Critical Mass. A Trip To The Bay State Wouldn’t Be Complete Without A Voyage Across The Sound To Nantucket Island

Sooner or later on Nantucket some chamber of commerce type will tell you that Nantucket means faraway land in the old Wompanoag Indian language. It does not. Or, they will tell you the locals call the place The Gray Lady. They don’t.

I know. Nantucket became my island.

My introduction to Nantucket came by way of an old road map all discombobulated on my 5-year-old lap in the searing black leather front seat of my father’s yellow ‘51 Buick Special convertible.

We were on Cape Cod, driving toward the Chatham dunes that form the elbow of the Cape.

What was this lonely white fleck on the map, far below the Cape?

Nantucket, he said.

A thin red line sliced right across the middle of the island from one indecipherable place name to another. That would be a state road, my father said. The names took up as much room as the island on the map. Nantucket Town, Sankaty, Sciasconset (pronounced Sconset and now written that way).

From the top of the Chatham dunes my father pointed south, into the sun. It’s very far away, out there, over the horizon, he said.

What is?

Nantucket.

I didn’t see a thing, but I said I saw Nantucket. I wanted to go there.

On my seventh birthday, the Andrea Doria went down with about 50 souls in the sea lanes out beyond Nantucket Shoals, rammed by a Swedish liner in the fog. It’s dangerous and bleak out there, my father said.

The years went by and the name kept breaching like the whales that made the place rich and famous. I saw Gregory Peck in Moby Dick at the old Paramount Theater in Boston, and that led to a search for anything and everything about whales and Nantucket.

I had to see this place.

I did at last when I was 18. From the bow of the ferry three hours out of Woods Hole I watched a knife edge appear on the horizon, and it grew fat and brown like a bread crust, and then green seeped into the edges, and a lighthouse, a sliver of white sand. Then a steeple and another, gold domed, and a red cottage roof, white pillars on a porch, more porches, flags red, white and blue, more roofs. Then sails in the harbor and small figures in the surf or meandering up the beach, maybe girls in an ideal world.

I was armed with a sleeping bag, a history of whaling, a road map with a thin red line to Sconset. I was flush with summer earnings and $400 in poker winnings - enough for an indefinite stay. I was with my girlfriend, who would soon tire of sand fleas and depart thankfully for America, which is what the locals call the mainland.

In a few minutes I was sitting on a teak garden bench on Main Street in the shade of a towering elm. The street was lined with them, still is. Their branches arched high above the paving stones and reached for each other like the hands of God and Peter in the Sistine Chapel. A southerly breeze scrubbed clean by 3,000 miles of open ocean played through the canopy.

As I soon learned from an old islander, even the streets tell part of Nantucket’s story. The paving stones on Main Street are not cobblestones, he said. This tidbit escaped even the great Melville when he referred to the cobblestone streets of Nantucket in Moby Dick. The stones were ballast removed from ships put up for repair. Later, when the whale oil money flowed, streets running into Main were paved with cobblestones.

You learn about this island from scratching it, breathing it, walking it, the old guy said. You don’t learn about it from books, even the great ones.

Well, yes and no.

To go to Nantucket without a cursory knowledge of whaling, Quakerism, 19th-century architecture and wildflowers is to go unarmed.

Most guidebooks will tell you that Nantucket should be discovered in two parts: town and country.

Nantucket Town is about as preserved a specimen of 18th- and 19th-century American mercantile city life as you can find. It was a city at the height of the whale oil boom, richer than Boston’s Beacon Hill, home to numerous banks, an atheneum, concert halls and a railroad. New brick mansions adorned with Doric-columned porches loomed over the smaller, more simple Quaker homes built by an earlier generation of sea captains.

Narrow lanes still wind down to the heart of the town - the waterfront, where ships were outfitted for multiyear Pacific journeys and whale oil was casked and shipped to customers worldwide until the 1860s, when Pennsylvania crude killed whale oil.

The town now is yuppified and pricey, but still pretty. Inns abound. Guide books call them charming. They are. And expensive. Simple rooms that remind you of your aunt’s guest room can run $150 a night or more during the summer. A burger and shake costs $8 on Main Street.

