Time & Tide

by Frank Conroy

  An interest in the stars and their movements had been a part of Nantucket’s culture for a long time. In the nineteenth century virtually everyone owned a telescope with which to search the ocean for sails, or confirm the names of ships coming into the harbor. The same telescopes could be pointed upward.

  Aside from the study of astronomy, there is the same enjoyment in a night upon the housetop, with the stars . . . there is the same subdued quiet and grateful seriousness . . .

  So sayeth Maria Mitchell in her diaries, and I felt the same way lying on various lawns with good binoculars, and eventually with a Questar, a compact, highly sophisticated catadioptric telescope I’d borrowed from a movie director I knew.

  My love for astronomy was born on that island . . . the spirit of the place had also much to do with my pursuit. In Nantucket people quite generally were in the habit of observing the heavens, and a sextant was to be found in almost every house. The landscape was flat . . .

  Maria’s interest in science began with her father’s lessons. She became an expert in the adjustment of precision chronometers while still a child. As a woman she discovered a comet and was awarded with a medal from the King of Denmark. She served as a librarian at the Atheneum for a salary of $100 a year. She helped arrange the Lyceum lectures—Thoreau, Agassiz (the Swiss naturalist and glaciologist), Audubon, Emerson, and other notables whom she convinced to make the trip and come ’round Brant Point. Eventually she became a professor of astronomy at Vassar College (at $800 a year). There exists in Nantucket a Maria Mitchell Association and Observatory to this day, in tribute to an authentic hometown heroine.

  During the sixties my wife, Patty, our children, Dan and Will, and of course myself took full advantage of what was still a quiet, calm island. We rarely went to town, although when we did it was still pleasant to visit the library, go to the bookstore, buy a good wool sweater at the Nobby Shop for a fair price, have a drink at the Club Car, or buy a raffle ticket from a lady at a card table in front of the Catholic church. As the streets became more crowded from one summer to the next, we barely noticed.

  Outside of town we could walk for miles over the moors or along beaches without seeing a soul. The South Shore dunes were private enough that the occasional nude sunbather might be startled into grabbing his towel to cover himself when a certain State Motor Vehicle Bureau officer (uniformed and armed in the state of Massachusetts) would appear out of nowhere in a specially accessorized low-flying Piper Cub and shout down from above, “You are under arrest for indecent exposure. Stay where you are.” Of course the putative offenders always took off pronto and no one was ever arrested. The local police quite sensibly ignored calls from the plane. This same uniformed individual did not endear himself to the board and members of the Sankaty Head Golf Club when he insisted that every golf cart be fitted with headlights, license plates, and everything else needed to meet state motor vehicle regulations because the carts crossed ten feet of a state road between holes two and three. (The club appealed in court and won.) Nantucket has always had oddballs and characters of one kind or another, and local oral history has not forgotten them.

  But as quiet as Nantucket seemed to be, changes were under way. And perhaps the very big changes on the mainland—e.g., the civil rights movement, foreign wars, “changes in the wind,” etc.—made it harder to appreciate the importance of the gradual takeover of downtown property by a group of businessmen with a master plan. They began buying in 1964 and anticipated a complete restructuring of the waterfront starting in 1966 with the aim of replacing the dwindling fishing industry activity with an economy based on tourism, an extensive yacht basin, and downtown retail outlets to serve the very rich in addition to the day-trippers. Good-bye to the old Five and Ten, the Upper Deck (a favorite bar of the locals), the Ocean House where I’d played piano. (What a gig that had been! Five college waitresses, all cute, who would gather ’round the piano at closing time, each with her one free drink—Brandy Alexander—listening to me play “Tenderly,” “Blues in the Night,” “The Little White Cloud That Cried,” or whatever else they requested. Severe temptation, and of course I gave in. I was nineteen years old and completely girl crazy.)

  Sherburne Associates had a plan, and even those who were against it had to admit it was well executed, and that off-island money began to flow into the island economy. It was pointless to revile Sherburne, or Mr. Beineke, the so-called Green Stamp King whose plan it mostly was, because change was inevitable. The old piers and wharves were falling to pieces, for instance, literally rotting away. The waterfront was a danger, and not only to children. Sherburne built a new waterfront, starting with Straight Wharf at the foot of Lower Main, and ending with a huge modern yacht basin with hundreds of slips and all necessary support services. The island of Nantucket, with its open spaces, beautiful and well-protected harbor, architectural treasurers, beaches and salt marshes, was essentially powerless to resist change. And it was a plum. Jet service from New York or Boston in a matter of minutes. Charm. Quaintness. Quiet. The gentle rhythms of small-town life. No one, including Mr. Beineke, could have foreseen what would eventually happen.

  Settling In

  IN THE LATE SIXTIES WE LIVED IN BROOKLYN and I occasionally made money as a “script doctor” for the Hollywood studios. My biggest job was an original script for Paramount. They never made the movie, but I was paid thirty thousand dollars. My wife’s uncle gave her a matching gift and we thought about land and a summer house. We had in fact admired a certain large area off Polpis Road called Quaise, almost all of it owned by one man, and had asked him, every year, to remember us if he ever wanted to sell a few acres. Things came together magically—the movie money, the match, and the arrival of the landowner’s first son at the gates of an expensive college. We bought a lovely bit of land that contained a mini forest, a beautiful salt marsh behind which could be seen the southern end of Polpis Harbor. We could walk down to the water on our own land. I hired a six-foot -seven-inch bearded back-to-nature M.I.T. engineering graduate to oversee a bunch of hippie carpenters. An architect friend purchased an old tobacco barn in the wilds of western Pennsylvania, dismantled the frame with some help from a nearby hippie commune, figured out how much siding would be needed, had it cut at a sawmill, and brought the whole thing— hand-hewn chestnut beams and raw white oak boards—on a semi which came around Brant Point in late ’68. I drew up a design, the architect did the specs and solved the “fenestration” problem, and by the spring of ’69 the house was almost finished. And so, unfortunately (to put it mildly, and for reasons that had nothing to do with Nantucket), was my marriage. The divorce was as amicable as I suppose it was possible to be. My wife kept the brownstone in Brooklyn, and I got Nantucket.

