The elaborate project now unfolding to move four buildings on Richard and Jennifer Schifter’s property on a remote and windswept promontory at the extreme southeastern corner of Chappaquiddick, including an eight-thousand-square-foot home, is riveting. This very big project for a very small island has already cost the homeowners millions of dollars as they engage in a spellbinding race against nature to move their summer home and assorted other structures back from the edge of a rapidly eroding cliff.

I am sending you a picture of my 88th birthday. I just love the Gazette and I am usually one and a half hour late eating my dinner when I get it. I like John Alley’s West Tisbury news as he always has something in it during the 1940s.

As the Oak Bluffs beat reporter for the Gazette in 1982 and 1983, I found myself in many meetings prolonged by the persistent inquiries of Linda Marinelli. She usually criticized me for missing the point of her diatribes and she thought I was lazy for failing to investigate the East Chop Beach Club land mess, a story she assured me would win a Pulitzer Prize.

So new tick-borne virus, no tests available. So 50 deer per square mile, 100 square miles, that’s 5,000 deer on the Vineyard. The way I hear it, no deer equals no ticks. As I have said before, 5,000 — given certain changes in regulations — 75 per cent of that sounds like a doable number, very doable, over the course of several years.

Bloodthirsty? Not as thirsty as the ticks.

This letter addresses the new asphalt storage tower that has been erected beside the Goodale gravel pit. This pit is near the blinking light in Oak Bluffs. The tower was erected without a permit and violates zoning laws about height.

In light of the wasteful expense, energy consumption and environmental damage related to moving the Schifter house, necessitated by severe beach erosion at Wasque, I would like to suggest a relatively inexpensive alternative which could save the house as well as the beach.