Time & Tide (3 page)

Squirrels?

BECAUSE OF ITS PROXIMITY TO THE GULF Stream, Nantucket is usually 10 percent cooler than the mainland in the summer and 10 percent warmer in the winter. This means that usually you can get by with a couple of heavy sweaters (and the obligatory long underwear for those living in unheated barns) until Christmas. January, February, and March tend to be very windy, and somehow psychologically debilitating. Spring is a foreign concept on Nantucket. Sometimes it doesn't rain in April and May, and a lot of times it does. June is muddy.

Nevertheless there was something about this mild common hardship that drew people together, that helped to form the spirit of Nantucket, our “rock.” In the seventies it was easy to meet people and make friends. A certain civility prevailed, presumably because there was no escape from each other. There were only so many places—be it The Hub, Cy's Green Coffee Pot, the Chicken Box—and you could be sure if you ran into somebody in one place you'd see them a couple of days later in another.

It was such a small town that sometimes odd, nice things would happen. Maggie, my girlfriend, lived on the westernmost edge of the island near Madaket Millie, I lived on Polpis Harbor halfway to 'Sconset. One week to the day after Maggie moved in with me her mail started to be delivered to my post office box. No instructions had been given, no forms filled out. It just happened. I imagine Sinclair Lewis would have thought it was terrible. We thought it was wonderful.

THIRTY YEARS AGO the ferry ran from Woods Hole on the laconic Winter Schedule during the off-season, and on the expanded Summer Schedule during the season, which was a good deal shorter then than it is now. The ferry loomed large in those days, bringing copies of the
New York Times
to The Hub, the single store allowed to sell them, as well as bringing milk, meat and eggs, mail, lumber, and other essentials. The ferry was an institution, like the Atheneum, or the windmill, or the clock tower above the Unitarian church. It carried people, of course, but not many during the off-season. If you had to go to the mainland to get a root canal or for some other essential business, stepping onto the ferry on your way back was like stepping onto the island itself. You would probably know more than half the people on board, and so the almost three-hour ride would pass quickly if the sea was calm. One felt halfway home.

Or, at least in the case of one island restaurateur, perhaps more than that. With a weighted suitcase strapped to each wrist, he stepped over the rail behind a storage area and launched himself into Nantucket Sound, never to be seen again. We all knew the poor fellow, and no one was surprised, somehow.

IT ISN'T EASY to get across how fragile, how vulnerable the island really is. The words have been repeated so many times about so many places as to become meaningless. Nantucket's highly exposed acres contain about a third of the heath lands, or moors, in America. Nantucket is not typically American, concerned with its large treasures like the Grand Canyon, the redwoods, the Mississippi, or the deserts and mountains. Nantucket is in the realm of the small. The small but valuable endangered species such as the piping plover, the Muskeget vole, the osprey. Dozens of species of plants, mosses, berries, and grasses exist nowhere else. The almost unbelievable complexity of a hundred-square-yard salt marsh can be destroyed by one house too many, one failed septic system. Nantucket has a greater variety of vegetation than any other place similar in size in America.

Excluding marine species, and further excluding birds, animal life is less varied. Deer have become a pest as in so many other Eastern built-up areas where they must compete for space and rub shoulders with humans. (My wife cannot leave potted flowers on the deck at night. They'll be gone in the morning. Once a deer chased her into the shed.) Pheasant, rabbit, and feral cats survive in the scrub; turtles lumber from pond to pond.

But until fairly recently there were no squirrels. When we first came as college kids there were none, and no one could remember when there ever had been. The oral history tells of a truckload of lumber coming across from Woods Hole on the ferry with a family of stowaway squirrels sometime in the sixties. By the seventies people would occasionally call Wes Tiffany at the University of Massachusetts Field Station to report a sighting. By the eighties squirrels were all over the island, fighting for every tree, every sheltered area in the winter, every hollow log. They too had become pests.

When, much later, I started teaching on the mainland at various universities, The Barn was usually closed up for the winters and became, in its partially sheltered location, attractive to mice, owls, and most particularly to squirrels, who chewed through the outside soffits under the eaves, created a large colony and nursery comfortably insulated by chewed-up quilts stolen from the inside of the house and stuffed, piece by piece into the long, dark, and snug expanse of the soffits area. When my middle son Will and our friend Phil were watching a rental movie one October evening, they became aware of a small group of squirrels watching along with them from one of the beams. Although the philosophy of The Barn with regard to other life forms had been pretty much live and let live—we called it “organic living”—Will and Phil decided things had gone too far. The next day, using borrowed thirty-foot aluminum ladders, they pried open the long boards under the eaves and held on for dear life as hundreds of terrified squirrels flew off in every direction.

