In the recess of summer, when the streets throb and the harbors fill and the Vineyard feels like the center of the universe, it’s possible to forget you are adrift on an island seven miles out to sea. In the winter, not so much. 

That was certainly the case in February of 1977, when the All-Island Selectmen’s Association voted to secede from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and form the nation’s fifty-first state. In an act of generosity yet to be repeated or repaid, they also voted to allow Nantucket to join. 

The selectmen were responding to a redistricting bill that would cull the state House of Representatives from 240 to 160 members. Dukes and Nantucket Counties, which had historically enjoyed their own representatives, would henceforth share one delegate with parts of Cape Cod. “If we don’t get our own representation, we should secede,” Everett Poole, one of the architects of the plan, recalled saying. And so the movement was born. 

Over the next few months, it unfolded with revolutionary fervor and glee. Barbara St. Pierre Hotchkiss penned an anthem. Fran Forman designed a flag. Marches on Boston were arranged, invitations from other states entertained. And at town meetings all across the Island, citizens overwhelmingly voiced their support while offering their best imitations of the Founding Fathers. (“Say it so loud it peels the gilt right off the State House dome!” thundered Poole at the Chilmark meeting. “Massachusetts, though they urge us to secede, I will remain true to you, Home of the Cod,” retorted another.)

Soon after, state-building fervor began to fizzle. Summer was coming, schedules were filling up, and despite all their lobbying, Islanders knew their efforts were unlikely to succeed. In May, the redistricting bill was passed by the legislature. 

Decades on, selectman John Alley, one of the movement’s leaders, joked that the ordeal had been little more than a way to get through a long and especially brutal winter. “We rode the crest of the news story until darned near summer!” he said. But underpinning the winter shenanigans had been serious concerns. 

The redistricting bill would be “in the clearest and simplest terms a denial of the basic principles of democracy….To amalgamate [the Islands] with Cape Cod would be to hand them over to exploitation by antagonistic and predatory forces,” wrote the Vineyard Gazette. Chilmark selectman Lewis G. King pleaded further. He urged the redistricting committee to look on this not just as an act of disenfranchisement but a dilution of identity and Island concerns. “Our problem is our loneliness,” he said. “We are given short shrift almost all the time. No matter how hard you try to understand, no matter how compassionate you are, you cannot understand how lonely we are.”

He, Poole, Alley, and so many others were not just passing time. They were reminding us, using the biggest bullhorn they could wield, that we cling to a remote spit of land whose edges are eroding and therefore need to be monitored and protected.

Still, it’s no coincidence their entreaties occurred in the quietest of months. These days, that’s still when most of the important, sometimes lonely work of shepherding the Island is accomplished. When the breakneck pace of summer yields and the center of the universe recedes from our doorstep, the Vineyard grows small, its citizens draw close, and its woes and worries and simple joys grow loud. We huddle around old tables in older buildings to debate zoning bylaws and craft master plans. We join committees and boards. We curse the Steamship Authority and the traffic and vow to do something about it. And we raise our mittened fists and all manner of hell in school gymnasiums and churches – at least until summer returns.