Time & Tide (8 page)

Slow Down! You're Already on
Nantucket

PERIODICALLY AN IDEA COMES UP IN ONE town meeting or the other: a scheme to control the number of automobiles coming onto the island. Nothing changes, however. Even limits that seem sensible, say, two or three cars per household, never get implemented. As cars rule America, cars rule Nantucket. The summer traffic in town is so intense it has affected the way the island has grown. More and more facilities, from the supermarket to an ancillary post office, are located in what is now the outskirts of town. Small clusters of retailers, most of them pretty fancy, seem to have sprung up everywhere. Niche restaurants abound, every one with a parking lot. Downyflake Doughnuts, where working people and families can get lunch at reasonable prices, is out of town. (A hallowed institution, by the way, and well worth a visit, even at six-thirty in the morning.)

I am on the island as I write this. I went into town at 11:30 this morning with a few errands to do, using a system that works well enough to allow me to do everything in two and a half hours.

First you must plan. The mail. (And thereby hangs a tale. We've had a post office box for thirty-five years, which we are loath to give up because there is a six-year waiting list to get one. We could use a mailbox at the end of our driveway, of course, but we don't. The post office identifies us as long-term Nantucketers, and I admit we are irrationally proud of that fact.)

A slice of pizza and a Nantucket Nectars lemonade from the Steamship Wharf would be nice. Pick up an orange juice machine at the Marine Home Center (housewares section). Croissants. The
New York
Times.
Two dust masks.

Ordinarily one would do it by the map, going from one place to the next, but there is a better way.

The system involves going into the clotted heart of town to check out the post office first. Today there were no parking places within two blocks so I didn't stop, but moved slowly through the side streets to come out at the pizza place. There were no spaces there either, but I knew I could park on the road the trucks use to get on the ferry if I left my lights flashing as I dashed across the street. (The pizza was good. The best on the island, in fact. I ate in the car.)

Then back to the post office, and this time a car pulls out of a space just as I arrive, so I park, get the mail (and the
New York Times
from The Hub), and continue on my way. Halfway out of town I stop at the Nantucket Bakery for croissants. As I continue homeward I stop at the Marine Home Center (parking lot) for the juicer, Island Lumber (parking lot) for the dust masks, and so back home.

Remain flexible, the system says. Never stop unless a car pulls out of a parking place, or you are out of town. Drive around the block. Breathe deeply. Play soothing music on the radio. Smile.

The island is proud that there are no traffic lights anywhere. And this is as irrational as keeping a post office box. There are at least four complicated intersections everyone knows should have traffic lights, both for safety and to speed things up. Everyone also knows it won't happen in the foreseeable future.

Traffic is a problem in a lot of places, but the combination of Nantucket's narrow streets and the presence of Hummers, Expeditions, and other oversized vehicles (Veblen!) makes things particularly tough. The bicycle paths, and the introduction of public transport, have helped a bit, but more and more cars seem to come each summer, with no signs of slowing down.

ACK

Not a bumper sticker, but a decal spelling out the
code for Nantucket airport. A favorite of summer
people rather than natives.

ACK NICELY

A gentle warning to the visitors

NATIVE

And proud of it. Although a lot of people
have been forced out, many have stayed,
toughing out the high cost of living.

NATIVE. AN ENDANGERED SPECIES

A Certain Romance

THE NEW YORK TIMES REPORTS ON THE popularity of what it calls “destination weddings,” and Nantucket turns out to be a prime example. The Chamber of Commerce has an information clearing house, listing churches, caterers, photographers, musicians, tent rentals, bartenders, and everything else that might be needed. (A good friend of ours, Mary Keller—she of the chador—plays her harp at such events and earns a significant part of her income thus.) It is not that hard to understand why people might want to be married on Nantucket. A certain romance attends to crossing thirty miles of ocean to arrive at a beautiful, historic, unique, and high-status island. Some marry in churches, others on the beach, or in a garden, or even in the moors. For all of them, one surmises, the event and the memory of the event are framed by the Nantucket atmosphere, which, like sense memories of food or the scent of flowers, is exceedingly difficult to capture in words while remaining quite vivid in memory. In many ways the island is a splendid place to get married. People smile when they see a wedding, as if the celebration is communal, and of course, most essentially, it is.