“The word is overused,” Will told me on the telephone, “but it was
awesome.
”

This tribal catastrophe no doubt struck deeply into the collective squirrel mythos, since, once the soffits were rebuilt and the few holes covered with copper sheathing, the rodents never returned. The Barn itself must have taken on some powerful squirrel juju for it to still be off limits after all these years, generation after generation.

For many more years the open moors and bramble teemed with dog ticks. Every dog owner's nightly ritual was to sit down with pooch and pull out blood-sucking insects by hand, and deposit them in a jar of kerosene or the like. A disagreeable nuisance, but then, with a degree of speed perhaps only possible on a small island, the dog ticks almost disappeared. I haven't seen one in the last ten years. (And my dog runs free, swims in the harbor, plays in the woods and the salt marsh.) An ecological mystery, followed by the less mysterious and no less sudden ubiquity of the tiny deer tick. A serious matter. Minuscule insects no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence, catching the occasional ride with a mouse or a deer, latching on to tall grass, reeds, wildflowers, waiting it seems, for a human to come along. Finding skin soft enough and thin enough to penetrate and begin the exchange, the tick takes blood while leaving behind the spirochete for Lyme disease or the germ for babeseosis. This sets the stage for potentially dangerous afflictions, which most people shake off, but others endure for years, worrying about the rare complications involving damage to the heart and the nervous system. In the summer, at a lawn party, it is not unusual to see a young woman with a small I.V. drip attached somewhere on her person, the thin plastic tube running down her bare arm to the firmly taped needle on the inside of her wrist. Continuous, long-term antibiotic therapy that doesn't interfere with mobility. A perverse kind of jewelry. An island status symbol.

If there were any Indians left, and were there a shaman among them, he might speak of the land resisting interference from humans. The need to dominate nature is deep inside us all. Lawns, for instance, are a statement of ownership, dominion, and what used to be called husbandry. On the mainland lawns seem innocuous enough, but as more and more of them are created on Nantucket problems have arisen. Chemicals seeping into the ground water, nitrogen from fertilizer impacting the marshes, ponds, and inlets. (When I built the barn in '69 we went down ten feet for water. Modernizing the plumbing in 1998 we thought it prudent to go down ninety feet, where the water is presumably purer.) People are advised to wear masks when they mow, because the lawn grass attracts rabbits whose dung lies uncovered, becomes powdered and airborne from the force of the mower blades, and sometimes has the power to sicken unto death. In terms of their ecological impact, no one knows how many lawns the island can sustain, even as more are cultivated. Fifty years ago it seemed people took pleasure in the unique, delicate wilderness of the island. Now it seems people are coming for different reasons, and may be made slightly uneasy by what they misperceive as bleakness. So they “improve” their plot of land.

The White Elephant Gig

IT WAS MY SECOND WINTER ON NANTUCKET when I first learned my social security number by heart. The unemployment office was a fairly large room on the second floor of the American Legion Hall at the edge of town. People sat on benches, in an arrangement reminiscent of church, facing a large desk behind which sat Wendy, an aging waitress familiar to all of us, who'd been lucky enough to snag a state job in the off-season. She would pull out a file, call the number, and if it was yours, you went up to go through the formalities and get your check. Although she knew just about everybody in the room on a first-name basis, she was all business, never so much as cracking a smile or giving any sign of recognition. It seemed a bit overdone to me, since on Nantucket there was certainly no shame attached to being on unemployment or using food stamps. Half the working people of the island were on unemployment. I was eligible because I'd played the piano at a fancy hotel six nights a week for three and a half months during the previous summer.

It was (and still is) called the White Elephant and was owned by Sherburne, which was mostly owned by Mr. Beineke. Beineke had a manservant, a middle-aged Italian I will call Flavianno, who had been Mr. Beineke's favorite towel boy at the New York Athletic Club, and whom he had hired away from that famous and exclusive institution to serve the Beineke household in various capacities.

One of Flavianno's responsibilities was to keep an eye on the restaurant, the bar, and the piano lounge. He did not run these parts of the hotel, but simply dropped in every now and then, making his rounds and trying to look important. He made it clear he had no use for me, or for the jazz I played, or for the mostly young and informal crowd I drew. He once made a waiter throw out a gay couple because they were in violation of the dress code, which called for jackets. From that night on I kept two or three jackets stashed behind the bandstand to lend to people who might need them. He was furious of course, and for the rest of the summer harassed me, cursed me to my face, and presumably tried to get me fired. But I was breaking records for bar sales, and pulling in people for the restaurant. Everybody was making money and there would have been protests from the staff. He had to be content with trying to push me to the point where I would lose my temper and do something rash, but I kept my cool.

