Longshore Drift
Reading, writing, and being in Earth’s vulnerable places
By Parker Richards
In the winter, when there was no one and nothing but gray skies above gray heather above gray sands: There was no loneliness, only solitude. To feel lonely — that is of the summer. Loneliness comes with the crowds, is felt most when another car beats along open-topped, music playing and hair streaming. Walking onto the beach, in the summers, and finding families, couples, old women reading romance novels: Lonely, sometimes. In the winters, when the summer people are gone and the only company is the birds in the twisted trees and the little voles on the sandy ground, there is no loneliness, no envy of society’s beating heart.
Solitude is the essence of islands. People seek them to escape, to find a place away from the conventional world. Islands exist upon their own continuum, isolated in time and space, unconnected — in their purest form — from land by bridge or by train tunnel. We go to islands to ask something of ourselves, to seek out respite, to find new worlds.
At least, seeking rest and solitude was — if I were to put it well — how I ended up island-bound last year. There is nothing unique about this: There was a pandemic, my apartment seemed crushingly small and my roommates too willing to invite disease-bearing guests into the home. One Saturday in that lonely March, I took the train north to Boston; then the bus south to the seashore: and then, lastly, the ferry across the thirty-mile sound steeped in fog. My parents have lived on Nantucket, a sandbar forgotten as the glaciers retreated northward, since my father’s retirement. I went to high school on the island, graduating with ninety-seven others one late spring day. I had barely been back more than a few weeks since and, thinking I would be home at most a month, came into the months most rich in storms, when in late winter the island earns its reputation for cloud and wind and endless suffocating fog.
We all know it was not a month, of course; those of us who went home stayed longer: Closer to two years than one, in my case.
In the meantime, I walked the island, felt its winds and its soils, walked from the furthest tip of Smith Point in the west, near the house my grandparents built, through the marshes of Eel Point to the north, across the broad moors that stretch along the island’s southern flank, through the Smooth Hummocks that dominate the region to the south, and across the massive expanse of low shrub and heather in the east: Then on to Great Point, far north, to Coatue, an eighteen-mile trek away from the car over soft sand, to ’Sconset, where in the winter surrounded by summer cottages no one else walked the high pathway above the bluff but I.
I found myself on my own most often. Even in summer, the paths I walked were isolated ones: I would pass another lone walker, a couple with a dog, a small family, but then they would recede, leaving me once more on the dirt track alone. I could have delved into the literature of isolation, the stories of loneliness that many sought out — or the narratives of plague, like those who immersed themselves in the Decameron. But instead I found myself drawn to stories of islands, to those places where isolation is inherent and frivolity often assumed, untethered from the obligations of society “outside.” Wide Sargasso Sea came first, before I realized that I would read more and more of these books, often short, beaten out as if in a rush of that dull, earth-bound panic that builds and builds and builds.
I had plenty of time, of course — for the vacation-house where the world slows down in Jean Stafford’s The Catherine Wheel (which isn’t really about an island at all, but doesn’t it seem like it is?); for Halldór Laxness’s Independent People, a chronicle of sheep farming and family; for Patrick Leigh Fermor’s only novel, The Violins of Saint-Jacques; for Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands; for others besides.
I set out, in other words, to read things about islands, written from islands, things that comprehended the idea of being away out to sea. There was no pattern to it, nothing particularly intentional about the choices. Each book struck at a fancy, and to be upon an island is often about little more than the striking of fancies. I read nothing set on Nantucket, as that did not strike my fancy (being stuck there myself), though I have heard tell that the island features in several works of repute. (Melville, of course, reigns supreme, though Poe’s only novel centers on the island — and, confusingly for those attempting to respond to my emails in haste, features an unfortunate sailor named Richard Parker who suggests cannibalizing a shipwrecked crew-mate to survive before himself being cannibalized. The island is also the de facto capital of both the limerick in its American form and the saucy summer beach read.
