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.

October’s Fine Wares

The harvest is payday. All the planting, tending and careful work turns time for picking, gleaning and eating. This is true on agricultural fields everywhere.

Little Doe’s Big Mac

It began with a dream while Jessie Little Doe Baird slept, in which people spoke to her in a tongue she could not understand. The last person to sound those words had breathed his last some hundred and seventy years earlier. But it became Mrs. Baird’s own dream to revive Wôpanâak, the language her Wampanoag ancestors spoke to express their ideas, emotions, knowledge, memories and values.

Library Jump Start

Edgartown prides itself on a long and well-earned reputation as a town of fiscal expediency with no infighting. But the story of the Edgartown Public Library expansion has been the exception to the rule in this town of white clapboard whaling captain’s homes, rose-covered fences and, in the middle of it all, the Carnegie building, a beautiful red brick structure that houses the town library on South Water street.

The Carnegie building needs renovation work and the library needs more space.

Profiles of Courage

They come looking for adventure, excitement, travel, challenge — the reasons that bring some fishermen to the Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby are the same reasons some soldiers give for joining the military. But for those men and women who have been at the adrenaline-drenched war front, it is a long and welcome way to the quiet waters of Martha’s Vineyard, where the battle is with the fish.

Fall Tilt

The autumnal equinox will take place this Wednesday, Sept. 22, at precisely 11:09 p.m. At that moment the tilt of the earth’s axis will be inclined neither away nor toward the sun. It is as if the planet will be suspended, the sun hovering directly above the equator, for just a moment before the seasonal change begins to roll in.