It was an uncomfortable situation, to be sure, but not without a momentary silver lining.

I should explain that I had a remote connection to the Kennedy family. My older sister's husband had run Jack's presidential campaign in Madison, Wisconsin, so I had tagged along to the inaugural. When Bobby eventually ran, Norman Mailer and I were to read at a fund-raiser at Town Hall in New York. Bobby was assassinated two days before the event, which of course did not take place. The Kennedy organization was nothing if not efficient, so years later, when Senator Ted came over to Nantucket for a small cocktail party/fund-raiser at Beineke's house, the organization somehow knew I was on the island and sent me an invitation. The party conflicted with my schedule in the piano lounge (I played two shifts, one before dinner and one after) but I didn't hesitate, and showed up at Beineke's right on time. He introduced himself—we had never met, nor was he aware of my employment at the hotel. We made small talk as other people began arriving. When he moved away, Senator Kennedy came in from the dining room and caught my eye. We stood together talking for several moments when someone offered us a tray of hors d'oeuvres. “These little toasted things are good,” Teddy said to me. “Try one.”

Flavianno stood holding the tray.

“I will,” I said, looking my nemesis straight in the eye, reaching out slowly, my hand hovering over the plate to draw out the moment. Not my finest hour, perhaps, but one which I nevertheless enjoyed. Nantucket was a very small place back then, and such things could happen. Flavianno never bothered me again.

Golf Games

I CAME TO GOLF FAIRLY LATE IN LIFE, WHEN two of my pals more or less forced me to go over to Skinner's and give it a try. Skinner's—I can't remember its official name, but Skinner Coffin ran the place—was an ancient nine-hole course open to all at a dollar a hole. Nothing fancy, but well maintained. Phil and Tom gave me a few pointers, showed me how to hold the club, told me to keep my head down during the swing, and finally teed me up. I addressed the ball with a two-iron, swung smoothly, and got off a clean, straight shot that soared out 110 yards to land at the edge of the green, where it proceeded to run up halfway to the pin.

“Hey! This is fun!” I said. “I see what you guys mean.”

Tom gave me a slightly puzzled look. Phil just laughed. It would be two years and hundreds of missed, bungled, dribbling, slicing, hooking shots later before I managed to drive to that particular green again. I turned out to be a poor golfer, shooting in the high nineties most days while Phil and Tom cruised along in the low eighties. I kept on, though, unable to forget the almost orgasmic thrill of that first shot.

We were three guys from very different backgrounds who enjoyed one another's company. (A few winters on the island and you found out who you liked pretty rapidly.) Tom, from the South, was a builder, soon to invent a one-handed pepper mill (The Peppergun!) and make his fortune. Phil came from Indiana and worked as a master carpenter as well as sommelier during the season. I was a writer from New York. The game of golf brought us even closer together, and that was definitely one of its pleasures.

The rituals were reassuring. Everybody had to show up, first of all, each of us by that act recommitting ourselves to a certain tacit camaraderie. Gathering at the first tee, fussing with our bags and carts, there was a pleasant sense of anticipation. We knew exactly what we would be doing for the next hour and a half, and we knew exactly the parameters of our activity—drive, approach, putt, move to the next hole, and do it again. A comfortable rhythm at a comfortable pace. There was no sense of competition—even between Tom and Phil, who played at more or less the same level of skill—rather the sense that each individual was playing against himself, against the maddening vagaries of golf itself, so deceptively simple on the surface, so infinitely complex underneath. For us there were no external variables except, occasionally, the wind. The challenge was almost entirely unchanging and static—the pesky fourth hole always the same every time you approached. The variables were within—inside our individual bodies and minds. Which is why the game can drive people nuts. Which is why it's probably not such a good idea to play the game alone for any length of time.

We knew the story of Chester Wilmont, after all, the local lawyer, unmarried, upstanding citizen, on the town board, etc., who played Skinner's every day, always alone, sometimes mumbling abstractedly or making gestures in the air. It was Skinner himself, lounging on the porch of the clubhouse, who watched him fiveputt the fourth hole and sat transfixed while Chester, a big man, removed one by one the clubs he had inherited from his father, breaking them over his knee, taking off his shoes, and leaving everything—bag, busted irons, shoes, balls, tees, scorecard, pencils—right there on the grass. He walked to his car without looking back and was never seen on a Nantucket golf course again.

“He got too deep in the tunnel,” Phil explained.

“What tunnel?” I asked.

“The tunnel of self,” Tom said.

“I bet he birdied the first three holes.”

