Peter Mcghee
Herbert Slater, who died last week, was one of a dwindling group of men who took part in the now largely forgotten harpoon fishery that made Menemsha a major source of swordfish landings on the East Coast in the fifties, sixties and seventies.
The Lash house has come down. It took Roger Allen six months to build but just two days for one man and a big John Deere excavator to demolish. And now only the sentinel chimney remains, but soon enough it too will be gone, tumbled down in a cloud of dust.
Chilmark fifty years ago was a different place. Well, of course it was. There weren’t so many people. There weren’t so many summer people. And there weren’t so many people who lived there year-round. Islanders, we called them.
The Lash House is for sale. For a small group of people, that single sentence carries paragraphs if not pages of meaning.