At Large : Wicked
By Doug Cabral
Published: August 21, 2008
Everyone hates a spat. Parents hate sibling warfare. Kids hate parental bickering. We are all one family, someone always says, we ought to try to get along.
At several blessed gatherings this weekend, friends told me that today's Vineyard family fights rage more viciously than was the case years ago. Between jumbo shrimp and cheeseburgers-in-a-good-cause, these congenial folks confided that they didn't like the wickedness; they didn't understand why we modern and presumably enlightened Vineyarders fight so viciously. They yearned for the harmony of yesteryear.
Actually, a review of the history suggests that the battlers of today are merely the descendants - in the loosest sense - of their fore-battlers, just as Darwin - in the loosest sense - might have predicted. For instance, on the question of whether the battles are harder fought today than years ago, history suggests we are following a long historical pattern of strenuous, even wounding, debate on public issues.
From long before the day in 1892 when West Tisbury, led by William J. Rotch, finally threw off the yoke of oppression imposed by Tisbury and became a town in its own right, Vineyarders have asked and given no quarter in their civic struggles. Up-Island, agricultural West Tisburyites had long chafed under the impression that they paid too many tax dollars "to build sidewalks, curbing and even pavements in Vineyard Haven," according to Gale Huntington, in his "Introduction to Martha's Vineyard."
"The fight was a long and bitter one, just as Cottage City's efforts to separate itself from Edgartown had been." But in that historic, principled, ancient, civil smackdown, West Tisbury fought its way to freedom from its cosmopolitan, seafaring former municipal family.
I suspect that although these ancient combatants lacked the advantages of the 21st century lexicon of political abuse that we so generously employ, their 19th century debates were as lively as the ones in the early 1970s over the Kennedy Islands Trust Bill, or Frank Sargent's Martha's Vineyard Commission legislation, or the battle to get Edgartown out of the MVC, or the battle to get Tisbury out.
What about the mid-1970s fight over the second slip at the Steamship Authority's Vineyard Haven terminal? There was a humdinger. The Martha's Vineyard Commission rejected the boatline's plan for the second slip, so the SSA, absolutely furious to be frustrated by this small-fry regulatory agency and with the wholehearted support of the then-Vineyard member who lived in West Tisbury, went to the legislature and got itself exempted from the MVC's jurisdiction.
Or, consider the battle over the Strock Enterprises plan to create 800 house lots on 500 acres of Oak Bluffs land stretching from the Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road to the shore of Sengekontacket Pond. I sat on the Martha's Vineyard Commission then, as an elected member from Vineyard Haven, and I voted with the majority to reject the Strock plan. Too many lots. The developer appealed to the state Supreme Court and lost, and eventually sought bankruptcy protection. The Oak Bluffs planning board was furious with the MVC over the decision, but Major's Cove, Hidden Cove, and, dare I say it, the Farm Neck golf course sprang from the smoldering ruins.
The fight over the removal of Edward Hanify from the administration of the Martha's Vineyard Hospital in the early 1980s was the equal of the fight that led to the banishment of the hospital board that put Windemere in bankruptcy in the mid-1990s. Certainly it was as bloody-minded as the fight between Dr. Richard Koehler and hospital chief Kevin Burchill, which ended with the loss of both of them.
And then there's golf. The golf war lasted three years.
Having established that combat is part of our Island heritage, I'd like to suggest three reasons for why that is.
First, people care about the Vineyard. It is not a bedroom community west of Boston or east of New York. When you are here, your heart, your thoughts, and your ambitions are not somewhere else. But how people care about the Vineyard varies from person to person, town to town, neighborhood to neighborhood, retiree to business owner. So to say that we, in the royal sense, all want the same thing from and for our Island home, and further to suggest that what you want is more meritorious than what I want - well, to say that presumes too much. Islanders struggle for the different things Islanders want and hold dear.
Second, the stakes are higher. Even as we clear our heads of the bubbly euphoria of the recent real estate boom, still the roots that Islanders put down get dug into awfully rich soil. If you pay a million to retire in a house that's worth $200,000 on its best day and some off-Islander plans a 30-unit affordable housing complex on the venerable 300-year-old farm next door that you thought was permanently protected from development, or if your Vineyard in-laws plan to leave the Chilmark spread to your wife but without any cash to pay the taxes, or if your two kids are in college and your seasonal restaurant needs a liquor license to generate the revenue to pay their tuitions, or you just want to build a world-class golf course and you'll do whatever the regulators ask - for you, the stakes are high enough so you'll put up your dukes.
And third, although to some the Vineyard community is "eroding," I think that actually it is just changing, as it has from the beginning, from when Gosnold et al stepped ashore and the Wampanoags said there goes the neighborhood, from when West Tisbury separated from Tisbury and some grizzled down-Island saltwater type said those sodbusters will never make it on their own, from when the Martha's Vineyard Commission was formed and veteran Islanders muttered that the newcomers and fancypants just want to be the last ones ashore, from when the critics said the regional high school would be the end of education, from when the Land Bank's opponents said the two percent land bank tax would kill the real estate industry, from when the anti-T-shirt types said the T-shirts would be the end of the Black Dog, or from right now, when the revamping of the Second Hand Store has self-styled Islanders viciously up in arms against off-Island thinking.
It's just change, unplanned, organic, some of it good, some bad, some uncomfortable. It certainly isn't preservation, and of course there is no way to be certain how it will all turn out.
