OUR VIEW — A modest plea on behalf of focus. The lake association has formed a committee to study the public dock, and we wish it well — and we wish it, above all else, to remain a committee about the dock.

The danger here is not idleness; the danger is ambition. A committee formed to address a single, soluble problem — in this case a public dock a year or two past its prime — has a way of discovering, by its second or third meeting, that the dock is connected to the landing, and the landing to the parking, and the parking to the long-deferred question of the entire shoreline, until the original and answerable question lies buried beneath a General Inquiry Into Everything, which no committee in the history of this county has resolved and several have quietly died inside of.

We have seen it before. We are, in another matter, watching it now — sixty-nine years into a conversation about a single stop sign that long ago stopped being about the sign. A committee that holds to its task can fix a dock in a season. A committee that wanders can study a shoreline until its members age out of caring. The difference is not intelligence or goodwill, both of which our neighbors possess in abundance; the difference is discipline, and the willingness to say, when the talk drifts, that this is the dock committee, and the dock is what we came about.

So: fix the dock. Price the lumber, pick a Saturday, and fix the dock. The shoreline will still be there to worry over afterward, as it has been all along. But a town earns the right to its large questions by first answering its small ones, and the small one, this spring, has a name, and the name is the dock. Let the dock committee be a dock committee. It is a higher calling than it sounds.