Commentary
Undue Pier Pressure
The American Academy of Pediatrics this week revealed that children and teens in the United States are spending an average of seven hours a day using television, computers, telephones and other electronic devices for entertainment.
On the same day this news came out, Island children Tate and Corbin Buchwald, Lauren DeCastro and Lachlan Cormie saw their names go on the board as daily winners in the Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby.
Saving Farm Pond
In the year the United States signed the Declaration of Independence, a tannery barn stood on the south shore of Farm Pond, which appears on a 1776 chart to have several distinct arms. These, like the tannery, have disappeared. Boats crossed into the waters for hundreds of years. Better yet, the pond’s history is full of herring, crabs and shellfish — softshell clams and oysters — in abundance, until the 1970s. But since that time, the pond has mostly been closed to shellfishing, and nitrogen is the killer.
Oak Bluffs recreational shellfishermen were out Saturday morning at Sengekontacket Pond, a happy day, because it was opening weekend for family scalloping. And while there were not a lot of scallops to find, for most it was reason enough to get out on the water in the bright autumn sunshine.
Editor’s Note: The following was published in Moshup’s Footsteps, a 2001 book of recollections and short essays by the late Helen Manning of Gay Head (Aquinnah). Cranberry Day, an annual celebration of the Wampanoag people, will be celebrated on Tuesday, Oct. 12. The piece appears here with permission.
Lyme Epidemic
The night sweats, the fever, the bullseye rash: the symptoms of Lyme disease are all too familiar to people on Martha’s Vineyard, where the disease is epidemic. Many Islanders are ready with prophylactic antibiotics when they find a pinhead-sized black arachnid clinging on their skin. What was not even recognized a generation ago has become the most common vector-borne (that is, spread by a host such as a mosquito, or in this case, a tick) disease in America.
A Generation on the Market