by Shawn Roberts
I was recently reading a collection of articles called Nantucket Voices by Mary Miles when I came across a passage that made me chuckle. In one essay, an old islander named Bill Broughton, who many will still remember, explains what qualifies somebody as a “real” Nantucketer.
“To my knowledge,” Bill says, “you have to have at least three generations back of you on the island—else you’re called a coof.”
A coof, the book explains, is an old island expression for an off-islander, likely derived from a word meaning “fool.” That already felt wonderfully Nantucket to me. The island has always had a gift for turning geography into social philosophy.
But then another passage appears later in the book from Charlie Sayle, who says with what the author describes as a “slightly wicked grin”: “Now, my wife is not a native. She was not born here…but her people settled here in 1685. She was born in South Weymouth, and brought back to the island when she was three months old.”
The joke, of course, is that despite her family tracing back nearly three hundred years on Nantucket, the unfortunate technicality of being born offisland still somehow disqualified her from full native status in the eyes of certain island purists. And, honestly, I love that story. Especially because both these men, who I grew up knowing as incredible islanders, were in fact not from here. Not because it’s reasonable: because it’s completely unreasonable in the most Nantucket way imaginable.
On an island this isolated, identity has always become strangely specific. Thirty miles of water creates a different psychological ecosystem. The Atlantic doesn’t just separate Nantucket physically from the mainland; it distorts the scale itself. Tiny distinctions become enormous. Family names stretch across centuries. Entire social categories emerge from who arrived when and under what circumstances.
Native….Year-rounder…Summer person…Washashore…Coof—everybody gets sorted eventually. But the older I get, the more I think Nantucket quietly operates under two completely different definitions of belonging at the exact same time.
There’s the official version, tied to bloodlines and birthplaces and old family histories stretching back into whaling days. Then there’s the deeper, unspoken version the island eventually reveals through weather, labor, and endurance.
The first one is inherited. The second one is earned. And sometimes they overlap beautifully. Sometimes they don’t at all.
I’ve known people born on Nantucket who never seemed emotionally connected to the island beyond nostalgia and real estate, and I’ve known people who arrived accidentally at twenty-two with nothing but a backpack and somehow became woven permanently into the fabric of the place after enough winters.
Because eventually Nantucket asks the same questions of everybody.
Can you survive February?
Can you tolerate isolation?
Can you handle inconvenience without emotional collapse?
Can you adapt when the weather changes your plans completely?
Can you contribute something useful when things go wrong?
The ocean does not care where your grandparents were born. That’s the great equalizer out here.
Some of the strongest islanders I’ve ever met technically came from somewhere else. They arrived to wait tables for a summer, crew on fishing boats, teach school, paint houses, fix engines, or simply disappear for a while from whatever version of themselves existed in “America.” Then slowly, almost without realizing it, the island changed them.
That happens constantly on Nantucket.
The place has always attracted drifters of a certain type. Not reckless drifters exactly. More like people searching for a harder, more grounded version of life. Artists. Sailors. Carpenters. Burned-out finance guys trying desperately to recover their nervous systems. Women escaping bad marriages. Men trying to outrun themselves and discovering the island is too small for that kind of thing.
Some stay for three months—some have stayed for fifty years.
You can usually tell which ones will last.
The people who survive Nantucket long-term tend to understand something fundamental: island life requires negotiation rather than control. The ferry gets canceled. The fog rolls in. The housing situation becomes absurd. Summer chaos suddenly collapses into winter silence almost overnight.
The mainland rewards efficiency. Nantucket rewards resilience.
That difference changes people.
There’s also an old island instinct I’ve always respected beneath all the social hierarchy and absurdity: usefulness eventually matters more than pedigree.
If your truck is the only one capable of pulling somebody out of a snowbank during a February storm, nobody suddenly pauses to investigate your ancestry. If your roof starts peeling apart during a northeaster, you stop caring very quickly whether the carpenter fixing it technically qualifies as native enough.
Reality cuts through performance faster on islands.
And maybe that’s why some of the deepest belonging here develops so quietly. Nobody really announces your acceptance into Nantucket life. It just slowly happens through repetition. Someone saves you a seat at the counter. An old fisherman finally tells you where the stripers are running. A local contractor stops calling you “Cupcake” and starts using your first name. People stop asking whether you’re staying for the winter because they unconsciously assume you already are.
That’s island trust. Not dramatic: just accumulated gradually through time.
Of course, the tensions still exist. They probably always will. Nantucket now balances uneasily between becoming a luxury product and remaining an actual living community. Entire neighborhoods sit dark for most of the year while working people scramble for rentals. Summer wealth reshapes the island constantly. Every year another piece of old Nantucket disappears beneath expensive reinvention. But underneath all that, the deeper culture still revolves around endurance.
Who stays.
Who adapts.
Who respects the water.
Who contributes more than they consume.
Who understands that weather remains more powerful than status.
That’s the real island citizenship test. Not where you happened to emerge from the womb.
Honestly, some of the most “local” people I’ve ever met technically arrived from Jamaica, Ireland, El Salvador, New Hampshire, or somewhere else entirely. Meanwhile, I’ve met native islanders so disconnected from the actual spirit of Nantucket that they felt more foreign than tourists. Place identity is strange that way. Belonging has less to do with origin than participation.
The Atlantic understands this instinctively. The tide does not care whether driftwood floated from Maine or Nova Scotia. After enough years in saltwater, everything eventually gets shaped by the same conditions.
People do too.
Which brings me back to that old term: washashore.
At first glance it sounds temporary. Almost dismissive. Like somebody who arrived accidentally and might disappear just as quickly. But many of the people who truly fall in love with the island arrive exactly that way: unintentionally.
They weren’t born on Nantucket. They became Nantucket…slowly. Through winters, through heartbreak, through work, through weather, through enough years tending the same garden.
And eventually the island stops feeling like a place they moved to and starts feeling like the only place their nervous system fully recognizes anymore. That transformation cannot be inherited.
It has to happen gradually, through friction and time.
Which, ironically enough, may be one of the most Nantucket things of all.
