Meet the beetles. The invasive exotic ones, that is. There is the goldenhaired bark beetle, the six-tooth bark beetle, the Mediterranean pine engraver beetle and the most dreaded of them all: the Asian long-horned beetle, which arrived on American shores a decade ago the way many foreign threats do, hiding in wood pallets.

At the Polly Hill Arboretum, collections and grounds manager Tom Clark and collections management intern Alyssa Janilla have been on guard for the unwelcome arrival of the voracious bugs by participating in a USDA monitoring program.

On Wednesday night, as the puck dropped for the third period of Game Seven in the Stanley Cup Finals, the streets of Oak Bluffs were, for the most part, quiet.

NURSING EXPERTISE

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

I am writing in response to your June 3 article about the hospital emergency room (ER) staffing, specifically concerning comments about nurse practitioners (NPs) and physicians assistants (PAs).

Humans are not the boss of nature. Just ask the residents of western Massachusetts, Joplin, Missouri, or Japan. On the Vineyard we are at the constant mercy of wind, waves, storms and tides. Someone once said that when land and water wrestle, water always wins. That’s why it was refreshing to hear talk, at an erosion control workshop on the Island last week, of erosion management as opposed to erosion control.

White Flower Island

Editor’s Note: What follows is an essay titled At the Turn of the Tide, taken from Salt Marsh Diary, a book by Mark Seth Lender, a writer and producer for the National Public Radio program Living on Earth. Mr. Lender will speak tonight upstairs at the Bunch of Grapes in Vineyard Haven at 7:30 p.m. At the Turn of the Tide is copyrighted by the author and appears here with permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. In an e-mail to the Gazette this week, the author explained the Vineyard story behind Turn of the Tide:

No Overtime for Tri-Town Resolution

The magnificent victory of the Bruins in the Stanley Cup finals this week had us talking about hockey and ice skating, and the conversation turned as these things will to the question of whether it is easier to skate forwards or backwards. This, it seems, is a matter of opinion, some of which can get quite vehement. Is it a function of the kind of skating you do or how you were trained? Or is there a right-brain, left-brain predisposition at work?

I’ve been carrying Gerry around for years. Trust me when I say he’s not heavy, not any more, he’s gone from 200 pounds to less than a pound at this point.

My friend and former coworker Gerry Kelly, a jovial, melancholy Irishman, died and was cremated in 1996. He had no known immediate family and although we were not all that close, we shared a love of cooking, the theatre and art.

Why would an Islander choose to ride our VTA bus system to circumnavigate the whole Island? Well, why did David Niven take a hot air balloon as part of his Around the World in 80 Days tour? Because there would have been no story if he hadn’t.

But there’s more to it than that, as far as riding the bus around the Island is concerned.

Halfway through a marathon Oak Bluffs selectmen’s meeting Tuesday where a ban on amplified music was under discussion, the board voted to go into an unusual executive session to discuss police union bargaining and a personnel matter.