The Hearing Continues

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Susanna J. Sturgis

These public hearings bring out my inner schoolkid, the one who couldn’t resist whispering during class, passing notes, and occasionally wadding up a bit of candy wrapper, stuffing it into the end of a straw, and shooting it at the kid in front of her. It seems others are having similar flashbacks. At the MVC (Martha’s Vineyard Commission) hearing last night on, you guessed it, the roundabout proposal, a town official who shall remain nameless was passing this (see right) out in the back row. If only Trip Barnes’s big truck could snake around small circles like that.

Video producer John McCormick had edited a shorter version of the Stop the Roundabout video, with additional footage featuring Craig Hockmeyer and his bicycle, but despite prior planning the MVC staff couldn’t come up with equipment capable of playing it. Hopes for a world premiere of the revised version were thus dashed, but a DVD has been submitted as part of the “written” record.

Part of the MVC and part of the audience

Originally the MVC planned to close the public hearing (which began on September 1) at 5 p.m. yesterday, meaning that public testimony would not be accepted at last night’s meeting. Then word went around that yes, public testimony would be accepted. This suggested that new information had come to the MVC’s attention since September 1. What information? we wondered. Were we going to be subjected to a “new” version of the GPI spiel we’ve already been subjected to twice?

No, indeed. Instead we heard a clear, well-informed presentation by Angie Grant, administrator of the Vineyard Transit Authority (VTA). Currently three VTA bus routes make regular stops at the blinker intersection. The intersection is a key transfer point for passengers heading or returning from up-island. The MVC staff — “without any prior consultation with the VTA,” Grant noted in written testimony — had proposed relocating the bus stops to the high school, four-tenths of a mile away. This would add almost a mile to the trip and play havoc with the VTA’s finely synchronized schedule, which makes transfers prompt and predictable. And since the VTA works on a “flag” system — riders can flag down a bus and request to be let out between regular stops, as long as the driver has a safe place to pull over — the buses would most likely be stopping at the intersection anyway.

Grant’s letter and oral presentation, made at the 11th hour, underscored how little Oak Bluffs (“the Applicant”), GPI, and the MVC have done to solicit input from those likely to be most affected by the proposed roundabout. Once again Trip Barnes vividly (despite the absence of the video) called the MVC’s attention to the challenges the roundabout’s drawbacks for large trucks: the Edgartown–Vineyard Haven Road is a main truck route, one of the many specifics about the site that GPI has not addressed.

And this brings up the most interesting, possibly portentous aspect of the hearing: John Diaz from GPI and Tom Currier from MassDOT weren’t there. Earlier in the week, an MVC staffer told me in an e-mail that he thought they would be. Not only that, they hadn’t responded to questions submitted to them earlier this month — we had to get our questions in by September 8 so they would have time to come up with answers by September 22. And not only that, several commissioners seemed to be getting just a bit annoyed with the lack of response. The hearing chairman emphasized that the MVC can request information, but it can’t go out and gather it, e.g., conduct traffic studies. The commission, like a jury, has to make its decision based on the information available to them.

Well. Far be it from me to interpret the statements of the commissioners, but I heard more ambivalence, more impatience, and more critical comments at this meeting than I heard at the previous two. I walked out of the meeting room on the brink of guardedly optimistic.

The written record for the public hearing is being kept open till noon on Monday, October 3, to give GPI and MassDOT time to answer the questions put to them. Later that day, at 5:30 p.m., the project will move on to the next phase: discussion by the land use planning committee (LUPC), which comprises any commissioner who wants to be part of it. The LUPC will then make a recommendation — approve, approve with conditions, disapprove — to the full MVC, which will then vote on it.

The three heads in the foreground belong to, from left, Trip Barnes (trucker), Sandra Lippens (owner, Tilton Rentall), and Craig Hockmeyer (bicyclist). About two-thirds of the MVC is visible in the background.

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Hey, everyone who’s been following the roundabout story, the eagerly awaited Stop the Roundabout video debuted this evening on MVTV and is now available through MVTV’s Video on Demand service. It’s about 20 minutes long and stars Trip Barnes and one of Trip’s big trucks. Check it out!!

