Island ideals
CUTTYHUNK -- Best as I could tell, the big news here last week was that they changed the Tuesday night movie to Wednesday night.
They had notices posted all over the place -- the elementary school attended by two kids last year, town hall, the dead pay phone booth near the market. (All six on island have expired.) This kind of thing matters when the only restaurant, according to the island website, consists of four picnic tables and ''a pizza oven held hostage in a garage."
That's the glory of Cuttyhunk, this hiccup in Buzzards Bay northwest of Martha's Vineyard. You've got about 400 folk who bolt the outside world each summer for the splendid isolation here. (Thirty-odd souls endure the winter on island.) People come and stay, drawn in community by an unspoken passion for simplicity and peace. It is this ethos that has kept it from ruination.
''We don't have a car-carrying ferry," adds Seth Garfield, a third-generation islander, beaming. ''We have no services." There may not be enough ground water left, he says, to support major expansion. Besides there's only room for another 10 or 12 houses under current zoning laws.
If the island appears safe from the developers' predations, it is vulnerable to another threat -- high-speed wireless Internet connections, which are multiplying like guppies. ''We're becoming a wireless hotspot," says Brenden Garfield, Seth's second cousin once removed. Cousin Horace maintains this wireless spike could change the character of the island more than any McMansion. The dreaded cellphone has already rendered the days when folks socialized while waiting to use a pay phone a sepia memory.
There's a gaggle of Garfields out here. Brenden says if they all showed up at once, there'd be 91 of them. Seth's daughter Callie shucks oysters in her father's raw bar at the dock. Rebecca works up at that peanut of a post office. Haven't a clue where she fits in.
Cuttyhunk is the outermost of the Elizabeth Islands, which are, for my money, the loveliest vision off the Massachusetts coast. These are stealth islands, unfamiliar to many yet unforgettable to all who have laid eyes on them. They are what didn't happen to Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket.
Extending southwest from Woods Hole on Cape Cod, you've got the Weepeckets, Uncatena, Nonamesset, Naushon, Pasque, Nashaweena, Penikese, and Cuttyhunk -- Wampanoag land that Bartholomew Gosnold named for his British queen when he arrived in 1602.
They're still pristine bodies today, low and open, perfumed by the salt air and washed by Vineyard Sound on one side and Buzzards Bay on the other. With the exception of Cuttyhunk and, to a lesser degree, Naushon, they're deserted.
The main reason is one John Murray Forbes, a member of the rich Yankee clan that feasted off the China trade. In 1842, he bought the biggest of the Elizabeths, Naushon, which after his death in 1898 was put in trust and preserved in its natural state. The Naushon Trust Inc. must have been forged with Kryptonite because it's still rock-solid today. (For the record, the Naushon Trust also owns the Weepeckets, Uncatena, and Nonamesset. A second Forbes trust owns Nashaweena and a third, Pasque. Penikese, owned by the state, has been home to the Penikese Island School, helping troubled teens since 1973. Last is Cuttyhunk.)
''They're a huge gift to all of us," says John Bullard, a former mayor of New Bedford and president of the environmental group, the Coalition for Buzzards Bay, about the Forbes islands. (He also runs the Sea Education Association, the crackerjack outfit that teaches oceanography and celestial navigation to college kids for a semester while sailing to places like Tahiti.) ''It's unbelievable what they've done for Buzzards Bay. If not for the Forbes trust, those islands would look like the Florida Keys. We'd be swimming in sewage."
Some argue that the Forbes family should share their treasure with the public, in the spirit of the philanthropist Paul Mellon, who bought huge swaths of land for what became the Cape Hatteras and Cape Cod National Seashores. (There are five beach areas on Forbes land, reachable by boat, open to all.) As an old lefty, I'm liking the idea. But the more I learn how meticulously the islands have been preserved -- and witness how horribly our national parks are managed these days -- the more convinced I am the situation needs leaving alone.
Naushon takes us inexorably to John Forbes Kerry. It has been widely reported that as a member of Forbes nation, Kerry claims Naushon by birthright as his summer sandbox. Wrong. Kerry is not a member of the trust who has first dibs to rent the 20-odd houses on island. Members are limited to direct descendants of John Murray Forbes. (There are about 200 of them.) While he has spent summers on Naushon intermittently over the course of his life, Kerry remains out of that particular loop.
''He's a distant cousin but not a member," confirms Tally Garfield, a Forbes who has summered on Naushon all of her 55 years. (Yup, more Garfields. She married John, a cousin of Seth.)
Which brings us to the short-tailed vs. the long-tailed Forbes. The short-tailed Forbes come from the posh branch of the family, who, going back a ways, used to clip the tails of their horses for dressage competition and fancy carriage work. The long-tailed, in contrast, hail from the informal branch who have always let the tails of their horses stay long. The Naushon Forbes are decidedly long-tailed. No one is quite sure whether Kerry is short-tailed or long-tailed.
Sam Allis's e-mail address is: allis@globe.com