There is a need to define island in its literary context. Clearly, not every book set in Britain can be said to be part of the literature of islands, though Britain is, incontestably and proudly, insular. To really be about an island, a work must not simply embrace the geographic setting—that is, to be out to sea, away from a continent—but also the deeper sense of islands remote: That incredible smallness that comes upon people who are unable to forget in any waking instant that they are isolated, perhaps even at the mercy of the waters. There is a wonder and a creeping dread in this sort of writing. Even in the most facile summer beach read, island is a byword for isolation, for slipping away, for being alone, or at least not in much of a crowd. Where is the sea when you are on an island? Always to hand: down a slope or across a field, around the bend of a street, over the next hill.
The German writer Judith Schalansky wrote that islands are “miniature worlds” unto themselves. They are not better or worse than other places: As Schalansky puts it, “there is no untouched garden of Eden lying at the edges of this never-ending globe … human beings traveling far and wide have turned into the very monsters they chased off the maps. But they are different. They exist at a remove from conventional society, the people a little strange, the land itself always different. Nantucket is usually translated, from Wampanoag, as “far-away place.” Some have also translated it, at risk of less thanks from local tourism officials, as “sandy, sterile soil tempting no one.” Something of the fascination with things far-off that tempted Schalansky to create her Atlas of Remote Islands rings out in both names; the former, of a haven, safe and tantalizing, the latter, of something more dangerous, yet perhaps no less tempting. There is a reason I, as a child falling asleep beneath my National Geographic atlas, could (like Schalansky) look at Bouvet — the world’s most-remote place, noted in history perhaps only for its proximity (in strictly relative terms) to an unexplained Cold War-era nuclear test — or islands like it and wonder, a reason why Schalansky would pace around a gigantic globe in Berlin and “read[…] the names of every tiny piece of land marooned in the breadth of the oceans,” thinking only that they “were as full of promise as those white patches beyond the lines indicating the horizon of the known world drawn on old maps.”
Perhaps, then, the literature of islands is simply a subset of the literature of things remote, or a bastard child of that and the literature of the sea. Place is a sometimes-forgotten essentiality of writing, of narrative, of reflection: Surely, as much as each work has in it some elements of one movement or another — autofictional, romanticist, modernist — it must have a relationship to place. An island is, as places go, a sort of full-stop, a declarative, isolated mark on the page, hewn away from its surroundings and demarcated, alone. Even within the context of isolation, it is unique. Mountain ranges stretch on, vast as they plod along to the corners of sight; so too deserts, drawn far beyond the conscious as they stretch ever-onward. A journey at sea is much the same: The ship alone upon the rolling main. But an island does not continue, it does not place a person in isolation thanks to vastness of its own. There is, yes, the vastness of the sea around, but the island itself is discrete, small, trapped in upon itself and left as if by accident (as some legends claim).
But I suppose I don’t really need a definition — alone, on an island for the better part of two years, I began to seek out stories of other islands that seemed both alike and different. Each would have something of what I felt on Nantucket: Solitude or loneliness, away off the shore. And each would have something different: Sometimes their islands would be far-flung places I would struggle to imagine, sometimes theirs would be revelries that were impossible during the regime de maladie. At its heart, the literature of islands is the literature of escape, yet often I found it an escape into melancholy, into a place apart where author and subject alike may find some kind of solace but will surely find nothing beyond it, nothing that fully quenches loneliness or offers more than introspection.
***
“People who live on islands are always letting their eyes glide along the horizon,” the Sweno-Finnish writer Tove Jansson noted in The Summer Book. “They see the lines and curves of the familiar skerries, and the channel markers that have always stood in the same spots, and they are strengthened in their calm awareness that the view is clear and everything is in its place.” From the western fingers of Nantucket, where my parents have their home on a hill in the scotch pine a half-mile from the low-slung dunes that overlook Madaket Harbor, I would see the familiar shapes of Tuckernuck, the next island, and on clear days the far-distant shadow of Chappaquiddick, or so I thought, the shape barely lurking along the horizon where it was ever-uncertain, an island, a mirage, a cloud’s long-dark shadow on the sound. Even if it were a mirage, it was in its place, resolute: Unchanging yet ever bound to change as Nantucket and the Vineyard become undone over centuries by the onslaught of the waves, comforting both in their stolid presence and in their inevitable return to the sea.
