Commentary
Last Sunday, while chasing waves in the Atlantic Ocean at Philbin Beach with my 11-year old granddaughter, I noticed the surf, which had been crashing in, had suddenly disappeared. The ocean I was standing in up to my waist seemed eerily calm. The sandy shore behind me lay perfectly flat, like a sheet of paper. How peculiar.
I spent the first 12 years of my medical career taking care of poor people in a teaching hospital in Providence, R.I. In the early 1990s health care was rather different than it is now. If a person had private insurance, they generally had ready access to both primary care doctors and specialists. For my clinic patients, it was another matter. Many had no insurance or Medicaid, were disabled, homeless, poorly educated or didn’t speak English. Working there required tremendous patience and a level of dogged determination that I did not realize I possessed.
A generation ago, Angela Lansbury spent 264 television episodes as Jessica Fletcher, an Agatha Christie-style detective who solved murders for the most part right in her own backyard, the sleepy rural town of Cabot Cove, Me. Two observations occurred to me: why would anyone hang out with Jessica once you realize that wherever she is someone gets murdered? And what’s the matter with Cabot Cove, a little fishing village that has a violent crime wave commensurate with Chicago?
When the Allen Farm’s 165-foot meteorological tower went up a couple of years ago in front of our Chilmark property, I wondered what the future would be like if a wind turbine were built. Our Vineyard history, especially the exquisite beauty and peace of our hilltop home, has been precious to us. My husband’s ancestor, John Eddy, first came to the Vineyard in 1660 as a blacksmith. More recently, my husband has enjoyed the company of five generations of his family here.
My Vineyard hikes take me to many beautiful sites. I enjoy seeing the diversity of landscapes, many influenced by their agricultural past. A frequent plant I encounter in abandoned farm fields is northern bayberry (Myrica pensylvanica, now Morella pensylvanica). Quick to reclaim open pastureland, the shrubs have the unique ability to fix their own atmospheric nitrogen through specialized structures called root nodules. The nodules contain the nitrogen-fixing bacteria Frankia. This mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship allows bayberry to grow in soils with low fertility.
Leave your credit cards and your worries behind and hop a ferry over to Cuttyhunk, our little sister to the west. It’s an undiscovered island filled with 400 friendly summer people, beautiful wooded walks, welcoming beaches and a sense of peace and tranquility reminiscent of life in the 1950s. Or even earlier.