The Inkwell Beach is a symbol of pride for many Islanders, especially African Americans, whose families have visited this stretch of sand for generations. The beach - which is no longer than a football field and bookmarked on both sides by jetties - does not have the royal vistas of Lucy Vincent or the commercial appeal of South Beach. Nonetheless, summer days find the beach jam-packed with sunbathers and swimmers. People will show up at the crack of dawn to stake out a spot, just around the same time that members of the well-known Polar Bear Club are taking their morning swim.

The irony of Oak Bluffs is that people so loved its beaches, they set about destroying them. They built so close to the ocean’s edge they had to defend their development with a seawall. And the seawall prevented the natural replenishment of the sand, so the beach eroded away. And now, as Dr. S. Jeffress Williams, senior coastal marine geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Woods Hole makes quite clear, there are only two choices. Either you remove the concrete armor from the shore and retreat, or you artificially recreate the beaches by bringing sand from somewhere else.

Revetments, armories, groins, jetties, ripraps — the walls of stone built to protect a length of bluff from erosion go by many names, but in whatever guise they pose a growing threat to the Vineyard shoreline, according to several prominent Island environmentalists.

At the Bend in the Road beach in Edgartown this week, summer seemed a lifetime away. The gently sloping beach dimpled with footprints is gone, replaced by large pipes and construction equipment stacked amid mountainous piles of sand. Vineyard beaches often change in the winter, washed by powerful ocean storms. But the Bend in the Road beach this off-season is especially unrecognizable, and none of the changes are natural.