The little sign in John Sylvia’s Four Winds Craft Guild accomplished something almost too perfect to make up. It became one of the most photographed things on Nantucket.
Nantucket Essays
Steamship Therapy
There is a specific moment, somewhere out past Brant Point, when the island finally lets go of you.
It doesn’t happen at the dock. It doesn’t happen pulling away from Straight Wharf while tourists wave cocktails around on the upper deck and kids throw popcorn at gulls. For a while, Nantucket still hangs onto you. You can still see the church steeples over the rooftops. The masts in the harbor still stand upright against the sky. The shoreline remains detailed enough that you can pick out individual houses, and, for a few minutes, your mind keeps trying to convince itself that you’re still there.
The Perfect Gray of Nantucket Island
People come to Nantucket looking for color.
They expect blue hydrangeas, white sailboats, red sunsets bleeding across the harbor, and the sharp green of beach grass moving in the wind. The postcards sell the island in bright tones. Summer magazines photograph it under impossible June sunlight with women in linen dresses carrying wicker bags down shell paths toward champagne dinners.
Scratch Up the Quahogs
Well would you look at that: Memorial Day weekend was a few days ago and Nantucket is insta-busy. Not surprising, of course, but it does feel often sudden this year. Perhaps it’s due to the lack of any real warm weather. Or maybe it’s that this national holiday was celebrated a week earlier than usual this year. Whatever it may be, it’s busy! Joggers, bikers, e-bikers, rental cars, Ubers, summer neighbors, people riding scooters or those crazy big wheel skateboard thingies – the island is very people-y all at once.
Sing It with Me
by Steve “Tuna” Tornovish Sing it with me, my fellow fishing types: “It’s the most miserable time of the year…” We Nantucket fishers have been watching for weeks as the striped bass migration moves slowly north from the Chesapeake Bay. Then into the Connecticut River. Throughout the Rhode Island costal […]
Semper Fi, Michael
If you’re not smart, you need smart friends. Yes you do. And that has long been my motto, the key to whatever limited success that I’ve had over these many years. Thank you, smart friends. You know who you are, I’m sure!
Healing with Fishing
Island people are meant to stay on islands. Them’s the rules. But every now and again, things happen and rules must be broken. This is the tale of a wayward island kid and his recent encounters in a slice of the real world.
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