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Susanna J. Sturgis | 4 Comments

Last Pesto of the Season

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Susanna J. Sturgis

Last Friday I finally got around to picking basil. It would be the last big picking of the season, so I’d put it off for several days. The nearly full four-cup measure sat on my counter for several days more. Same reason: this was going to be the last pesto of the season, and who wants to admit that this is it for another year?

This morning I got on with it. My basil plants have been generous, and letting their bounty wilt into mush seemed ungrateful. Yes, I’ve already got three times more pesto in the freezer than I did this time last year, but even a single girl never has too much pesto, and if I ran out in April I’d be really annoyed with myself.

(Some of the) dirty dishes

Out came the old blender and all the stockpiled ingredients: parsley, parmesan, butter, olive oil, walnuts, and garlic, lots of garlic. Making pesto means making a mess. That’s one thing I like about it. Another thing is licking my fingers, and the knife I use to tamp things down in the blender.

My blender is neither fancy nor new. It works, but it needs a little coddling, especially when I get lazy about trimming all the stems off the parsley and they wind around the blades. When the motor starts to labor, I give it a rest. A blender could do worse than to give up its life in the making of pesto, but my blender aspires to become an antique.

Last pesto

Pot licker

Making pesto — OK, cooking anything — means doing some fancy footwork to avoid tripping over or stepping on my sidekick, who lies close enough by that he can grab whatever falls from the counter before I can pick it up. Basil and parsley do not interest him; parmesan and walnuts do. Pre-washing pots is a specialty. This one had melted butter in it. The trick is to get it away from him before he starts carrying it around the room.

What’s left on my basil plants might season some spaghetti sauce, but the pesto season is now officially over. My garden is still incubating a bumper crop of green cherry tomatoes, however, the fruit of the plants I started from seed very early in the summer. The few that have ripened already were delicious. In August, the tomatoes ripened so fast I was hard pressed to eat them all. September sunlight doesn’t work like that. Evening temps are dipping down to the low 50s, and — a couple of nights ago — the high, very high, 40s. Will these guys ripen before the first frost?

I think I see some color on the bottom-most one in this photo.

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Roundabout TV

Posted on September 18, 2011 by Susanna J. Sturgis

This roundabout thing is getting to us — us being the valiant souls who have been fighting to get Oak Bluffs officials and the Martha’s Vineyard Commission to listen to reason — to listen, period. Having been involved only a scant couple of months, I’m already tearing my hair out. Several of my colleagues have been at it since 2004, facrissakes. It’s a wonder they haven’t committed themselves en masse to a loony bin.

Viewed from a certain angle, however, Martha’s Vineyard is a loony bin. As Milton Mazer noted more than 35 years ago in People and Predicaments, the Vineyard has a “high tolerance for deviance.” So maybe they haven’t committed themselves because they’re already here.

Anyway, at the last meeting of the small ad hoc “roundabout roundtable,” Trip Barnes, trucker and inveterate showman, said he was going to produce a TV show. Yeah, right, thought my rational self. And that’s going to accomplish — what?

But it’s rational self that’s been tearing her hair out: When you marshal your facts and prepare one coherent argument after another and the people you’re trying to persuade act as if they haven’t heard a word you said, what do you do next?

John McCormick, cameraman

Why not a TV show? We’ve got a local-access cable channel, MVTV. People actually watch it. MVTV rents out camera people at reasonable rates. Trip’s idea was to combine some man/woman-in-the-street interviews with footage of one of his big trucks trying to maneuver around circles the size of the proposed roundabout. I was, as usual, late getting to the scene of the shoot — at the blinker intersection, of course, just outside the gate at Tilton Rentall — but here’s a preview of coming attractions.

Trip interviews Sandra, or vice versa

Sandra Lippens is the proprietor at Tilton’s, which occupies one of the four corners at the blinker intersection. Tilton’s rents all sorts of stuff but specializes in the big outdoor parties that are so popular during the Vineyard summer. From place settings to tents to rollaway beds and cribs for overflow guests — you can find it at Tilton Rentall. Customers and employees are in and out of the Tilton property during business hours, and occasionally after hours, seven days a week. The roundabout proponents have been chronically vague about how much their plan will encroach on the Tilton Rentall property, and on how exactly employees and customers will get in and out. Sandra has been in the forefront of the Stop the Roundabout battle from the very beginning, which was around 2004.

