I hope the giant utility poles springing up around the Island are not a fait accompli. It seems we are going to have to bury our power lines at some point anyway, so waiting may just be a false economy. (Can you imagine the poles growing by that much again some day?)

Early summer fog blew across the moors at Wasque Reservation last Saturday morning, a soft blanket of dampness settling over tiny, salt-blasted wildflowers. All was quiet. A short distance away was the place where fishermen once stood famously shoulder to shoulder, casting deep into the rip tides for blues. But few fishermen come to this spot anymore. What was once a wide sandy beach is now a sheer cliff in a land that has been under assault by a relentless ocean for the past six years.

It’s just after five o’clock on a potholed stretch of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. I’m in the slow lane, moving along a concrete wall between the road and a back row of mostly dark apartments. Beyond those apartments are more apartments, a long line of giraffe-shaped cranes, and the very beginnings of a New York city morning. Almost exactly a decade after my first trip, I’m back on the road to Martha’s Vineyard. Things are the same and things are different.

From the Vineyard Gazette editions of July, 1968: The Vineyard sizzled yesterday as it seldom does. The maximum temperature recorded at Edgartown was 91, and of course the high where heat gathered in streets and other places was way above 91. This is really hot for the Island. Last summer 85 was the maximum. The all-time high for the Island is said to have been 96, reached on July 20, 1892. At that time there was a Weather Bureau station on the Island.