I've described elsewhere how I met my wife on Nantucket more than thirty years ago. She was hitch-hiking because her car had a dead battery, and in accordance with the winter rules, I picked her up. We hit it off immediately and were married in the Episcopal church a year or so later. Maggie's mother and her large network of Boston pals stayed at the Jared Coffin House and had a good time, watching the Kentucky Derby at the reception, cocktails aloft.

Places can insinuate themselves into your very soul if you have lived and grown there. I cannot separate my love for Maggie from my love for the island, for instance. There are overlaps. (And in a totally different way I love our ten-months-a-year home in Iowa City, where I wrote two books and learned how to teach.)

I WORRY THAT I haven't done Nantucket justice in these pages. It has a special feeling, a special aspect unlike any other place I've been. (An English village in which I lived years ago. Visits to London, Paris, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Budapest, Portugal, Spain, Mexico, and the Caribbean, to name a few. Each had a flavor, of course, but none as powerful to me as the faraway island.)

My second son met his wife on Nantucket. She was an Irish girl who'd come over for a summer job, and she wound up staying. They married on Nantucket and their son, Liam Wainwright Conroy, was born on Nantucket. There is a brick with his name on it on a special wall in the hospital. A wall, as they call it, of Native Born. So my grandson discovered Nantucket even earlier than I did, as I stood on the bow of that ship watching the boys dive for coins so long ago.

Two summers ago Julia, my daughter-in-law, was walking on the 'Sconset beach. The water was calm and she took off her shoes to wade. After a while she felt something on her ankle, reached down and retrieved a one-hundred-dollar bill. She spotted another one close by, drifting like seaweed, and kept searching for a while until it was clear there weren't any more. Probably someone had gone swimming with the money in his bathing suit with the pocket unbuttoned.

I was reminded yet again of the boys diving for coins, and of the passage of time. We live and the world changes around us, slowly, to be sure, but every now and then something happens, some unusual occurrence that stands like a signpost, a marker of the relentless passage of time which no one, and no place, can escape.

SOURCES

I'VE USED SEVERAL BOOKS. MOST IMPORTANT was Robert F. Mooney's excellent source book,
Nantucket Only Yesterday,
Wesco Publishing, 2000. Also helpful were
Nantucket, The Last 100 Years,
compiled and edited by John Stanton, published by the Inquirer and Mirror Press, 2001;
We Are Nantucket,
edited by Brian L.P. Zevnik, Wellington Press, 2002; and Nan
tucket in the Nineteenth Century,
Clay Lancaster, Dover Publications Inc., 1979. Also,
Celestial Messengers,
a play by Maggie Conroy. My thanks to the
Inquirer and
Mirror,
the Nantucket Historical Association, and the Nantucket Chamber of Commerce. My debt to all of these good people is large.

ALSO IN THE CROWN JOURNEYS SERIES

Land's End
by Michael Cunningham
After the Dance
by Edwidge Danticat
City of the Soul
by William Murray
Washington Schlepped Here
by Christopher Buckley
Hallowed Ground
by James McPherson
Fugitives and Refugees
by Chuck Palahniuk
Blues City
by Ishmael Reed

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

FRANK CONROY is the longtime director of the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is the author of
Stop-Time, Midair, Body & Soul,
and
Dogs Bark, but
the Caravan Rolls On.

ALSO BY FRANK CONROY

Stop-Time
Midair
Body & Soul
Dogs Bark, but the Caravan Rolls On

Copyright © 2004 by Frank Conroy

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by Crown Publishers, New York, New York.
Member of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN JOURNEYS and the Crown Journeys colophon are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Map by Jackie Aher

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Conroy, Frank, 1936–
Time and tide: a walk through Nantucket / Frank Conroy.
(
Crown Journeys series
)
1. Nantucket Island (Mass.)—Description and travel. 2. Walking—
Massachusettes—Nantucket Island. I. Title. II. Series.
F72.N2C66 2004
974.4'97043—dc22 2003020317

www.randomhouse.com

eISBN: 978-0-307-42251-4

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