Opinion
NO PREFERENCE
Editors, Vineyard Gazette:
I have to question the math and management of the Steamship Authority’s Islander Preferred reservations system. I write this Sunday morning after telephonically punching my way through to the phone reservation center and being told that all of tomorrow (Monday) is sold out — six minutes after they began answering phones at 8 a.m.
The crowd looked frighteningly large. I had butterflies in my stomach and my palms were sticky as I searched for my mother in the stands. My previous experience with a skillet had been stationary and involved eggs, not throwing, but I had impulsively announced in an editorial meeting at the Gazette (where I am working as an intern this summer) that I would enter the 14th Annual Women’s Skillet Throw at the Agricultural Fair. What had I been thinking? But there was no time to back out.
Back in the middle of the last decade, a round about was proposed for the Island’s key blinker intersection, where Barnes Road crosses the Edgartown–Vineyard Haven Road. The discussion faded away. I thought the proposal had done likewise.
This past April the roundabout came roaring out of hibernation when the state Department of Transportation (MassDOT) held what is called a 25 per cent design public hearing. While hibernating, the roundabout proposal had magically transformed itself into a done deal. I was shocked.
The Vineyard will be a very different place in 100 years, notes Island naturalist Gus Ben David. The changes in his lifetime have been “phenomenal,” he says, especially the explosion in population and degradation of natural habitat.
Hurricane Watch
Will Irene, lumbering up the coast earlier this week, lose her gumption and shrink from landfall as Earl did last Labor day weekend? Or will she gain momentum and pack a wallop the way Bob did two decades ago? As we go to press, the first hurricane to threaten New England this season seemed likely to spare the Vineyard a major disaster. But despite big advances in hurricane tracking over the past 20 years, weather patterns remain just capricious enough to keep the skeptics among us skeptical and the planners preparing for the worst.
During the last presidential campaign, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye had the daunting task of introducing Caroline Kennedy at an Obama campaign event in San Antonio, Texas. The honor was made particularly formidable because Ms. Kennedy’s plane had been significantly delayed.