Our rights to our ways
EDITORIAL

Recognizing that not all roads, paths and trails are ways open to the public and that the sanctity of private property is precious on this finite pile of sand is crucial to the survival of the unique cultural island tradition of sharing one's shoreline, woodland paths and dirt roads with the walking public that treads lightly.

This tradition, however, is by no means a right.

Yet, property lines drift, privet hedges pop up over night, rosehip bushes spill over into public paths and surveyors make mistakes. The insidious encroachment of private property owners onto public ways does impede the Nantucket citizen or visitor who wants to explore the island's public ways.

All existing rights-of-way leading to beaches, ponds, harbors and upland areas should be open to anyone who wants to use them. They should not be discreetly smothered by abutting private property owners, their markers destroyed and their entrances blocked with no-trespassing signs and fences. Nor should they be guarded as little-known paths to secret places on the island that only native Nantucketers know about, but rather, raised in prominence in the island geographical lexicon of special places to explore.

This is the basis for the Roads and Right of Way Committee's "A Plan for the Improvement of Public Access and Rights of Way within Nantucket County" and it forms a prescription for unearthing and reopening rights-of-way, posting and maintaining them and educating the public as to their locations.

The duty to keep all of the island's rights-of-way open for everyone to use falls to the town, so the Board of Selectmen's plan to hire a fulltime town surveyor is the logical, correct first step toward a healthy right-of-way system on Nantucket. The next, which needs to happen tonight, lands specifically on the Board of Selectmen/County Commissioners, which has the task of adopting this plan and seeing it through.

We commend the Roads and Right of Way Committee - Chairman Allen Reinhard, D. Anne Atherton, Nat Lowell, Sylvie O'Donnell, Charles Sayle, III, John Stackpole and Harvey Young - for developing this plan, and Francis Karttunen for her "History of Roads and Rights of Way in Nantucket County." And we ask that the town honor their work and the rights of Nantucketers to use these paths by endorsing this plan.