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Time and Tide: A Walk Through Nantucket (Crown Journeys) - Hardcover

Conroy, Frank

 
9781400046591: Time and Tide: A Walk Through Nantucket (Crown Journeys)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1400046599 ISBN 13: 9781400046591
Verlag: Crown Pub, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Frank Conroy first visited Nantucket with a gang of college friends in 1955. They came on a whim, and for Conroy it was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with this "small, relaxed oasis in the ocean." This book, part travel diary, part memoir, is a hauntingly evocative and personal journey through Nantucket: its sweeping dunes, rugged moors, remote beaches, secret fishing spots, and hidden forests and cranberry bogs. Admirers of Conroy’s classic and acclaimed memoirStop-Time will again delight in what James Atlas, writing in the New York Times, called his "genius for close observation."

In Time and Tide, Conroy recounts the island’s history from the glory days of the whaling boom to the present, when tourism dominates. He vividly evokes the clash of cultures between the working class and the super-rich, with the fragile ecology of the island always in the balance. But most fascinating of all, he tells his own story--of playing jazz piano in the island’s bars; of raising a barn in the early '60s with the help of a bunch of hippie carpenters; of leasing an old, failed bar with two island pals and turning it into the Roadhouse, a club "that was to be ours, the year-rounders, and to hell with the summer people." There’s a marvelous story of his first golf game, played on an ancient nine-hole course with two friends, a part-time sommelier and a builder from the South who invented the one-handed pepper mill.

This is a book that revels in friendship, music, history, and the gorgeous landscape of a unique American place, and is a wonderful work by one of our greatest contemporary writers.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Frank Conroy first visited Nantucket with a gang of college friends in 1955. They came on a whim, and for Conroy it was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with this "small, relaxed oasis in the ocean." This book, part travel diary, part memoir, is a hauntingly evocative and personal journey through Nantucket: its sweeping dunes, rugged moors, remote beaches, secret fishing spots, and hidden forests and cranberry bogs. Admirers of Conroy’s classic and acclaimed memoir Stop-Time will again delight in what James Atlas, writing in the New York Times, called his "genius for close observation."

In Time and Tide, Conroy recounts the island’s history from the glory days of the whaling boom to the present, when tourism dominates. He vividly evokes the clash of cultures between the working class and the super-rich, with the fragile ecology of the island always in the balance. But most fascinating of all, he tells his own story--of playing jazz piano in the island’s bars; of raising a barn in the early '60s with the help of a bunch of hippie carpenters; of leasing an old, failed bar with two island pals and turning it into the Roadhouse, a club "that was to be ours, the year-rounders, and to hell with the summer people." There’s a marvelous story of his first golf game, played on an ancient nine-hole course with two friends, a part-time sommelier and a builder from the South who invented the one-handed pepper mill.

This is a book that revels in friendship, music, history, and the gorgeous landscape of a unique American place, and is a wonderful work by one of our greatest contemporary writers.

Aus dem Klappentext

Frank Conroy first visited Nantucket with a gang of college friends in 1955. They came on a whim, and for Conroy it was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with this "small, relaxed oasis in the ocean." This book, part travel diary, part memoir, is a hauntingly evocative and personal journey through Nantucket: its sweeping dunes, rugged moors, remote beaches, secret fishing spots, and hidden forests and cranberry bogs. Admirers of Conroy s classic and acclaimed memoir Stop-Time will again delight in what James Atlas, writing in the New York Times, called his "genius for close observation."

In Time and Tide, Conroy recounts the island s history from the glory days of the whaling boom to the present, when tourism dominates. He vividly evokes the clash of cultures between the working class and the super-rich, with the fragile ecology of the island always in the balance. But most fascinating of all, he tells his own story--of playing jazz piano in the island s bars; of raising a barn in the early '60s with the help of a bunch of hippie carpenters; of leasing an old, failed bar with two island pals and turning it into the Roadhouse, a club "that was to be ours, the year-rounders, and to hell with the summer people." There s a marvelous story of his first golf game, played on an ancient nine-hole course with two friends, a part-time sommelier and a builder from the South who invented the one-handed pepper mill.

This is a book that revels in friendship, music, history, and the gorgeous landscape of a unique American place, and is a wonderful work by one of our greatest contemporary writers.

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Busy Days/Hot Nights

In 1955, at the age of nineteen, I arrived on Nantucket for what I thought was the first time, accompanied by my college girlfriend and two other Haverford/Bryn Mawr couples. All six of us rented a three-room apartment over a bicycle shop (which still stands) for the summer. Those of us who needed them got jobs fairly quickly, because even in those days Nantucket in summer relied on imported labor. We’d come on a whim, the way kids used to do in the Eisenhower years, confident that we’d survive one way or another. My girlfriend got a job as the hostess of a small restaurant, I played the piano at the Whaler’s Lounge in the basement of a ramshackle wooden hotel run by the Manchester family (where now stands the Jared Coffin House, a brick nineteenth-century building, still a hotel, pricey, with nothing ramshackle about it). One of the guys boned up on the small island’s history from sources provided by a touring outfit and met the morning ferry every day to hawk the day-trippers into sightseeing rides in his little bus. A couple of the girls waited tables in a seafood joint. We survived, and had fun, walking the miles of empty beaches on our off time, swimming, having cookouts. We didn’t use the apartment for anything but sleep, so jammed in were we those hot nights. Busy kids.