The really cool thing, though, was watching Trip pull a U-turn on the Edgartown–Vineyard Haven Road.

Note in the last photo the cherry picker parked off to the right. Peter Goodale, from Goodale’s up the road, brought it down so the cameraman could take aerial photos of Trip’s truck circling the intersection.

Trip and crew then went into Vineyard Haven. He’d earlier ascertained that the little circle near the SSA (Steamship Authority) terminal, the one where the VTA (Vineyard Transit Authority) and Park & Ride buses stop to let off and pick up passengers, was about the size of the proposed roundabout. Proponents assure us that big trucks, like the 62-footers that deliver groceries to the Stop & Shop in Edgartown, will have no trouble negotiating the roundabout. Many truckers have misgivings about this. I hear Trip and truck had to go up on the curb to get around the circle, but I’m sorry to say I missed the photo op: I was back at Tilton’s kibitzing with my colleagues.

Can’t wait to see it on TV!

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Risk

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Susanna J. Sturgis

The kernel of what follows was part of my 9/11 anniversary blog, but writing has a will of its own and when I got to the end of “Belated 10th Anniversary” it no longer fit. I zapped it. In writing as in life, “reduce, reuse, recycle” makes sense. Nothing is ever wasted. What goes around comes around. Etc. In other words — it’s back.

As the official reaction to 9/11 developed, with the Patriot Act, invasions of Afghanistan of Iraq, and all the rest of it, I began to understand that the country’s “leaders” were seriously freaked out. I, however, wasn’t. Yes, I was shocked at first. A scenario I had previously considered strictly fictional had come to pass in real life. If something’s happened once, it can happen again. It passes from the realm of the literally inconceivable to the realm of the possible. I added this possibility to all the other possibilities mingling and tangling in my mind, and I walked on.

Detached retina

Three years later, in August 2004, with no warning a pale translucent disk eclipsed nearly all the vision of my right eye. That eye’s retina had detached from the eye wall. Until I got the diagnosis, I didn’t know enough about retinas to know they could detach and from what. Once I did know, I got jumpy: What if it happened again? As luck would have it, it did happen again. Between August 2004 and the end of the year, I made several trips to the ophthalmologist in Boston. I hadn’t been off-island since 9/11; I was barely aware of its backwash out there.

Hurricane Irene

All that changed as I made my round-trips, by ferry, bus, and subway, to the ophthalmologist’s office. During those months, I thought a lot about risk and how we humans deal with it in our everyday lives. In the years that followed, I wrote and rewrote “My Terrorist Eye: Risk, the Unexpected, and the War on Terrorism.”

Sooner or later every female person learns that she’s at risk for rape or other physical violence. People of color learn at an early age that they may be beaten up or killed for their color. The less privilege you’ve got, the more at risk you are. The overwhelming majority of us learn to live with it. We take precautions, but we step out anyway. Rich, powerful white men, on the other hand, tend to take it for granted that they can go where they want when they want and no one’s going to get in their way.

When the planes appeared out of the sky and knocked their buildings down, the rich, powerful white men finally knew otherwise. And they freaked out. Because they’re rich and powerful, they had an option that the rest of us don’t: they set out to exterminate the ones who scared them so badly.

By the early 2000s, I’d been on Martha’s Vineyard long enough to be several strata down in its bedrock. The comings and goings on its surface usually didn’t touch me directly; I heard about them, if I heard at all, from friends and friends of friends, or I read about them in the paper. Toward the end of the decade, a school principal, speaking of a dip in enrollment figures, said that some families who had moved here after 9/11 were leaving. I hadn’t realized until then that anyone had moved here to get away from 9/11.

I did know that many people think of Martha’s Vineyard as a refuge from the real world, a safe place. Once upon a time I thought so too: it was the place I ran to when I needed a break from city life. For this left-brain self-control freak, moving to Martha’s Vineyard was like jumping into free fall. I only did it because I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I didn’t know what it took to make a living here, or make a life. Martha’s Vineyard doesn’t take no for an answer. If you want to live here, you do what she says even when you know you can’t.

