreamed, dressed casually in faded khaki or hot colours.
Children take flight on bikes, wearing safety helmets and back packs stuffed with sports equipment, carefree and busy. The beach beckons, crammed at weekends, quiet during the working week. Lifeguards appear at 9 a.m. and leave promptly at 5 p.m. By 6 p.m. you can smell the barbecues. By 9 p.m. all is quiet.
Yankees go home to houses embellished with decks, hammocks, tall windows, vast porches. You'll see the odd US flag blowing in the breeze.
Mr John Kennedy jnr enjoyed the very best of this culture, leaving an overheated New York City on Friday, only to return late on Sunday, or very early Monday. While his sister, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, savours the exclusive protection of East Hampton, Long Island, and is raising her children in New York fashion, Mr Kennedy jnr prefers his mother's house on the more rustic island of Martha's Vineyard, off Cape Cod - a 10-minute flight from Hyannis Port but a million miles away from the Kennedys' compounded demands and excesses.
On the Vineyard, Mr Kennedy's privacy was respected; he was clearly at ease here, often seen riding his bike or roller-blading with his wife, Carolyn.
They shopped locally and often went to one of the small movie houses or to private house parties with the island's smart crowd, mostly from Boston or New York.
Martha's Vineyard, and the neighbouring island of Nantucket, has always attracted an elite willing to ferry or fly the extra miles off shore. In winter, the Vineyard's population is 12,000, which soars to some 72,000 in summer, causing locals to complain that it is being rapidly "bought up".
Property prices are as wild as our own and few sites are expected to be available after 2005. Celebrities are building enormous houses which demand more water and power than the island can provide.
The Vineyard has a fascinating history and boasts a far more diverse population than you might expect of an island in the middle of the arch Anglo-Saxon enclave which is Cape Cod. Wealthy blacks started "summering" on the Vineyard as early as the 1920s; one of the beaches is known, even in these PC days, as the Inkwell. One of Jacqueline Onassis's last achievements was to edit the stories of Dorothy West, who chronicled the life and times of this community.
Religious life on the island is also varied. Methodists have a "camping ground" on the island - a circle of quaint, gingerbread houses, built on a site originally designed for canvas tents - where annual meetings are held. There is also a synagogue and three Catholic churches, among others.
The Fourth of July on the island is positively cinematic when all these traditions converge to celebrate their common citizenship.
As a magazine publisher, Mr Kennedy jnr found a wide circle of media colleagues here, including some of the best in the business: Walter Cronkite, the newscaster who famously announced to Americans in 1963 that JFK had been shot: humourist Art Buchwald; Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham; former New York Times columnist James Reston; news presenters Diane Sawyer and Mike Wallace.
Entertainment folk include Tom Hanks, Billy Joel and Carly Simon. The Vineyard has a magnetic attraction for powerful outsiders; President Clinton has returned several times to see his friend Vernon Jordan.
Little has changed here since the 1950s except the degree of wealth of the inhabitants. The success of the US economy is in clear view; on Martha's Vineyard few other social realities of the 1990s intrude. Think of a Norman Rockwell painting.
Surprisingly, however, the Vineyard is not unlike Ireland, with its stone walls, farmed fields and dramatic sea views. Today, conversation everywhere turns to the tragedy which continues to follow the Kennedys through successive generations, and anticipates the grief of the Bessette family, facing the loss of two daughters.
As the search closes in around Aquinnah Beach, just beside Jacqueline Onassis's former house, how terrible to think that this handsome and vigorous threesome was so close to a safe landing.