"Strange shift to be working," it seems to Maxine ...

Sat Sep 1 08:28:08 CDT 2018

"Island of Meadows" is what's written on the page but Isle of Meadows seems to be meant.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention!

Am 01.09.2018 um 14:51 schrieb ish mailian:

Did P write  **Island of Meadows** ? The Isle of Meadows in NYC is
conflated here with the **Island of Meadows** a bombing island?

Or a typo?

Isle of Meadows is a 100-acre (0.40 km2) uninhabited island in the New
York City borough of Staten Island in the United States. It is located
along the western side of Staten Island, where Fresh Kills empties
into the Arthur Kill. The island is owned by the city of New York. In
the 1990s, the island nearly became part of the Fresh Kills
Landfill.[citation needed] It is now a nature preserve providing
important meadow and salt marsh nesting habitat for herons, ibises,
and egrets, and is not accessible to the public.[1]
On Sat, Sep 1, 2018 at 8:46 AM ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com><mailto:ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:

NAVY BOMB SITE RATTLES THE VINEYARD

A version of this article appears in print on May 24, 1987

Nomans Land, one of seven United States coastal islands retained by
the Navy and the only one in the Northeast, is an island of meadows
and bluffs, of stone beaches and salt water ponds. They are littered
by over 40 years worth of live and practice ordinance. There are
rusted fins from dummy bombs and shells from .50-caliber machine guns
and tracer bullets. There are three-foot wide and three-foot deep
craters from the practice artillery the Navy uses today. Some of the
old live ordinance, the Navy acknowledges, is still unexploded.
Wildlife and Bombs

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Continue reading the main story

The Navy has been bombing Nomans since 1943, when it began leasing the
island from the Joshua Crane family. In 1952 the Government bought it
from the Cranes for $67,500. It was and is legally a part of the
Vineyard town of Chilmark.

Ironically, Nomans Land is also a wildlife refuge, managed by the
United States Fish and Wildlife Service, home to herons, terns and
thousands of gulls. In 1970, the Navy and the Interior Department
agreed that the military would stay away from particularly fragile
parts of the island and allow periodic visits by biologists of the
Fish and Wildlife Service.

The biologists say the bombs are better for the wildlife than people.

On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 6:36 AM Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de><mailto:lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

... The industrial racket from back in the marshland behind the giant cliffs of ruin has grown continuous. Now and then workers, in long-standing Sanitation Department tradition, have lengthy exhilarated screaming exchanges. "Strange shift to be working," it seems to Maxine.
   "Yeah. Nice overtime for somebody. Almost like they're up to something they don't want anybody to know about."
   "When did anybody ever want to know?" March lapsing for a moment into the bag-lady character in her commencement speech at Kugelblitz, the one person dedicated to salvaging everything the city wants to deny. "Either they're playing catch-up or they're getting it ready to open for dump business again."
   A presidential visit? Somebody's making a movie? Who knows.
   Early seagulls show up from somewhere, begin inspecting the menu. The sky takes on a brushed-aluminum underglow. A night heron with breakfast in its beak ascends from its long watch at the edge of the Island of Meadows ...

Bleeding Edge, pp. 168-169

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