By PETER BRANNEN
As the charred remains of the drive-on dock at Menemsha stand as a reminder of last Monday’s fire, the unselfish actions of a few individuals during the frenzied confusion of the blaze have come into sharp relief.
One such individual is Menemsha bass fisherman Casey Elliston, who salvaged a number of boats from the inferno as flames raced down the ill-fated pier. For his part, Mr. Elliston refuses to acknowledge that he did anything special the day Menemsha burned.
When Boston College Law School professor Ray Madoff set out to write a book about the legal rights of the dead in America, she only intended to include one chapter on the law itself, devoting the rest of the book to a philosophical, psychological, sociological and even religious interpretation. But as she began prying into the more remote and cobwebbed corners of the legal system, she stumbled upon a bizarre legal world of grave robbing, posthumous procreation and cryogenic preservation that was too rich a topic; in the end, she devoted the entire book to this world.
It’s been an exhausting week for Chilmark fire chief David Norton, but during a brief respite at the station yesterday, he took a few minutes to look back on the events, Monday afternoon that are now well recorded in newspapers and cameras around the Island and beyond.
At 10 o’clock in the evening on June 30, Theodore (Tod) and Kate Sedgwick had just turned out the lights of their shoreside colonial summer home in Vineyard Haven, ready to settle into their first night of vacation when the phone rang with an unusual insistence.
“I said don’t answer it, we know where our children are,” recalled Mrs. Sedgwick.
On the phone was Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia calling Mr. Sedgwick to inform him that he had been confirmed as the United States Ambassador to Slovakia.
This Saturday marks the fifth annual Art Stroll in the ever-expanding arts district in Oak Bluffs. The evening promises to be as eclectic as the tenants of the district, with traditional seascapes displayed adjacent to steampunk mechanical dinosaurs. The diversity of work represents the growing vocabulary of art on the Vineyard, which has found its fullest expression in this bohemian corner tucked away on Dukes County avenue.
For Polly Hill Arboretum director Tim Boland, the swift demise of his oak forest that spans the arboretum property has been literally startling. “I’d be outside in the collections this winter and I would just hear wha-BAM!” The trees, ravaged by a plague of caterpillar infestation that lasted just over three years from 2005 to 2008, are now hollowed and rotting, teetering toward collapse. “I used to think these trees would stand for the next 10 years or so. They won’t. Within the next three to four years they’ll all be down,” Mr.
