Commentary
As I write this from afar, I can picture the long tables in the Chilmark Community Center, the town clerk’s volunteers overseeing voter check-in and the old oak box where voters deposit their ballots. It’s a long way from where I sit now, in a bustling, fluorescent-lit campaign office in Seattle where we are working to defend the state’s marriage equality law on the Washington ballot this November.
My absentee ballot has already been stamped and mailed.
Every once in a while, a trap door opens and another world of knowledge and experience disappears forever. Or almost. We’ve all seen it happen with the passing of a friend — particularly those friends who have been so curious about their surroundings that they unearthed wonders and made their patch of ground seem as exotic as any place on earth. The Vineyard just lost such a man, Preston Gray Harris, who many of us knew as P.G.
For a limited time, the Vineyard Gazette is opening up access to all parts of our new multiplatform website to subscribers and visitors alike so yo
When I can’t sleep I take long, late-night walks, mostly in the winter when I’ve got the place to myself. On quiet nights I usually head down Broadway past all the unlighted sleeping houses of people I know now and those I used to know, to the pier where the boats are sleeping, too. I stand perfectly still, listening to the sound of the faint gentle kiss of piling and rail, the strain of the stretching line, the barely audible lullaby of breeze through rigging.
It has finally happened. The old-fashioned bridge over the Mill River Ford in North Tisbury is no longer an old-fashioned bridge. Until three weeks ago, it was as close in character as the Island ever has had to a covered bridge. It’s not covered of course, but through the years it has retained wooden railings to keep cars crossing from falling into the brook below.
For centuries, probably millennia, the small, oily fish known as Atlantic menhaden have been the protein-filled food of choice for striped bass and many other large species in our waters. Fishermen call them pogeys or bunker, often using them as bait to entice stripers to their lines. Menhaden were once so abundant that early Americans spoke of them swimming in schools upwards of 25 miles long.