So lately I’ve been involved in this fight to stop the rush to roundabout the blinker intersection (verb that noun, girl!). Most proponents want you to believe that it’s all about safety, even though they aren’t producing any statistics to prove that the four-way-stop intersection isn’t already pretty damn safe — four or five accidents a year, mostly fender-benders. At the public hearing I blogged about two weeks ago, we had much speechifying about how the roundabout would make it easier for emergency vehicles to get to where they were going, all with no evidence whatsoever, and one woman even said it was worth $1.2 million to prevent one hypothetical fatality. (According to several islanders with long memories, no one has ever been killed at that intersection.)

When people around here talk about “the character of the island,” as people around here love to do, they usually mean slow-paced, bucolic, a little dull — safe. But the island’s real character has surely been shaped by the island’s history, and that history is one of risk. Whether they worked on sea or on land, islanders were — and in some cases still are — at the mercy of forces much greater than they are. Our lives may be far less dangerous, but we’re at the mercy of those forces too and we can’t reduce the risk to zero.

The challenge is to acknowledge that uncertainty is part of life, and learn to live with it.

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Belated 10th Anniversary

Posted on September 14, 2011 by Susanna J. Sturgis

So I’m three days late blogging the tenth anniversary of 9/11. So what. 9/11 is going to be around for a while, despite the best attempts of the news media to blather it to death. If the rest of us pool our insights into what 9/11 was about and what’s happened since, we’ll eventually get a handle on it.

Yes, I remember where I was and what I was doing: at home, which was then the little guest house at the Wooden Tent on State Road, editing a manuscript. The manuscript was hardcopy. My first inkling that Something Was Very Wrong came from CE-L, Copyediting-L, an e-list for editors that I’d been on for four years. (It’s still thriving, and I’m still on it.) At 9:18 Eastern Time someone posted “does anyone know what is going on?” That thread spun on for more than 24 hours, with list members from several countries as well as the U.S. contributing what they had heard, what they were thinking.

That night I sent an e-mail to friends. “You know me well enough,” I wrote, “to know that I don’t think much of George W. Bush, or of the Republicans, or of most of the Democrats. You know that I came of age in the anti-Vietnam War movement, that my fascination with the Arab world began before I was in double digits, that feminism is my second skin, and that I make my living in the word trade. You know that I left Washington, D.C., more than 16 years ago, and that I’d work for minimum wage before I’d work 9 to 5 in a 110-story building. I am trying to put all this together.”

My “Dear, dear friends” letter was published as an op-ed that Thursday in the Martha’s Vineyard Times. I’m still proud of it: I was as stunned as everybody else, but I was also pretty lucid.

Vivid memory from that afternoon: Clear blue sky over Crow Hollow Farm, with no planes in it.

Vivid memory from the days following: Flags, flags, flags everywhere. I don’t fly the flag, salute the flag, or pledge allegiance to the flag. When I have flag postage stamps, I stick them on upside down. In theory the U.S. flag may represent noble values and aspirations; in practice, more often than not in my lifetime, it’s represented intolerance, arrogance, aggression, and hypocrisy. My gut cringed at all those flags. Then my head caught up: The flying flags were saying We’re here, we’re united, we will survive. Not in my language, but I understood it.

The manuscript I was copyediting at the time was In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692, by Mary Beth Norton (Knopf, 2002). It’s a well-researched and masterful reinterpretation of a well-trodden field in U.S. history. During the years she worked on the book, Norton could have had no inkling that 9/11 was coming, but the book and the day are forever entwined in my mind. Using period documents, Norton evokes the bitter war then being waged on the New England frontier between the indigenous Indians and the Anglo settlers. The Puritans saw the Indians as agents of Satan. Any Indian victory was seen as a victory for Satan and a sign of God’s displeasure. The frontier at that time was not far north of Essex County, in which Salem lies, and several of the key players in the witch trials, accusers and accused, had lived on the frontier. Add these details to the story and the story deepens as connections are made, motivations revealed.

