Opinion
WATER’S FINE
Editors, Vineyard Gazette:
So I hear the waters that I have gone swimming in every summer since I was an infant (Truman was president) are deemed “maybe polluted.” Ho hum. Not the first in a long line of indignities visited upon what I revere as the Galilee of bathing beaches. Here is a timeline of sorts:
From Gazette summer editions:
It’s one of those odd things that the northeast wind which, most of the year, produces three days — at least — of rain and wind, usually raw and bleak, can produce in late summer and early fall the beautiful phenomenon known as a dry northeaster. A northwest day is pretty fine, but the clear northeast day is finest of all, for its air makes the heart lilt and sing.
Murky Waters
It’s been a delicious hot spell, the days sunny but not excessively so and the nights cool. Perfect Island weather. Perfect for summer. Perfect for swimming.
Vineyard residents have a unique op portunity next Thursday, July 28, to assess the state of civil liberties and justice in America as we approach the 10th anniversary of 9/11.
Two remarkable speakers — retiring federal judge Nancy Gertner, and national ACLU legal director Steve Shapiro — will discuss The Pursuit of Justice: Perspectives on Major Civil Liberties Issues from Two Sides of the Bench, as part of the ACLU of Massachusetts Roger Baldwin Summer Series at the Chilmark Community Center at 7 p.m.
Ometepe is as unlikely a place as you could ever imagine to catch a glimpse of the future. Although unique in the world, an island composed of two volcanoes in the midst of Nicaragua’s freshwater Lake Cocibolca, it is mostly a quiet backwater, both off the grid and the beaten path as well.
Some years back, my wife and I rented a tiny little cottage in Gay Head on Martha’s Vineyard. It was called the Binnacle. According to a story we heard, the Binnacle had been built with a keel for a foundation and a hurricane had floated it to where it was now, on the road from Lobsterville toward Red Beach.
Instead of moving it back to its original site, the Binnacle’s owner, Dorothy Scoville, had simply bought the lot where it had landed.