Nantucket is an island, roughly thirty miles out to sea, and its shape is important for several reasons. It has been described as a crescent moon by one writer, but to me it looks like some fantasized elf’s slipper—Madaket Harbor a worn-away toe, Surfside the sole, Siasconset the heel, Wauwinet the top of the heel, with a strip running up higher to Coskata, the long strip down Coatue, where the slipper’s laces would tie, and then, even higher above Coskata, the final decorative tassel of Great Point.

The island itself is about fourteen miles long, and averages out at perhaps four miles wide, except for the long eastern shore, less than half of which is habitable. The sandy beach just north of Siasconset (or ’Sconset, as it is called by islanders) is the easternmost edge of the United States. The familiar Mercator Projection to be seen in every schoolroom makes it look like Maine sticks out farther, but that is no more than an effect of flattening three dimensions into two. On a globe Nantucket beats Maine by between two and three degrees.

As you look at a map of Nantucket, notice the small points of Coatue jutting into Nantucket Harbor. (They are named First Point, Second Point, Third Point, Five Fingered Point, Bass Point, and Wyers Point.) Nantucket Harbor is in fact a series of basins, spilling sequentially one into the other as the tide rises or falls. The circular movement of the water within the basins cutting and shaping the thin, grassy strip into the configurations revealed on the map.

The harbor is five miles long, and is of special interest to marine scientists and geographers because its basin arrangement, and the way the water moves in circles within it, are unique in the world. I have personally explored every part of the harbor with a series (over thirty-five years) of small boats, and bear witness to its beauty. The sudden, slightly exotic atmosphere of Coskata at the head of the harbor, inaccessible except by water, usually deserted, except in August, with its glades, hills, long ponds, and dunes, is especially alluring. Any one of the points, as you return, is worth exploring. You can swim in the shallows, fish for bass or bluefish in deeper waters, or simply cruise along in the sun.

Despite its great area one is never out of sight of land in the harbor, which is reassuring to the inexperienced sailor. If a fog bank rolls in and you can’t see more than twenty feet in any direction, the thing to do is cut your engines, or lower your sail, and wait it out.

As seen from the Atlantic Ocean, Melville describes Nantucket thusly: “a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background.”

And so it still appears from a distance, although not quite as bare as it was in the first half of the nineteenth century. A sense of the ocean—the sound of it, or the smell of it, or a certain purity to the air—is felt everywhere on the island. Indeed, it’s a pretty small patch of land, mostly moors because the severity of the winter winds preclude the growth of trees over much of its surface. There are a few “hidden forests” where the topography allows mostly scrub oaks. It resembles southern Scotland more than it does the neighboring island of Martha’s Vineyard or the mainland. It is best explored on foot, off the roads, in September and October, when the moors change colors, veering toward purple, and the sunlight turns winey. Some find it too bleak, but many, like myself, do not.


Busy kids, working, making love, endlessly talking and arguing about the books and ideas we’d been exposed to the previous winter, we didn’t have much time to explore. We seemed unable to get out of the lower Main Street area, with its side streets, post office, drug store, five & ten, etc.—that fifth of the town that had been destroyed by the Great Fire of 1846 (which was the final blow to the island’s foundering whaling industry) and rebuilt despite hard financial times. Once in a while we’d bike out to Surfside, or walk around the crumbling wharfs and slips of the town waterfront, but that was about it. Not even the boy driving the tour bus saw very much going out to ’Sconset and back, stopping every now and then for water views or a look at the cranberry bogs. What one saw from the roads represented only a hint of the uniqueness of the island in those days. Now, with so many houses, hedges, landscaping, fences, and general prettifying on the sides of the roads, the hint is a good deal weaker.

But much of the town of Nantucket looks a lot like it did fifty years ago. The lower part, where we roamed as kids, is similar to what the day-trippers see now, although the shops are more densely commercialized, and the prices are ridiculously high.

What we did not see then, and surprisingly few off islanders are aware of now, is that part of town that survived the fire: an entirely residential area on Upper Main Street and off Upper Main Street with a maze of lanes, narrow streets, alleys, and paths. To walk through old Nantucket town is to enter a living dream of the past—a hundred and fifty, sixty, seventy years ago, sometimes two hundred years ago, these beautiful houses were built. Federalist, Greek Revival, and Quaker architecture predominate. In terms of the size of the streets, lanes, buildings, narrow sidewalks, and especially the harmonious proportions of it all, it is as it was. It is not a museum, people live here, but as quiet, calm, and peaceful as anyone could wish. One finds oneself walking softly, talking softly, without consciously deciding to do so. I have visited and seen many lovely towns across America, but nothing has taken my breath away like old Nantucket.

How did it come about? First, Nantucket was once a place in which the rich were truly, mind-bogglingly rich. I don’t mean now, I mean in the first half of the nineteenth century, when whaling ships would go out to the Pacific Ocean for a couple of years and return to home port in Nantucket with a million dollars’ worth of oil belowdecks for their owners. There was a working class in Nantucket, to be sure. Coopers, blacksmiths, carpenters, sailors, clam diggers, etc., who lived mostly on the low ground, near the water. Up a bit higher, on Orange Street, for instance, ship’s captains built solid houses with widow’s walks on the roofs from which one could see what was happening in the harbor (or put out a chimney fire). The filthy...

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Verlag
Crown Pub
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1400046599
ISBN 13 
9781400046591
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
144
Kontakt zum Hersteller
CROWN
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/

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