Unfortunate License

The very thought that walking down a Vineyard beach and casting a fishing line into the ocean will require a license would appall and anger generations of fishermen stretching deep into the Island’s past.

The same restriction on fishing in freshwater ponds likely would have struck Island fishermen of past centuries as a foolhardy and unwarranted invasion of the government in a matter that was none of its business.

Public Safety Alert: Children at Play

In one more sign of the changing season, today is the last day of school for most Island public schools (the Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School had its last day yesterday.) The familiar yellow buses that roll on Island roads early in the morning and again in the afternoon throughout the fall, winter and spring, are ready for decommissioning as transportation vehicles for our most precious resource — Vineyard school children. At least until just after Labor Day.

Vineyard woodlands are full of delicate pink lady’s slippers, the striking native wild orchids that grow here. In some places hundreds of lady’s slippers can be counted in a small patch of woods. Also called moccasin flower, the flower’s genus name (Cypripedium acaule) derives from the Latin word for Venus’s slipper.

The federal Minerals Management Service has received an unprecedented 40,000-plus public comments on the draft environmental impact statement for the “stalled” Cape Wind project, as it is described by one media outlet. Dozens of key groups and government agencies criticized the draft document which glossed over many of the serious threats the Cape Wind project would pose to public safety, marine wildlife and habitats, tribal and historic resources, commercial fisheries, and the local economy.

PARKING JUSTICE

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

Last weekend  provided two different aspects of life on the Island: delight — and dismay.

On Saturday and Sunday, a group called the Boston Area Roadsters Club brought a number of shiningly restored vintage cars. Part of the welcome the Island offers this group, apparently, is permission to park on both sides of Lake avenue, which is the road that runs along the base of the Oak Bluffs harbor, for the three days of their annual meeting. 

All the Social News

From the Vineyard Gazette editions of June, 1908:

Those from Edgartown, in all numbering twenty-three, who attended the Neighborhood Convention at Gay Head on Tuesday, report a most delightful day. The start was made, five teams in all, at the early hour of six in the morning, and the arrival home was about eight in the evening, four hours on the road each way.

Four people escaped serious injury when a helicopter crashed into the sea off Lake Tashmoo about 2:30 p.m. Sunday.

Police said engine failure was the cause of the crash.

Several private fishing and pleasure boats were on the scene, about 1,000 yards off Tashmoo, within minutes and threw life jackets to the passengers clinging to the upturned chopper.

The occupants were then able to swim the short distance to the boats. It is believed three boats ferried them to shore. All were checked at the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital and quickly released.

A brief but acrimonious rift between the promoters of a concert planned for this summer in Ocean Park featuring the Boston Pops and a group of Island charities who plan to use the event for fund-raising has been patched up — at least for now.

Rick White, a senior producer for Festival Network and lead organizer for the Martha’s Vineyard Festival, told the Gazette yesterday his company is abandoning plans to expand the August 10 concert to a second night.

The post-mortem report on the tiny bird was clinically graphic.

The chick was laterally compressed, with internal trauma to the right side, and hepatic, pulmonary and intestinal rupturing. The left eye contained sand grains adhered to the surface and compressed within, misshaping it. There was trauma to the left side of the brain and the pelvis was squashed out of alignment.

“The bird was otherwise in good condition, and results are consistent with the hypothesis that the chick died from being crushed,” the report said.

When John Biguenet was writing Rising Water, his play about two people trapped by the flooding of New Orleans, the first four or five drafts were “so furiously angry” that they could not be performed.

Mr. Biguenet, whose family had lived in New Orleans for a couple of centuries, was deeply personally affected, and as a result he was packing his play “full of my opinions . . . my anger and my opinions and my sadness.”