James Joyce once declared that if Dublin were ever destroyed, it could be wholly reconstructed from the text of his famously impenetrable opus, Ulysses. On Wednesday night, or Bloomsday night rather, the Dublin of Joyce was thus faithfully restored in Vineyard Haven.
It has been an unusual past 100 years for Noman’s Land, that half-forgotten rock off Chilmark and Aquinnah that has occasionally reasserted its presence to Vineyarders with wafting smoke clouds and distant bomb blasts. Shrouded in mystery and explosives, it has seen rumrunners, pirates, hurricanes, and even an accidental internecine gun battle between the Coast Guard and the Navy in 1967.
, The Blob! It’s revolting! It’s oozing! It’s sweeping the Island! Will no cedar tree be spared?
“It looks like something you’d see in a horror movie,” says Polly Hill Arboretum outreach coordinator Karin Stanley referring to Cedar-Apple Rust, a ridiculous looking tree fungus that has seen an unusually robust late spring and early summer here on the Vineyard.
As the prevailing summer winds begin to blow, bringing with them an influx of seasonal residents, Vineyard Power, the Island’s nascent energy cooperative, begins its first seasonal membership campaign, flooding local airwaves with advertisements and fanning out across the Island in a series of informal public presentations and question-and-answer sessions. One such presentation was held last Thursday at the Grange Hall in West Tisbury.
In January, while Vineyarders endured battering sleet storms and mid-winter cabin fever, at least one of the Island’s piping plovers was enjoying a respite from the New England doldrums in the Caribbean. After a two-decade hiatus in researching plover migration, scientists from the Canadian Wildlife Service again started a tagging effort this winter in the Bahamas that has just begun to offer insight into the migration and behavior of this tenacious and much ballyhooed little creature, one of whom will call Aquinnah home this summer.
When the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) were unceremoniously disbanded in 1944, Ann Lesnikowski of Vineyard Haven was told to go home, with no explanation or money for transportation. In the decades that followed, the memory of the first female military pilots was either forgotten or deliberately obscured. But on March 10 at a ceremony at the United States Capitol Ms. Lesnikowski and her remaining fellow WASPs finally received their due: a congressional gold medal, the highest civilian award in the country. “It was a long 60 years coming,” she said.