The espresso at the Espresso Cafe on Main Street is tepid, but who knows, Julia Roberts might be found sipping one in the rear garden.

Shop windows are full of overpriced imported antiques that are scarfed up by big money tourists who fly in for the day on private jets.

But, if you sit under an elm with a hot coffee on a cool summer night, you can easily summon an image of heavy wagons loaded with South Sea treasures lumbering up from the wharves and oil lamps glowing and simply dressed Quakers on their way to meeting.

Historic Nantucket is found in town but natural Nantucket is found in the moors and on the beaches.

Nantucket’s beaches ring the island like a long, primitive necklace. The south side beaches are sandy and front the open ocean. They’re majestic, broad, the surf wild as it tears at the dunes where roses trail down into the sand. Look toward the horizon and you’ll see the white foam turbulence of distant shoals that have claimed hundreds of ships over the centuries.

As the summer sun heaves higher into the sky, swimmers and surfers head for Surfside and Cisco beaches, but the beaches are never crowded by any mainland measure.

Most north side beaches front the harbor and are shallow, muddy at low tide, often full of glistening pebbles. Sailboats ply offshore, locals dig for bay scallops and children swim without fear of being pulled out to sea. Sunlight jumps from beach umbrellas and gulls lurk overhead in search of picnic flotsam.

The beaches can be seen from the highest points in the moors, which form the heart of the island. At dawn the moors are comforting, at sunset stupendous, at dusk melancholy.

Dusk and dawn bring red-tailed hawks that circle high over the moors in search of mice and rabbits. In November packs of beagles are driven through the brush by Portuguese hunters from the mainland who come and shoot and drink and leave some of their dogs lost, to starve.

Artists set up easels here and there in the moors. Except for midsummer the sunlight slants low out of the south, soft artist’s light that turns the northern sky deep sapphire blue and softens the landscape. I learned years ago that a real Nantucket fog can change all that in a few minutes.

When the fog rolls in from the south, as it does with great frequency, a blue-gray cloak closes over the island and the world seems to end at your nose. Sound plays games, comes from above, below, over there, out of nowhere.

Without a compass you’ll walk the moors in endless circles with claustrophobia as your guide. In town the fog drapes itself like an old shawl over the cedar shake roofs of cottages. Street lamps flicker to life in midday. Wisps of cloud slip around street corners as if on their way to some silent assignation.

I piled my daughters into the Jeep one night to go cross island to a fair. A thick fog had come in. We took a shortcut through the moors. In daylight it’s a 10-minute trip. The headlights were useless. I took the wrong road, and another. No airport noise to orient us, no church bells, no lights, no nothing. An hour later we emerged on the east end of the moors, dead opposite of where we were going.

I remember wearing a T-shirt when I left the house that night. By the time we got to the fairgrounds I needed an Irish knit sweater. Nantucket’s weather can be as crotchety as an old sailor and just as mean.

June’s rains, a high sun and cool, wet fogs bring wildflowers to life in town gardens and on the moors. The sweet smell of beach roses drifts on the southerlies. The floral display on the moors is stunning. But a wind shift to the northeast can turn the island bleak and cold as Iceland for days at a time.

The fall air is dry and crisp, still warmed by the Gulf Stream that lurks offshore until November, when it drifts away and opens the door to winter’s chill. Then, the winds shift slowly from west to north. Arctic air drops down to stay and the icy wind finds you and won’t let go.

In winter you feel like you’re at the top of an ice planet, too far from a sun too weak to warm your frozen body. It lasts from November to May and is hard, raw, terrible and beautiful. Most shops and inns close just after Christmas.

A winter visit, though, is worth the trip. It might just snow between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and the entire island gets decked out in its holiday finery. Pine boughs and wood smoke saturate the crisp air with homey and warming aromas.

Daylight in January is a blink. By February cabin fever is so great the locals refer to a malady they call “The Februaries” - a melancholy urge to get out of the house and off the island to some warm place where the noonday sun rises higher than the horizon.

The Daffodil Festival each April is a welcome but premature celebration of winter’s end. Millions of bulbs were imported to the island over the last 20 years, and the great splash of yellow warms the soul. But April is cold, very cold. So is May.