They nodded together and shook their heads at the folly of mankind.

My first season was to spend time in the tunnel myself—frustration, anger, the desire to rush or to do it over, to sink into strings of mulligans—but my friends always pulled me out with a word or two. They knew how lucky we were playing on such a beautiful course, high on the island with views of the sea, and never crowded. (It was this extraordinary natural beauty, no doubt, that led to the recent construction of an eighteen-hole course just a half mile away. An exclusive club whose memberships go at three hundred thousand dollars a pop. I kid you not.) I became familiar with an inherent tension in the game that first season—contemplation of the calm beauty of nature, the immutable physical reality of the course itself, the fairways, the greens, even the slowly changing colors of the rough, in other words the
outside,
against the need to maintain an emotional calmness on the
inside,
to maintain a sense of balance between yourself and the world as you walked through the game and its tests.

So we took golf fairly seriously those first couple of years—nothing obsessive, but we treated the experience with respect. We went out to the other end of the island and tried the links at Miacomet, which was in those days a mildly funky workingman's course, with beer, hot dogs, and potato chips. We were not snobs, but when a couple of guys from the lumber yard teed off in front of us with some special gizmo that allowed them to hit the ball at waist level with a baseball bat, we went back to the simplicity at Skinner's. We got ourselves invited to the old Sankaty Head Golf Club and played what must be one of the most gorgeous eighteen-hole courses in the Northeast. It seemed odd to ride the golf carts, however, as if a certain purity was lost.

It may be that if you learn the game late in life, the particular course you learn on has a kind of lock on you you'll never escape. For me, the only course that counts is Skinner's. Only on those nine holes can I measure my progress (if indeed there is any) or feel any real sense of accomplishment. Maybe I got too serious, but for one reason or another by the third year the element of laughter—which had always been there to some extent—began to blossom in our threesome. Phil was a brilliant mimic, with dozens of accents and characters in his repertoire, and was capable of switching personae during the course of the game. I believe that was how it started. Not jokes, but entirely free improvisation, spontaneous role-playing, and other nonsense in a sort of Marx Brothers–Monty Python hybrid. We got really silly, in a way that would probably not have been possible in any other setting. In terms of my golf scores, I had more or less reached my individual plateau, going up or down only a few points from one game to the next. And so, with a kind of mild and delicious hysteria, we began to deconstruct the game of golf, or rather to deconstruct our behavior while playing it.

Oh, there's really no way to adequately describe it, or to directly describe it, but the fact is I would sometimes simply fall to the grass helpless with laughter at some riff of Phil's as a Pakistani intellectual, or at our collective serial description of a Stalinist golf course, or some other foolishness. I remember once as Tom and I sat on the bench at the seventh—a “smoking hole” by tradition, Phil with his Old Golds, Tom with Marlboros, and myself with Merits (we have all since stopped)—while Phil teed up, bent over to pluck an offending blade of grass, and fiddled around as usual. Finally, he was ready. Tom and I maintained the silence and stillness appropriate to this charged moment. Phil took his backswing as usual, but then instead of keeping his head down he raised it and looked directly into my eyes. He twisted his face into a mask, into some demented gargoyle, and never broke eye contact with me as he swung, catching the ball perfectly for a 150-yard drive. Then, he winked.

Or the day when we agreed that I simply swung too fast, that I should work on smoothing things out. So I tried singing, just a phrase of something familiar as I commenced my backswing—“Some day my PRINCE will come”—timing it all so I'd hit the ball at the word
prince
. The boys thought this was a swell idea, and we made a rule that for the rest of the week everybody would have to do it on the fourth and fifth holes.

“People, people who need PEOPLE . . .” or “I'll be down to get you in a TAXI, honey,” or “I get no KICK from champagne.”

Eventually we moved on to a variation in which the word “lunch” had to be substituted wherever the lyric said “love.”

“I can't give you anything but LUNCH, baby.” Or “Once I had a secret LUNCH.”

Oh my goodness, we laughed. And it felt wonderful.

And so I was released. We all knew I was never going to be good enough to play at the high levels that can keep the game fascinating for a lifetime. I didn't have to break my clubs over my knee like poor old Chester. I went out laughing.

I think I can remember the precise afternoon when I sensed that the game of golf was perhaps not going to be the game for me. The sixth at Skinner's is a long par five, and the first part is a gentle hill, but I could never make it even as far as the top. After one such attempt I sighed and said, “It sure would be nice to get over the damn thing.”

We started forward, pulling our carts behind us.

“Well,” Phil said gently, “if it hasn't happened by now, the chances are it never will.”

All too true. I haven't hit a golf ball for at least nineteen years.