Commentary
I’ve been granted my wish for winter snow — albeit accompanied by temperatures of 10 to 12 degrees midweek. That was what the thermometer registered early Wednesday morning when I chose to walk. Even my adventurous, well-furred yellow cat declined to go outdoors as I set out, intelligently preferring the warmth of a bed to the frigid outdoors. On Tuesday, the day after the snow fell and temperatures were warmer, he had happily snuffled about in it. That day I had followed my usual route through the West Tisbury woods past Glimmerglass Pond.
Sometimes there is that one person who has vision and energy and steps forward to lead the way. And in the process, things get done. Gray Bryan was just such a person, and when he died three weeks ago, the Vineyard lost a great friend. Gray Mac W. Bryan Jr. died on Dec. 29 at the age of 85. He was ahead of his time, at least when it came to water quality protection on the Vineyard.
Glued to the television during the last quarter of 2012 as events unfolded, the senatorial and presidential debates and triumphs, Hurricane Sandy, the northeaster, and then the tragedy and long mourning in Newtown, Conn., I had a mid-course emotional reaction, a sadness which now seems rather trivial. At the height of Sandy, while watching the boardwalk at Atlantic City break up piece by piece and float out to sea, memories of childhood summers spent there visiting my grandmother floated in on a tide of nostalgia
As I started writing this, I found myself wondering how to make people understand something that they have already made up their minds about. It’s so easy to stereotype a person or a place. America isn’t all fast food and violence and Brazil isn’t just made up of favelas. For those who don’t know, a favela is a city within a city, a separate world. The very name is synonymous with violence and poverty, and yet when I had an opportunity to visit one I found that it wasn’t that simple.
The other day Cam Bergeron was standing in line at the grocery store on the Vineyard talking to a friend about Gosnold town business when he was interrupted by a man standing behind him. The soft-spoken gentleman asked if Cam was from Gosnold and Cam told him that he was. The tall, stately black man said that he had never met anyone from Gosnold but had wanted to for a long time. He needed an explanation for something that had happened to him near there. He then told this story.
Winter has always been my favorite season, so I was delighted when snow fell on Saturday just in time to welcome in the New Year. Admittedly, it wasn’t much of a snowfall, but enough to brighten the dead brown grass on fields and bejewel the trees for an hour or two that morning. It was wet snow, which meant soon there was ice underfoot, but fearing that with climate change there might not be another snowfall this winter, I went walking in it all the same. I took my usual, unadventurous route through the trees behind my house on Tiasquam Road in West Tisbury.