S ome six decades ago the Vineyard was at war. Military outposts dotted the landscape, Islanders kept watch for enemy aircraft at East Chop Light and unlit ferries slinked across Nantucket Sound wearing battleship gray. There were air raid drills, rations and even United Service Organizations in Vineyard Haven and Edgartown that brought in the likes of Gregory Peck and Helen Hayes. And in every corner of the globe the sons and daughters of Martha’s Vineyard served, from the Pacific and European theatres to the home front in civil defense.
It is Wednesday night in Vineyard Haven and Evan Hall’s weekly hip-hop dance class is ready to begin.
At the Lightkeepers Inn on Simpson’s Lane in Edgartown, it was a long summer for light-sleeping inn-seekers.
Construction across the lane at the site of the former Shiretown Inn has provided its share of metaphorical and actual headaches to Heidi Raihofer and her guests at the Lightkeepers Inn over the past several months, and the time has come, she says, for a rational noise ordinance in Edgartown to address the matter.
A grant for renewable energy has flummoxed the West Tisbury selectmen who say that the terms of the grant are too restrictive and that the amount is too small to achieve anything worthwhile.
“We have $8,526.56 that I don’t have the slightest idea how to spend,” said executive secretary Jennifer Rand at the board meeting Wednesday. The grant is from the Renewable Energy Trust, an organization administered by the state’s development agency for renewable energy.
The deer are everywhere: strolling 30 deep through the pastures off North Road, blithely grazing Nat’s Farm field in West Tisbury, and bounding throughout the Island on streets, driveways and occasionally through windshields. They are gorgeous animals, what biologists delightfully call “charismatic megafauna.” But biologists have another term for the Island’s relationship with deer: beyond carrying capacity.
At Morning Glory Farm in Edgartown the summer’s undulating sea of cornstalks and striated expanses of green have given way to the frost-kissed and fallow soil of fall. A biting damp wind sweeps over the fields, heralding months of cold privation. It would appear that this year’s harvest is over. But for a group called the Martha’s Vineyard Gleaners, it is just beginning.
