News and Events for Nantucket Island
We humans tend to be territorial. People hang out in areas that they like, staying in their comfort zones. Also, we generally stick to routines and, thus, can be fairly predictable. For example, my wife and I have our favorite spot where we sit for church every Sunday. We would be all out of sorts if we had to move to a different location. Doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it? No, but that’s how humans are. And all of these strange traits are directly applicable to us fishing folks, to be sure.
My morning routine goes like this: Step one – make coffee. Step two – check email while drinking coffee. Step three usually involves looking at the world news and being disgusted. Let’s just ignore step three for now, shall we? Much too depressing.
I have been vexed by a closet. Inside, on the floor, drifts of clothes, papers, hats, swim suits, and about fifty shoes in one shape or another. On the walls, on various shelves, are vases, plates, platters, and card board boxes with specific tools that we no longer need. I am not sure if the automatic bubble machine is strictly necessary at this stage of my life
According to off-island enthusiasts, visiting Nantucket was something like a trip to a living history museum. As with Rome, the ancient glory of Nantucket had faded, but its heritage remained. An article in Harper’s Magazine from that time drew a connection between Nantucket’s main product— whale oil for lighting—and the experience of the “good old days” that Nantucket now represented. Between the ages of “lusty barbarism” (lighted by tallow) on the one side and “overstrained and diseased civilization” (lighted by kerosene) on the other, stood Nantucket and the “golden age of reason”— lighted by whale oil. Nantucket’s predominantly Federalist-style homes embodied “all the Renaissance classicism of Andrea Palladio as reinterpreted by Inigo Jones, Christopher Wren, and Robert Adam, and then stripped down to its bare essentials for trans-Atlantic shipment, whence it found its way to the houses of American rum merchants and whaling captains. It was the École des Beaux Arts simplified—the grand formal orders of antiquity that America had long consigned to a cobwebby corner of the national attic and forgotten. Above all, it was restrained and dignified, calming, orderly, and elegant, an architecture worthy of the forward-looking, rationalistic culture of the America of the late nineteenth century.”
On the south shore of the island, downwind of the sewer beds, you can rent a house for $25,000 a week. For that money, you get two master bedrooms and two guest bedrooms. Each bedroom has an “en suite” bathroom and a television set. The master bedroom, of course, features a “state of the art” shower. The house is less than a mile downwind from the beach..
The Maine turnpike goes through a lot of nature. It wanders through hundreds of miles of pine trees, oaks, and salt water rivers. On our way south from Boothbay, with presents in the back, cupcakes in the front, Dar Williams on Spotify, and the air conditioning humming, we came across Momma Duck.
We have had a wonderful July. On a day that a billionaire would have designed for his pleasure, I walked up Pleasant Street and headed to town. This summer, these hydrangea have bloomed, as have the hedges. Somebody loved them. Somebody pruned them by hand, fertilized the dirt with the right acidic mix to get bridal white blooms, and gave them lots of water.
I found myself, this spring, defending my summer reading list. Now, as an old white man, I am used to a certain sort of academic battle, and I have generally chosen the prudent retreat over the final climactic fight. The years of assigning Huckleberry Finn for summer reading, or John Steinbeck, or even Agatha Christie have gone with purple photocopies.
