My first chat with Ginny Jones was a long one, as they all were, for Ginny didn’t do small talk.

I had wandered in the Fo’c’sle locker, her old closet-sized Menemsha bookstore, sweaty and disoriented from a long autumnal bike ride. I recall her seated in the corner there, surrounded by books and maps and papers on all sides. She almost seemed to have become a part of the library itself.

She was guarded at first, a little suspicious of the wide-eyed and excessively chatty young man who had walked into her shop in the late shoulder-season. But then I told her I worked at the paper and, as it turned out, she already knew my name and writing. She also knew that I would be covering West Tisbury and wanted to make sure that I was going to get it right.

We spent more than an hour together that day, an impromptu crash-course symposium on Island history and conservation and West Tisbury politics. She sent me off with homework, too, with all the Henry Beetle Hough essays I had to read, and Gale Huntington and Capt. Fred Tilton too. Her perspective was refreshingly pessimistic, lovingly so, equal parts proud of all the things that Islanders had achieved and despairing of the Vineyard’s future.

It was, as ever, unflinchingly, startlingly honest.

This aspect of Ginny always most impressed me. Few knew better than her about the mechanics of Island politics, or its history or inhabitants, but more than that, no one was more openly honest about them than she was. She was as generous with praise as she was with criticism, when she felt it deserving, and spoke glowingly of those Islanders fighting the good fight. But she never shied from naming the enemy as she saw it.

During one of the only times I formally interviewed her for a story, I pressed her for a note of positivity to include my piece.

“Is there any hope for the Island?” I asked.

In so many words, she replied with a no. And yet that didn’t stop her. She embodied that old truism, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” working to achieve a better Island, never pulling any punches, never worrying about stepping on toes.

We would go on to have many talks during my years on the Island, always over the landline, because my cell phone didn’t begin with 508. They were long talks, soliloquies, for Ginny didn’t do short chats, and often circuitous, and perfectly grumpy. She, and her perspective, inspired much of my writing in those years, which I am sure was her intent.

I recall the last time we spoke, she ended our conversation with a common refrain, wondering aloud: “Well, what else can I tell you?” before she decided she had told me everything she needed and we bade farewell.

But I am sure, then as always, she still had more to say.

Thomas Humphrey is a former reporter for the Vineyard Gazette.