To the editor:

It was with great enjoyment that I read Kate Chase’s thoughtful missive “Westport's awful ‘fork in the road’ needs to go away” (Shorelines, April 30).  Ahoy ho! for indeed it is an outrage that we are made witness to such an egregious aberration of proper roadside aesthetic.

I share her conviction that the collective dignity of the fair gentry of The Harbor is unfairly skewered by this offensive abomination. What a cruel irony that an instrument once representative of good manner and social grace is now turned back against us in such a bastardized form.  Are we to have our very civility mocked liked this? 

Nay, I concur with Ms. Chase that Westport must hold a plebiscite at once, lest our fair town slip down the wayward slope toward the debauchery of lawn tchotchkes like garden gnomes, mirror balls, and dare I say … pink flamingos. 

It is clear that the better among us have a moral obligation to stop the transgressors in their horrid crusade against rural vistas.  While I certainly agree with Ms. Chase’s call to arms that this issue is worthy of a town referendum (move aside, school funding), this is simply not enough. 

The fork must be burned, not in effigy, but in actual flames!  I propose a roving fire pit with the insidious fork burned at its own stake, a Hardyesqe skimmity-ride through Central Village for all Westport citizens to publicly witness. 

Rise up good people! Only through our righteous and superior judgment will the commoners be saved from their own poor taste and crude preferences, and only through our grand and self-important public pronouncements will we stem a rising tide of tastelessness that threatens us all. 

We cannot and will not be trodden upon by the lowbrow indulgences of a pedestrian palate, manifest in the roadside installation of an oversized utensil, unaware of all the shame and disgrace it embodies.  What untold sins against humanity will ensue should this travesty endure? 

The fork is merely a harbinger of what looms; if we allow the crassness of fork to prevail, next may come the knife—in the form of pink plastic kitsch on front lawns everywhere—that cuts against the moral fabric and social order to which all we residents of the Harbor are all rightfully entitled.  The horror … the horror.

Eunice Wentworth Howell

Westport