Major newspapers this week carried obituaries and tributes for author John Updike, who died Tuesday at the age of 76 of lung cancer. A former longtime summer visitor to Menemsha, Mr. Updike wrote the following essay about the Vineyard that was published in Peter Simon’s 1989 book, On the Vineyard II.

Last week after the snowfall, I went walking. I always try to beat the plows and the sanders, and for awhile I did. The only sounds were the squeaking snow beneath my boots and the wind soughing. It was just about dusk and a bird or two was uttering a goodnight chirp before tucking its head under its wing. The snow along West Tisbury’s Music street, gleaming under occasional street lights, seemed to me like that “ribbon of moonlight” in the Alfred Noyes’ poem The Highwayman.

Editor’s Note: The following letter was sent to Paul Diodati, director of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries. The letter was also signed by Chuck Hodgkinson, Emmett Carroll, Jennifer Clark, Jonathan Mayhew, Virginia Jones and Tom Osmers.

Regarding the request for consideration of a tending requirement on bottom tending or sink gill nets in Massachusetts state waters: All nets must come in with the boat and not be left at sea when the boat is at port.

I went to the inauguration thank s to my college friend, David Skaggs, a former Colorado congressman, now the chairman of the board of the newly established Office of Congressional Ethics. From Republicans who had other things to do, David accumulated enough tickets to invite not only his own family but a group of Wesleyan friends as well. Though I dislike crowds to the point where I leave that cannot-be-named-in-this-newspaper stadium in the Bronx at the end of the seventh inning, I knew I was being summoned by history.

Inauguration Day

A man

Stood in the sunlight

And spoke

And the crowd listened

and heard him.

He spoke of hope

and of hard things and

he spoke of darkness

and as he spoke the

multitude heard him.

The man stood in

the sunlight and spoke

of darkness and

those who had lived

through the darkness