The Chaos of April

Praise for the Garden Club, Infrastructure Failure, What's in a Name?

The sun rose at 6:08 this morning and will set at 7:15 this evening.

Beauty is as Beauty Does

The seasonal beautification of Main Street has begun. Store owners are filling window boxes and planters with spring flowers, brightening up the streetscape. This adds so much to the charm of our downtown, at no small cost to businesses, and deserves to be recognized. We do appreciate you!

Kudos this week to Nantucket Looms and Congdon and Coleman insurance, who are among the first to brighten their little stretch of Main Street with pretty posies.

Now if someone would only speak to the few stores and restaurants who decorate with fake flowers and ask them to cease and desist and go for the real thing instead. Unfortunately, we can’t legislate style or good taste.

On Tuesday, Jill Sandole was arranging flowering shrubs and plants in the fountain at the foot of Main Street. She artfully arranged spikes of yellow forsythia, cascades of pink Andromeda and perky pansies in the basin of the Max Wagner fountain.

Sandole is a member of the Nantucket Garden Club, an organization that has quietly done more than most people realize to promote tourism on Nantucket in the spring, beautifying the island’s roadsides and public spaces with daffodil plantings.

While the Chamber of Commerce runs the Daffodil Festival during the last weekend in April, there wouldn’t even be a festival without the Nantucket Garden Club and the daffodils it planted half a century ago.

Next year is the 50^th Anniversary of the Nantucket Daffodil Festival, and I hope something is in the works to recognize the Nantucket Garden Club as its genesis. It has promoted the festival over the years. A proclamation from the State House, recognizing the Nantucket Garden Club, seems to be in order.

Economically, the Daffodil Festival has been a boon for island businesses, infusing their empty bank accounts with cash after a long, cold, quiet winter. Fifty years ago, the start of the season was the Fourth of July. Now businesses get a kickstart the end of April.

Nothing Lasts Forever

When the concrete dolphins were installed on Steamboat Wharf back in the 1980’s, they replaced wooden pilings, coated in creosote, which were so old that most had rotted away below the waterline and could have snapped with a strong bump from any one of the vessels gliding past them.

The “dolphins” – admittedly an odd name – are the concrete structures that serve as buffers to the wharf and as guides for the captain docking the vessel.

These dolphins are now about 40 years old, installed during the construction of the south slip. Like all elements of infrastructure, they deteriorate with age, and last week one of the dolphins on the south slip snapped, falling into the water and rendering that slip unusable.

It also created a hazard to navigation. The Current has a good video of this actually happening that a reader sent them.

A question we all should have now for The Steamship Authority management is this: What is its plan for evaluating and replacing aging infrastructure on Steamboat Wharf? Is there one?

Or does the SSA just respond to catastrophes as they happen? (I’m inclined to think the latter is true.) Those of us who live on the island and rely on the SSA as our “lifeline,” have a right to know and should be asking these questions.

What’s in a Name?

Recently I’ve been engaged in a debate regarding the term “year-round resident” vs “seasonal resident.” What’s the difference?

My own definition is that a year-round resident lives and works on the island 9-12 months of the year. They might travel quite a bit in the winter, but largely their life is here, on Nantucket.

There is a shared knowledge among year-round residents of what it’s like to live on this sandbar 30 miles at seas, of the things we do without by choosing to live here and how weather, distance from the mainland and boat cancellations can define aspects of our lives. There is something that binds us together in our isolation.

A seasonal resident, again my own personal definition, may be on island from Daffodil weekend to Columbus Day when the island is active and shops and restaurants are open, but then they return to their mainland lives.

Some seasonal residents have transitioned to year-round residents since they retired, or they’re in the position where their job allows them to work remotely, and they do that from Nantucket.

I’m meeting more and more people who were seasonal residents but have now elected to be here year-round, and in some cases have sold their mainland residences.

Seasonal residents may choose to have Nantucket as their polling place because Nantucket is where their heart is. But that doesn’t make them a year-round resident.

You’ve got to be here, on Nantucket, most of the time. Just wanting to be a year-round resident doesn’t make it so.

What about this one: Nantucket native vs islander? The first part is easy. If you were born on Nantucket, you are a Nantucket native. If you weren’t, you aren’t.

However, the designation of islander is where things get tricky. Being called an islander means you embody a certain spirit about Nantucket that resides deep in your soul. You can’t get rid of it, like you can an accent, it’s just there, and it defines you, sometimes even without you ever wanting it.

Being an islander has nothing to do with where you were born. The late Charlie Sayle Sr., who wrote the Waterfront News column for The Inquirer and Mirror back in the 1960’s, was born in the Midwest, but he was certainly an islander. And then there are Nantucket natives who aren’t islanders, and never will be. They just happen to have been born here.

Nobody Wants This

Over 200 people showed up at the Milestone Rotary around noon last Saturday, holding placards and waving signs that read “Hands Off Our Constitution,” “Trump is Putin’s Puppet,” “Hands Off our Social Security.” They were protesting the policies of the Trump administration that are decimating our government agencies and our economy, erasing constitutional rights, and jeopardizing our national security.

While 200 people isn’t huge, especially compared to the size of protests in other small communities, it’s significant on Nantucket. This is an island where people routinely fail to RSVP to summer cocktail parties and just show up, and where residents are often disconnected from America and take comfort that the geographical isolation of our island will shield them from the difficulties of the real world.

Over the last week I’ve spoken to a number of people of varying political perspectives about what’s been happening to our country over the last 80 days. They are all critical of the administration’s actions of eviscerating the government, laying off tens of thousands of people willy-nilly and now screwing with the economy and our 401K’s with Trump’s crazy, seesaw tariff policy.

What has happened to our country, the America we grew up with? The conclusion is that however people voted last November, no one expected the chaos and destruction we’ve been seeing. We’re all Americans. Nobody wants this.