On Nov. 15, 1969, a million peo ple, give or take a few hundred thousand, marched on Washington to protest the war in Vietnam. It was my first major demonstration. You never forget your first.

Jay Segredo, one of the main characters in my novel The Mud of the Place, is a gay man who grew up on Martha’s Vineyard but lived off-Island for two decades. Though close to his family, he’s never come out to any of them, and when he moves back to the Vineyard, where everybody knows who you’re related to and where your car was parked night before last, his secret overwhelms his good sense and he starts making stupid mistakes.

Sometimes the juxtaposition of two appar ently unrelated stories provides more incisive commentary than the best editorial or op-ed. Take the front page of last Friday’s Vineyard Gazette.

The new tax bills for Tisbury Great Pond properties were a shocker all right. The camp that I co-own with my three siblings, as the Sturgis Family Trust, was valued at $2,123,800 in fiscal year 2007. Now, with no effort on our part, it’s supposedly worth $4,419,700. For years we’ve been managing to pay the taxes — $9,568 in fiscal year 2007 — by renting the camp out most of the summer. The new tax bill, $17,511 and change, means renting for nine or ten weeks with no margin for error: no cancellations, and nothing left over for maintenance either.