That war on the New England frontier — King William’s War or the Second Indian War, as U.S. history calls it — was one of terrorism and counterterrorism. As the Puritans understood it, they were losing ground to Satan, and this could only be because they weren’t doing God’s will. As I see it, the Indians were fighting for their home, for their land, not because it was their exclusive possession but because it was their source of life; they were, in other words, fighting for their lives. In the Devil’s Snare reminded me, in case I needed reminding, that “terrorism” doesn’t come out of nowhere.

At the end of September, my mare and I took part in the Fall Fuzzy, part horse show, part gymkhana, and the most fun event on the M.V. Horse Council calendar. The costume class comes at the end of the day and is eagerly awaited by all, especially the young people who for weeks, often in teams, have been creating costumes and persuading their patient equines to put up with them. There are always prize categories, usually including Most Beautiful, Scariest, Best Vineyard Theme, and one or two others. In 2001, one of the categories was Most Patriotic. Uh-oh. I braced myself for an orgy of red, white and blue.

One of the girls from my barn had decked herself and her pony out in classic 1960s style: tie-dye, beads, peace signs, the works. She called herself the Peace Chick. The colors were bright, the costume quite lovely — she was a definite contender for Most Beautiful.

The judge gave her the blue for Most Patriotic.

Along the rail I heard the comments: Huh? I don’t get it. What’s that about? How is that patriotic?

I had tears streaming down my face as I applauded, for the courage of that girl and the wisdom of that judge. It was at that moment I knew that the best of this country was going to survive, somehow. I didn’t know how then, and I don’t know how now, but it was a good feeling to have back.

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune–without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

—Emily Dickinson

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How the Story Ended . . .

Posted on September 10, 2011 by Susanna J. Sturgis

Sacco (left) & Vanzetti

Earlier this summer I copyedited a book about the Sacco-Vanzetti case. I’d known the basics for many years. In 1921 Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were convicted of killing two men during a 1920 payroll robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts. After years of appeals, both men were executed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on August 23, 1927. The verdicts, the conduct of the trial, and the executions have been controversial ever since.

Reading page after well-researched page evoking the time, the place, the characters, and the events, I was sure that the story was going to end differently this time. Given the contradictory evidence, how could anyone not have a reasonable doubt? How could anyone not see how prejudiced the judge was? In what idiotic legal system would the trial judge also be the appeals judge — the one who got to rule on whether the trial judge had been fair or not? In this book Sacco and Vanzetti would not die.

In my manuscript, of course, the story turned out the way it does in every other telling: Sacco and Vanzetti died.

Nisa

I had Sacco and Vanzetti on the brain when I learned earlier this summer about Ben Ramsey and Nisa Counter’s struggle to come to amicable terms with the Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation (SMF) over a disputed piece of Chilmark land. Ben and Nisa weren’t on trial for their lives — what was at stake for them was their land and their intended home — but the forces arrayed against them were formidable. Not the state this time, but a Vineyard conservation group with almost $6 million in the bank and ample connections to power. It quickly became clear that neither island newspaper was interested in their side of the story, and one, the Martha’s Vineyard Times, seemed to be going out of its way to misrepresent them, and to silence anyone who called attention to its errors and omissions.

Ben

The end of the story hadn’t been written back in July, but there was handwriting on the wall. Having resisted all attempts to resolve the issue by negotiation or mediation, SMF brought suit in Massachusetts Land Court against Ben and Nisa. The first skirmish went so well for our side: Judge Sands’s ruling indicated that SMF’s claim to the land was nowhere near as clear as SMF thought it was. Two Vineyarders unrepresented by counsel stood up to a couple of high-powered, high-priced lawyers and — pretty much — won.

You would not, however, have inferred this from the M.V. Times story, which implied that the round had gone to SMF. (This is discussed in some detail in “What’s Up with the M.V. Times?”)

But the campaign ahead promised to be long, emotionally grueling, and very, very expensive. Yesterday, September 9, Nisa and Ben posted an open letter to their friends and supporters, explaining why they have decided not to continue the battle. (For a copy of the letter, see “Turning Point.”) SMF seems to have won on a technicality: it has more money. Has it proved its right to this piece of property? It has not.

