Martha’s Vineyard endured a precarious existence in those heady days of the young republic. As the founding fathers debated the philosophical underpinnings of liberal democracy in Philadelphia, entire British and Hessian fleets skulked just over our horizon (as reported by contemporary whalers). The vulnerable and largely defenseless Island was caught in limbo and few natives ventured to offend the Crown. As the war drew on, though, and these specters increasingly emerged in Vineyard harbors to exact their punishing toll, Islanders became patriots.
As the nearly 800 members of Vineyard Power — the Island’s nascent energy cooperative — vote on their future, at least 12.5 per cent of them need to actually show up in person to legally do so as a quorum. Members who attended Wednesday night’s meeting to vote on rather mundane bylaw changes were disappointed to find that there were not enough in attendance to do so.
One audience member blamed the poor attendance on the lack of urgency in the cooperative’s electronic bulletin.
Next Monday night Jemima James will treat the public to the kind of concert that regularly takes place in her own home. With two musically accomplished sons (her older is currently touring Europe with Norah Jones) and Ms. James an Island legend in her own right, she has become a matriarch of sorts for the Vineyard folk music scene. It is a scene that is surprisingly young and vibrant and a perfect match for the Musical Mondays summer series at the Featherstone Center for the Arts.
It was an evening of tartans and tuna tartare as the men in kilts invaded the highlands of Oak Bluffs, auctioning off their services at the Mediterranean Restaurant to benefit the high school’s drama program. All the traditional Celtic standards were on offer Thursday night, from Danny Boy to It’s Raining Men, as kilt-clad local teachers and community leaders put their services up for bidding to help send 16 students to Edinburgh to perform in the legendary Fringe Festival in August.
Islanders have long been acutely aware of the problems of health care access. Cut off from the larger medical community by Nantucket Sound, Vineyarders are twice as likely as other Massachusetts residents to be uninsured. On Friday afternoon Martha’s Vineyard Community Services held a panel discussion about the recent national health care bill, and how it would improve access as well as hit home.
In 1896 William Mayhew escorted a Boston Globe reporter to Noman’s Land to meet the Butlers, the Island’s lone, rather eccentric inhabitants. Mr. Butler, after explaining that their daughter was possessed by the spirit of a Boston milliner and would often race around the house in a fit of hat trimming, conveyed the desolation of the place, perhaps as idiomatically as possible: “We don’t git any news here at this time of year ’ceptin what comes on the wind, and it’s about two months now since we’ve heard from the American Continent.
