outdoors

(Superstorm) Sandy and Lucy (Vincent)

Posted by Ivy

Jack Lionette, left, and Tristan Scott, both of Chilmark, Mass., dash through piles of foam at Lucy Vincent Beach on October 30, 2012, the day after winds and rain from Hurricane Sandy whipped through Martha’s Vineyard. The storm caused the collapse of the prominent clay cliffs on Lucy Vincent, and washed away the beach’s dunes. School was canceled for two days due to the storm.

I don’t even have any photos of my own showing what Lucy Vincent looked like before Sandy came along; I’ve only been to this beach twice. Suffice to say that the square-shaped dent in the cliffs didn’t exist before. Since school was out for the day, there were a lot of families at the beach checking out the damage for themselves (there were also a lot of photographers). I took Jack’s photo last year when Remy wrote a piece on his dad, who’s the chef at Morning Glory Farm…the Vineyard is so small in the off-season.

Here’s what it looked like on the other side of the cliffs:

And here is a sandpiper who is probably pretty happy about the new tide line:

Cliffside

Posted by Ivy

After photographing Dan Sauer in his backyard garden on Tuesday, I decided to hang around Aquinnah for a little bit. Aquinnah is the westernmost area of Martha’s Vineyard and is home to less than 400 people, a third of whom (more or less) are Wampanoag. The town actually used to be known by the English name of Gay Head until they decided to change back to its original Wampanoag appellation.

There isn’t all that much to do in Aquinnah…unless you’re a tourist and want to visit the cliffs. Of course, even homegrown Islanders should visit the cliffs, because they are simply gorgeous.

This photo has probably been taken several thousand times by now, but never on my camera:20100621_0398_edit_web

Some more ‘been-there, taken-that’ pictures:

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I came down from the lookout point to find two girls squealing about a little black snake on the path (“Pick it up!” “It might be poisonous!” “Just pick it up!”). An older naturalist-type guy walked up and scooped up the snake for the girls to see (it wasn’t poisonous, for the record…). In related news, I’m not sure those shorts count as shorts.
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Back to Nature

Posted by Ivy

I went out to Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary this morning to photograph a crew of SCA (Student Conservation Association) volunteers doing some restoration work for the area. It’s pretty great- they’d cleared out an entire thicket of bittersweet and brush that had grown up around an old granite foundation on the property. Today they were working on moving more granite blocks from the surrounding woods into the foundation area to create a natural amphitheater for Felix Neck. Hardcore—granite isn’t exactly the lightest of rocks. I think it’d be fun to do an SCA or AmeriCorps environment project sometime.

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I didn’t intentionally pose this. Either everybody’s just naturally intrepid-looking (likely) or they saw the camera and were posing (possible).

I had to write an article for the story, too…took me about four hours. I have got to work on my writing speed…