Once there was a giant named Moshup who created the Island of Martha’s Vineyard to escape violent war and fighting on the mainland. Isolated on the tiny bit of land surrounded by sea, he one day became homesick, and set out to build a bridge back to the mainland. He waded out into the Vineyard Sound and threw down a trail of giant boulders to step across. But in the middle of his effort, Moshup was bitten on the toe by a crab, and returned home to nurse his wounds. He never resumed his project, and his bridge remains unfinished.

A popular Vineyard Haven restaurant faces the prospect of being shut down by the town within weeks as a result of the building owner’s persistent failure to address multiple, longstanding breaches of fire safety codes.

Already the Tropical restaurant, at Five Corners, has been ordered to stop cooking in a kitchen which has been found to breach safety regulations in a number of ways. Tisbury fire chief John Schilling served a cease and desist order on the restaurant owner on Tuesday.

In the middle of March, lifelong Chilmarker Mike Holtham was pulling out from his winter home on Quansoo when a group of fire trucks sped by, sirens blaring. Curious, he made a split-second decision to follow the trucks, which were headed to a fire on a road nearby.

“I know every person that lives on that street right now,” he remembered thinking as he approached the scene. “Now there’s no excuse,” he thought.

The next day, Mr. Holtham walked into the Chilmark fire station and signed up to be a volunteer firefighter.

The damage estimates are in and the price tag for repairing the West Dock in Menemsha following the July 12 fire may exceed $1 million. And as they struggle to figure out how the town is going to pay for it all, the visibly harried Chilmark selectmen this week voiced their disappointment in the Coast Guard for its slow response on cleanup efforts following the fire.

Vandals have been targeting the boat house at the Sailing Camp Park in Oak Bluffs, leaving a trail of smashed-in doors, broken windows, floats set adrift in the Lagoon Pond — and, in a dangerous turn, the latest offense this week saw gasoline poured around the grounds.

At the receiving end of all this vandalism is Sail Martha’s Vineyard, the community-supported nonprofit program that leases the boathouse on the Lagoon from the town to teach sailing to Island children.

The Vineyard has no fish weirs these days. The trapping technique, catching fish by way of corralling them against walls of branches, timber and spiles strewn with nets, is no longer used here.

On Wednesday afternoon, however, Jonathan James-Perry, 33, a storyteller and historian with the Aquinnah Cultural Center, gave a talk about the use of fish weirs by the Wampanoag Indians of this region. In a time when the ocean was bubbling with a lot more fish than are there now, a fish weir was an effective way to catch fish.

Friday, July 30: Clouds break in the morning. Sunny. Perfect day for the beach.

Saturday, July 31: Not as hot. The air in the morning is autumnal. Temperature rises to the mid-70s. Low humidity. Tomatoes ripen on the vine in Vineyard Haven. Tiger lilies in full bloom in a backyard garden. Shields sailboats race in the outer Edgartown harbor with a stiff breeze from the southwest.

More than four years after the new Martha’s Vineyard Hospital was required, as a condition of its expansion, to spend $2 million on community health programs, not one dollar has yet been spent on initiatives not directly connected to the hospital.

Under the terms of approval by the state Department of Public Health, the hospital was supposed to begin distributing the money in January 2006. The five-year timetable for the expenditure meant it all should have been distributed by January 2011.

JOHN S. ALLEY

508-693-2950

(alleys@vineyard.net)

Shorebirds, waders, peeps, squatters, twiddlers, tattlers or sandpipers, it makes no difference what you call the members of the Scolopacidae family. They have hit the beaches, flats and fields of the Vineyard running. The shorebirds are visiting the Vineyard now and will be for the next few weeks. Visiting from where and why here?