We will all be dealing with the backwash and repercussions of this for quite a while. Earlier today, Jackie Mendez-Diez, among the most active of Ben and Nisa’s supporters,  wrote: “I thank them for exposing the real SMF, the newspapers, and the individuals who abetted this injustice. This was an important and revealing happening within the workings of the Vineyard social structure, and we are all better off knowing where our trust and faith are deserved.”

Yes indeed. Yet part of me wishes I did not know what I know now, especially about the M.V. Times. I worked for the Times from 1988 to 1993 and again from 1996 to 1999. It was one of the best teams I’ve ever worked on. We knocked ourselves out every week trying to produce the best paper we could. I loved my job.

Whenever Betty Ann Bryant (1938–1994) came through the front door, I knew I was about to learn something about Martha’s Vineyard. Betty Ann, a native islander, was a one-woman social services agency. When regular channels didn’t work, she’d carve her own, enlisting the assistance of whoever she thought could get the job done. Not infrequently this involved the Times. “Where’s Gerry?” she’d ask while making a beeline for his desk in the far corner of the newsroom.

Gerry was Gerry Kelly, dubbed by a fellow journalist “the greatest one-man band in the history of journalism.” Gerry turned out prose like yard goods: news stories, editorials, art and book reviews, food columns, personal profiles, and more. If a stringer was late with a story, Gerry could fill the hole in about 30 minutes. Gerry might come across as crusty and gruff, but he was the softest touch on the staff and Betty Ann knew it. She’d explain who needed what, Gerry would make a few phone calls and maybe write a story, and pretty soon help would be found.

A dozen times this summer I’ve thought, If Gerry Kelly were still sitting at the corner desk, the Times would have covered this story very differently. But Gerry died in 1996, a year and a half after Betty Ann.

Another incident from the early 1990s: after the father of two small children was killed in a construction accident, a Times reporter covered and supported a community effort to complete the house he was building. The paper won a community service award from the New England Press Association for its coverage of the story.

The Times as well as the times seems to have changed. Will anyone give the paper an award for its coverage of this story? Probably not. Being celebrated at Chilmark cocktail parties for keeping Chilmark safe for the affluenza will have to do.

By the way, Jackie Mendez-Diez and I are still blocked from posting to the Martha’s Vineyard Times website under our own names.

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Turning Point

Posted on September 9, 2011 by Susanna J. Sturgis

This morning, Nisa Counter and Ben Ramsey released this letter to their friends and supporters. That includes the many people who’ve been following their story on this blog. You know I’ve got a few things to say about it all, but I’ll save them till tomorrow.

Ben and I would like to sincerely thank all the people who took time out of their busy lives to get the facts of our land dispute with Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation. We unfortunately have come to a point where we both realize that financially and emotionally we can no longer continue this battle with the newspapers/SMF/lawyers and everyone else with a misguided opinion. The truth is we believe in our claim and in our land; however, $1,000–$2,000 a month for the next five years is not something either one of us can see signing up for, or asking anyone else to help support.

Nisa & Ben

We had our second miscarriage and the toll it has taken on me is not worth it—do I really want to live next to neighbors who dislike us and are mean, unkind people? Do I want to subject my children to those attitudes? We believe we gave it our best fight—sadly SMF knew we wouldn’t be able to afford to continue if they just held their ground.

So Martha’s Vineyard will not be our home. We will be leaving in October, and I will plan to come back periodically to run my fitness business. However, we will sadly say goodbye to our dream of a year-round home here. Our legal defense fund has been closed and the funds have been put toward our current legal debts.

I am grateful for the love and support we have felt, and I forgive those of you who turned your backs—gossiped without knowing the facts, trespassed, or decided your social standing was more important then being our friends. I have decided to keep the Youth Lots vs. Tax Breaks page up on Facebook. Sadly, I know this will happen to someone else again. SMF is a big bully: they have a history of this behavior despite their shady past they will never choose to do the right thing.

So long as greed, ego, and selfishness run this Country/Island we all suffer. May God bless us all. Thank you, everyone, from the bottom of my heart—I love you  XO

Nisa Counter

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September

Posted on September 7, 2011 by Susanna J. Sturgis

September looms large in the year-round Vineyarder’s calendar. A popular 1990s bumper sticker read PRAY FOR SEPT.! and in small print underneath: M.V. Year-Rounders Trying to Deal with Summer. September, we like to say, is when we get our island back.