  The Barn going up.

  Somewhere in his enormous body of work, John Updike writes, if I remember correctly, that the ideal size of a community is five thousand. Nantucket’s year-round population was stable, as I said before, for a very long time, but in the early seventies it began to move toward Updike’s magic number. It was a different kind of community from the small-town/semi-pastoral atmosphere in which Updike spent his boyhood. You’re thirty miles out to sea, for starters. I don’t have much nostalgia for Nantucket in the seventies. Personally it was a tough time both emotionally and economically. I was a writer, after all, and, to make it worse, a literary writer. I left Brooklyn with three hundred dollars, no job prospects, and an unheated, unfinished barn on a remote island my only possession.

  The population included people who worked for the water company, the telephone company, the town itself, etc., as you would find in any town, and an awful lot of people who served the summer people in one capacity or another, building or taking care of houses, running the hotels and guest houses, and who had to make enough in three and a half months to support themselves for twelve.

  In addition there were a lot of odd people, nonconformists, wounded people (like myself ), dropouts, fantasists, hiders from reality, wanderers, loners, wei
rdos, and characters. It was a kind of halfway house for some, and some never left.

  I’ve already mentioned the man who worked at the State Motor Vehicle Registry office. A thoroughly nasty guy. But then there was Sam, a cheerful, good-hearted simpleton who hung around downtown with his beloved pet rabbit Floppy, and whose Deep South black accent was almost indecipherable, but whose smile was not. He was the town fool, essentially, and the town took care of him. (He never begged, but he got by.) It was a simpler time, as they say.

  Perhaps the best-known character was Mildred Jewett, known as Madaket Millie, who was born on the island in 1910 and raised on a small farm on the west end. Her mother had disappeared, her father was ailing, and it was up to her to “work the farm, milk the cows, and spend a lonely life by the sea,” as Robert Mooney explains in Nantucket Only Yesterday. She was a strange woman, big, ugly, tough, and private. What probably saved her sanity was her connection to the Coast Guard boys at the small Madaket Coast Guard station. “The lonely young sailors took a liking to her, and she ran errands to town for them.” World War II provided some excitement. “Millie was the civil defense officer and air raid warden for Madaket, which she patrolled on a big horse. Woe to the careless customer who violated the blackout on Millie’s watch.”

  After the war the station closed, but Millie was given a plaque for her cottage designating it as the United States Coast Guard West End Command, and was officially appointed Chief Officer. She wore the Coast Guard cap over her wild hair for the rest of her life. She was no simpleton, and bought up a fishing shack or two near Hither Creek, renting them out to young people. In fact Maggie, a twenty-three-year old girl from Boston, whom I was eventually to marry, lived in one of Millie’s properties. Maggie never saw Millie except to hand over the rent, and although she doesn’t like to admit it, the woman scared her. For that matter she scared me.

  Madaket Millie.

  But the town was proud of her, and protected her. The oral history describes the death of her father, who had been bedridden for years, cared for, cleaned, and fed by Millie alone. When the body was delivered to the hospital it was clear that the old man had been shot in the head. Quite a few nurses and hospital workers must have noticed it, but the doctor on duty was also the medical examiner for the County of Nantucket. He filled out the form, listing the cause of death as heart failure, and signed with a flourish. A brave act, if indeed it happened. The doctor was rather an odd fish himself, with only a partial belief in the science of medicine. He was very cavalier with his patients, including me, one of his friends. I never asked him about the story because I knew I’d never get a straight answer from him, so much did he love affecting an air of mystery.

  TAKE ANOTHER LOOK at the map. I lived about halfway between the towns of Nantucket and ’Sconset, off Polpis Road behind the first salt marsh at the south end of the harbor. In those days there were no other houses nearby. I saw a completely different Nantucket when I became a year-rounder, a pretty tight place where it wasn’t easy to make a buck. The action in town—the rebuilding of the harbor and other Sherburne projects—was covered by old time local labor. I managed to survive the first winter by doing magazine work by mail, playing the piano in a year-round bar, cashing small royalty checks from my book, and living on the cheap. I installed electric heaters in the bedroom and the kitchen, but the barn hadn’t been built with winter in mind and I spent a lot of time in the crawl space underneath working on frozen pipes with a propane torch, or installing new ones with an instruction book lying open in the dirt in front of me. My mortgage was $600. I discovered anew how claustrophobic and narrowing it is to live with little money. (I’d known it in my childhood, too, although in a different way.) The amount of time and energy spent on small household and automotive tragedies. The frustration of not being able to go anywhere more than ten miles away. The fact that even with long winter underwear it was cold. The brutality of the wind in February, humming through the thin spaces in the barn’s oak siding.

  I tried scallop fishing, but I wasn’t strong enough and it was dangerous work. I kept warm many nights, and kept myself in beer, by shooting darts in a pub, as I’d done at college. I spent the first winter like quite a few of the locals, simply waiting for summer.

  “Don’t sink,” my lawyer had said on a brief visit to check up on me after the divorce. “Some guys just sink. Don’t.” He wasn’t talking about boats.

  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.