Editorials
Ordinarily a rare sight on the Island, wood lilies are blooming in profusion this year in many places, including in the fields at Waskosim’s Rock Reservation, a Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank property.
The showy red-orange wood lily occurs in dry woods throughout southern New England; its entire range runs from southern Ontario to North Carolina and Kentucky. The bulbs were once gathered by native Americans for food.
Lines form at the Galley restaurant on warm summer evenings as people of all ages stand shoulder to shoulder for swordfish sandwiches and soft-serve ice cream cones. Around the corner at the Bite, the smell of fried clams hangs in the air. Down on the docks charter fishermen steam in from somewhere off Noman’s, their holds full of freshly caught striped bass and bluefish. And when the sun sinks into the western horizon, crowds form on the beach, as they have for so many years, to gaze across the water, look for the green flash and cheer the end of another day.
After a cold wet spring, a week of simmering weather on the mainland brought tourists out in force last week for the Fourth of July parade in Edgartown, and our charming little seaside village has rarely looked so good. That is, except for a certain house on a certain corner. Year after year, we’re asked by friends and visitors about the blighted property that occupies a most visible spot at the intersection of Main and Summer streets.
Early summer fog blew across the moors at Wasque Reservation last Saturday morning, a soft blanket of dampness settling over tiny, salt-blasted wildflowers. All was quiet. A short distance away was the place where fishermen once stood famously shoulder to shoulder, casting deep into the rip tides for blues. But few fishermen come to this spot anymore. What was once a wide sandy beach is now a sheer cliff in a land that has been under assault by a relentless ocean for the past six years.
The Gazette turns back the page in this week’s edition as it revisits the Harris Poll, a first-of-its-kind scientific public opinion survey the results of which were published by this newspaper twenty-five years ago. What follows is an editorial from July 4, 1987, the year the Harris Poll survey was taken.
It’s late June and few people are thinking about politics, even though a campaign to elect a new U.S. Senator from Massachusetts is in its final days.
A special state election will be held on Tuesday to fill the seat left vacant by John Kerry who left in January to take the job as U.S. Secretary of State.
The two candidates for this key Senate seat could not be more different.