In a small room on the second floor of West Tisbury town hall this week, a crowd of maybe one actual spectator gathered to hear the

Gone Scalloping

The water was so warm you almost didn’t need waders. The October sun glinted off the water in the pond and at Sengekontacket people congregated in small groups, heads bent over their peep sights, long dip nets tucked beneath their arms. Bert Combra had his signature unlit cigar stuck in his mouth. Who are these creatures, someone might say who had just landed here from the moon.

Living on the Edge

Every week brings new facts to support what our senses already know. The natural environment around us is changing, and the pace of change is quickening.

We listen as we walk and no longer hear the familiar whistle of the northern bobwhite. We gaze on the water and rarely see the quicksilver flash of schooling mackerel. Shore fishermen say the bass are increasingly scarce these days.

Great swathes of beaches and dunes we loved as children are washing away.

Autumn Days

Old Houses, Town Stewards

What next for Tea Lane Farm in Chilmark? A cloud of uncertainty now hangs over the project to restore the farmhouse after voters rejected a spending article for a second time at a special town meeting Monday. What was most troubling was not that voters turned down the request for $550,000, but that they did it so quietly. It was puzzling to see almost no discussion on the town meeting floor about this important project which has been actively on the drawing board for two years.

Saltwater Heroes

The idea came from an eight-year-old Chilmark boy. Three years ago young Jack Nixon was reading journalist David Kinney’s book The Big One, the hot new fishing read of the summer that year about the Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby. As Jack was reading, he gazed at a newspaper nearby and had a sudden thought: He wished that some of the men who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan could fish the derby.