EXTRA...

Thrice-Cursed Penikese Island; Artist loses 1,200 works; Where King Philip stood; Saving the roseate tern

TODAY's quote: "A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker." - H.L. Mencken

Lepers, Delinquents and Ghosts, Oh My: The Thrice-Cursed Island of Penikese

   Tiny Penikese Island is north of Cuttyhunk and 12 miles southwest of Cape Cod in the western end of Buzzard's Bay.

Penikese Island School (Cat.'99) is the sole inhabitant of a small island 12 miles southwest of Woods Hole, near Cuttyhunk. It has only nine students at a time; they are very troubled "last chance" teenage boys, referred by the criminal justice system, the Department of Social Services, or schools. They live with the dedicated school staff as a family and they do chores to help run the place. This is the first stable, warm, supportive environment these boys have ever known, and though they stay there for only 6-10 months, it makes a deep impression — 70% are not re-arrested, and 80% are not re-incarcerated. The school's success rate is double that of jail and boot camps. MCAS test scores also support the good work the school is doing; students average 92% in math, 77% in English.

We might as well turn to Wampanoag legend to find out how Penikese and its sibling islands off the northwest coast of Martha's Vineyard were created:

One day the Indians on Cape Cod called on their giant protector, Moshup, to help them out. They were being assaulted by Pukwudgees, little ten-inch tall demons who made the Indians' lives miserable by breaking their arrows, jabbing holes in their canoes, and scattering sharp objects on the hunting paths. Moshup gathered up a posse of his five sons and tracked the mean little critters through the wetlands. But the malicious and clever ‘wudgees crept up on the avengers, blinding and then killing the five young giants. Devastated, Moshup carried his dead boys to Buzzard's Bay, built up mounds of rocks and soil over them, and slunk away, his years of playing the Lone Ranger to humans abruptly ended. Meanwhile the ocean rose, carrying the burial mounds way offshore, where they became what are now known as the Elizabeth Islands - Naushon, Pasque, Nashawena, Cuttyhunk and Penikese... The Vineyard Gazette.
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Feathering the nests
Long-planned work will restore tern breeding grounds

The Bird Island tern restoration program seems finally to be on the horizon, even as the tiny circle of land, home to two types of protected sea birds, is slowly eroding.

Nearly $4 million in federal and state funding has been almost 10 years in coming, and the start of the work is still some years away. But with the state sending a letter of support to the Army Corps of Engineers requesting the restoration move ahead, the project is finally on track, said Carolyn Mostello, tern project leader at the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife...

Plans call for a replacement sea wall that will be sloped to better dissipate waves, Mostello said. And the low-lying wet areas will be filled in with a rocky layer topped with sand, likely dredged from the Cape Cod Canal, said Marion Harbormaster Michael Cormier. The canal sand is compatible with Bird Island sand....

There are also plans in the works to fill in some wetlands on Ram Island, a project that has not yet gone out for bid, Mostello said. That island is roughly twice the size of Bird Island, while Penikese Island, which also hosts a significant seagull population, is about 75 acres... Globe.
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When King Philip stood

King Philip's War was a holy war waged with staggering brutality reminding readers of Iraq & Viet Nam.

Today, it's regarded as the highest point in Norton, a place where people hike and occasionally gather round campfires.  But during the late 17th century, Wampanoag Chief King Philip stood in front of the outcropping of boulders on what became known as Great Rocky Hill and could see Colonial troops marshalling from nearby Taunton.

People today know little of the Native American history of the boulders, collectively referred to as King Philip's Cave, Norton Historical Commission Chairman Christopher Cox says.

The rocky pile is off Stone Run Drive, off Plain Street near Bay Road and Lake Winnecunnet.

Now, a historical marker erected in September and funded by the Colonial Dames Seventeenth Century's Olde Boston Chapter is intended to educate the public about the site's Native American roots. Seaconke Wampanoag Chief George "Silver Wolf" Jennings visited the site Thursday for the first time... The Sun Chronicle.
Read about the bloodiest war in US history here.
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Returning from a brush with disaster
After losing 1,200 artworks, he found a new purpose

He still owns Nick's, but he now splits his time between Cape Cod and New York: He owns DNA Gallery in Provincetown and New York's Freight + Volume - his third New York venture and first solo one, after partnerships at the storied contemporary venue LFL Gallery and the art-book gallery Volume. He has studios in both places, as well.

"I like happy accidents," says artist Nick Lawrence, "the clumsiness of when paint spills and explodes."

The painter, a latter-day beatnik with curly brown hair and a goatee, wanders around Pierre Menard Gallery, gazing at some of his early works from the 1980s. They're gaudy with color and comic with angular, elongated men and women, the canvases built up and patched over with old hospital rags. Those rags, blots of paint, squiggles and scratches and drips are all part of Lawrence's improvisatory repertoire, which is now on view at the gallery in "Nick Lawrence: Notes From Underground 1982-2007, A 25-Year Survey."

The retrospective, which features close to 150 works, culminates an ordeal that began with a truly unhappy accident.

"Catastrophic" is the word Lawrence uses to describe what occurred in early 2004, when the artist stopped by his studio at the Boston Center for the Arts and found that 20 years' worth of paintings and works on paper, totaling almost 1,200 works of art, had gone missing... Globe.