Trav woos at bus

According to the calendar September arrived almost a week ago, but September isn’t really here till the school buses return to the back parking lot at the West Tisbury School. As Trav and I headed homeward on this morning’s misty-moisty walk, there they were. Only four of them, not the whole complement, but the yellow-orange glow was evident through the trees from several hundred feet away. September is here at last.

The dismantled gate and other debris, ready to be trucked away

Teachers and students were nowhere in evidence all summer, but there’s been activity a-plenty at the school. Trav and I have monitored it on our walks. The whole sprawling building has been reshingled, and many of the windows have been replaced. The back parking lot has been given over to storage units, dumpsters, and vehicles involved in the refurbishing. A chain-link gate blocked vehicle access to the lot. By Sunday morning the gate had been dismantled. Could the buses be far behind?

This morning some of the buses were back, and the front parking lots were jammed with the cars of teachers readying their rooms for tomorrow’s first day of school.

The back of the West Tisbury School decked out in new cedar

Probably the kids haven’t been praying for September as fervently as their parents, especially the ones who’ve been juggling summer work schedules while trying to keep an eye on their offspring. Here is where being part of an extended family can make a big difference. By 15, many Vineyard young people have full- or part-time summer jobs.

Trav expresses my opinion of the bottled-water machines

Over the summer, when Trav and I went walking after sundown, no lights shone through the trees. The school might not have been there at all. That’s about to change, I expect. At the nearer end of the school’s backside are two Aquafina bottled-water-dispensing machines. When they’re operating, the bright blue-white glare is visible from at least a quarter mile away. The town must have told the school to make sure the light wasn’t visible from Old County Road, but it doesn’t seem to have made any stipulation about visibility from the woods.

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Defense Fund Established for Ben & Nisa

Posted on September 4, 2011 by Susanna J. Sturgis

Nisa and Ben

From the Seasonally Occupied Territories has been covering Ben Ramsey and Nisa Counter’s fight to defend their land against the claim of the Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation (SMF), a local conservation group. Apart from Facebook, it’s the only public source of accurate information about Ben and Nisa’s side of the story. Scroll down to find links to earlier posts in the saga.

After refusing to negotiate or mediate their differences, SMF sued Ben and Nisa in Massachusetts Land Court. The first hearing, on August 18, did not go the way SMF expected, even though they went in with two lawyers and Ben and Nisa represented themselves. It became clear, though, that when the battlefield is a courtroom, legal representation is a good idea. On September 1, Ben and Nisa released the following statement:

With overwhelming community support for our position, we have decided to continue the legal defense of our property on Blue Barque Rd.

If you have been reading the papers it would be understandable for you to think that we are trying to steal land from Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation.

The truth, however, is just the opposite. We bought a parcel of land that has been owned and used by the Hancock family since 1828.

SMF was given a deed to a neighboring parcel in 1973, a parcel with no defined boundaries–boundaries which they never made any effort to determine.

Now we are defendants in a lawsuit, brought by Sheriff’s Meadow, supported by donor money, which is attempting to overwhelm us with money and clout.

Having right on our side is unfortunately insufficient. While we defended ourselves in Land Court at the first hearing, we feel strongly that without a lawyer who understands the system and can present our facts and make our arguments we will be swept aside.

If we are able to establish an adequate legal defense fund,  we can be assured that we can maintain a proper defense for the long haul.

With a successful fund-raising effort, we believe that we will prevail in the defense of our land. If the lawsuit concludes with funds remaining on hand we would like either to return the balance pro rata or, at the donor’s preference, donate any remaining funds to a worthy affordable housing initiative.

Ben Ramsey and Nisa Counter

Donations should be made out to the Quenames Woods Fund and sent to P.O. Box 531, Vineyard Haven, MA 02568. Electronic transfers may be made to Martha’s Vineyard Savings Bank, Edgartown, MA, routing no. 211372925, account no. 21973.

The story thus far . . .

“Land Grab,” August 17, 2011
“What’s Up with the M.V. Times?,” August 25, 2011
“So Long, Tent,” August 25, 2011

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