With thoughts of my family someday making the move I spent a winter rehabbing an old cottage on a hill next to a kettle pond in a place the Indians called Quaise. The word means “where reeds grow.” I thought “Quaise” was a nice play on words for my family of growing Reids.

I cleared land and planted spring gardens that the omnipresent wind kept stunted. In springtime my daughters sat and read on the shore of the kettle pond or pulled up reeds for purposes of making imaginary swords, magic wands and floral arrangements. My toddler son went with his mother to the pebble beach at the end of the lane and netted baby eels and tried to catch sand crabs.

In summer we’d all walk up the shell road between the ponds and on up to the moors. We’d find a boulder to sit on and wait for dark and the meteor showers that streak across the black summer sky.

Most summer nights we’d repair to the general store in Sconset for ice cream cones. Sconset was once a collection of fishing shacks used by whalers and fishermen who couldn’t make it back to Nantucket Town during winter storms. Now, the shacks go for $300,000 and the whole place looks like Martha Stewart sub-contracted on the decorating.

We’d finish our island days with penny-ante poker and a fire in the fireplace and then to bed. From their windows my daughters could watch the moors sleep under a big moon and the pulsing flash of the Sankaty lighthouse out by Sconset.

But the Sankaty lighthouse is about to fall victim - literally - to dune erosion. The moors are turning into oak forest. Young New York commodity traders buy cottages for cash and tear them down to build big houses that are entrusted to caretakers because the new owners just come on summer weekends.

Russell Baker, the New York Times columnist, decamped after 30 years: too many yuppies. Fred Rogers - aka Mr. Rogers - doesn’t walk Main Street as much anymore. Dinner for two almost anywhere runs $120, and that’s with a cheap wine. The roads are rife with hard-drinking tourists and bicyclists with bikes that cost as much as a good used car.

Nantucket is changing. Not just the feel of the place, but the place itself.

It’s sinking back into the sea. In a thousand or so years it’ll be a sandbar. Then, it will slip beneath the waves.

The island teaches a new lesson each day about change and the vagaries of life. I learned that “How does your garden grow?” is a dangerous question on Nantucket. An unexpected wind shift can shear years of weeding and feeding in a minute, in life and marriage as well as the garden.

One day, just like that, everything changed. After knocking around in an empty house for a while, I put it up for sale and left. But every day I spent on the island had been a gift, starting with that walk up Main Street in 1968.

I returned to Nantucket two years ago with a friend. I went with a sense of loss; she with a sense of discovery. She found a praying mantis clinging to a stalk of dune grass on a wide and wild beach. It means good luck, she said. As things turned out, she was right, for the two of us, together. Like my first memory of Nantucket, my last remembrance is of clear sky and fair winds.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: IF YOU GO Nantucket is 30 miles off the south coast of Cape Cod. It’s a pork-chop shaped island about 14 miles long and 5 miles wide at its widest point. There is auto ferry service from Hyannis. Reservations for cars in summer is a must. Best to go without a car, if possible. Major airlines connect with commuter flights from Hyannis, Boston, Islip and LaGuardia Airport. Biking is the ideal transport for island visitors. Nantucket is flat, and paved bike trails crisscross the entire island. Bike rentals at Young’s Bicycle Shop, (508) 228-1151. Guidebooks abound, but look for Obed Macy’s “History of Old Nantucket,” first published in 1925 but available in paperback. The Nantucket Historical Association (508-228-1894) runs a museum and offers programs for children. The Whaling Museum (508-228-1736) is a must see. Dining: Lots of fine restaurants, cafes, pastry shops. In town, DeMarco and 21 Federal offer Parisian delights at New York prices. Black Eyed Susans offers the new American cuisine. Chanticleer, in Sconset, should be tried. Guinness Stout and burgers are best at the Brotherhood of Thieves. Try the pastry at the Downy Flake. Lodging: There are plenty of inns and small hotels. Call the Chamber of Commerce at (508) 228-1700. The Jared Coffin House, downtown, is an old favorite, (508) 228-2405. The Quaker House is an in-town B&B, (508) 228-0400. The Summer House in Sconset is right on the dunes with an oceanside swimming pool, (508) 257-4577. For more information, try the Nantucket Information Bureau at (508) 228-0925.