Tom Dunlop
For more than 25 years a nonprofit group on the Vineyard has worked creatively to help keep personal disputes from building into court cases that burden the judicial system and often cost the people in conflict more than they win when the court makes a ruling.
It requires a little extra faith to open a new business on the Vineyard. There’s the feast-and-famine seasonality of its economy, the often ingrained shopping habits of its residents, the tendency to look to the mainland for choices and prices that the Island cannot match.
I n August the reeds just beyond the open door to the Mugwump shed sway and hiss in a warm breeze off the lagoon. Inside the building, the shape of the hull that the skeletal framing only hinted at a month before begins to reveal itself, plank by plank, as the crew sheathes it from keel to deck.
“I love putting on the first two or three planks,” says Ross, who comes to Mugwump with business for Nat. “There’s nothing more rewarding than watching the shapes develop as you’re twisting and bending them on there.”
All the panelists agreed with Ellsworth Havens — chairman of Rotary International’s program to find solutions to water and sanitation problems around the planet — that ensuring the fair distribution of potable water is “the greatest environmental issue confronting the world today.”
For 21 years — from the late summers of 1874 through 1895 — a passenger train chuffed along a route that looks inconceivably imposing to us today: from what’s now the Oak Bluffs Steamship Authority wharf, over the very sands of State Beach, through the fairways and greens of the Edgartown Golf Club, perpendicularly across Upper Main street, along the border of not one but two cemeteries and into what are now the subdivisions and farmlands of Katama before terminating at two dead ends: the dunes of South Beach and a hotel at Mattakessett whose ugliness was rivaled only by its windswept isolation and self-evident vulnerability to fire.
Like everything else in the world today, the event was captured on a cell phone camera and posted almost immediately on YouTube. Watching it, you can’t help but think of Jack Ruby as the man charges out of the crowd toward his victim, except Jack Ruby wore a fedora and a suit and this guy wore a white T-shirt and plaid shorts slung low.