Islanders — the inhabitants of almost any small, isolated island; which island is entirely irrelevant — are an odd lot, at least in reputation and usually in reality. In The Summer Book, just three people inhabit a small island in the Gulf of Finland, lodged south of Helsinki, west of Petrograd, north of Tallinn. They are a widower, only occasionally mentioned; a grandmother, never named; and Sophia, a six-year-old who will spend the entire summer on this, her family’s island, because her mother has died. The world collapses around Sophia, the great expanses of possibility both limited and made limitless by the literal insularity of her newfound world. Her only company, with few exceptions, is to be found in her grandmother, in their errant cat, and in the island itself. “We live here on this island, and people who come to bother us should stay away,” the grandmother says — and each time others come, the family is at best indifferent, at worst hostile, even to those the family invited, or those whose islands they trespass upon.
“An island can be dreadful for someone from outside,” Jansson writes early in The Summer Book. “Everything is complete, and everyone has his obstinate, sure, and self-sufficient place. Within their shores, everything functions according to rituals that are as hard as rock from repetition, and at the same time they amble through their days as whimsically and casually as if the world ended at the horizon.” But Jansson is wrong — or at least, not fully right. Islands, especially the kind of islands that draw visitors each year in an onrushing tide, can be just as alienating for those who dwell there year-round. Nothing is complete on the island itself, waiting as it is for people who will come only briefly. The summer peoples’ lives are seen by the islanders to rush by, seemingly perfected: Rich and beautiful, sun-kissed; a thousand interchangeable teenagers whose parents, summering, thought they should get a job staffing the restaurants and ice-cream stands; the boats flying Bermuda’s flag that come in and out with each tide. And they, the islanders, we — we walk on about our own daily lives, which suddenly seem so very boring, whatever contentment we might have had soiled by the knowledge that it seems less full than the happiness of those visitors, the reminder that their time of vacation, of relative bliss, is all we see of their lives somehow ashen in spite of itself.
Nantucket makes itself hospitable to those from outside; that has become its purpose. The island’s post-colonization history is commercial, first dominated by the clearing of land for sheep grazing, then by the great and terrible years of butchery when the island’s whale-ships lit the world. The tea thrown overboard one night in Boston was heaved from the decks of ships owned by Nantucket merchant houses. The Federal and Greek revival-style architecture in the town center was paid for by the industry of a massive fleet, whalers and merchantmen alike. Firms with Nantucket roots continue to be household names: Macy’s, Folgers, and more recently its eponymous Nectars. Today, the island sells itself. In summer, the year-round population of around 15,000 swells; not long before I left the island last August, the local water utility company said over 100,000 people were on the island. The island’s airport — which ran out of jet fuel multiple times last summer — is the second-busiest in Massachusetts, after only Boston Logan. The island becomes a sort of shadow-Nantucket, a glossy, fake version of itself, as if a theme park dedicated to ancient Rome were built over the ruins of the Coliseum, both utilizing and obscuring the very edifice it sought to deify.
On Jansson’s invented island, the family begins to tear up native plants to lay the seeds of things Sophia’s grandmother thinks are prettier. The island has no tourist industry, no onrushing summer crowds brought by jet and ferry and over-large yacht beneath a blood-red flag, yet still it finds itself corrupted. The native fauna dies as water is pumped ad nauseam into the new planters, the cycle of life and rebirth broken to make way for something newfangled: Some of the island folk, whose homes are the islands big and small around Sophia’s island, make their business serving the summer people. That is a part of life, a part of what the sea offers up:
The sea is always subject to unusual events; things drift in or run aground or shift in the night when the wind changes, and keeping track of all this takes experience, imagination, and unflagging watchfulness. It takes a good nose, to put it simply. The big events always take place far out in the skerries, and time is often of the essence. Only small things happen in among the islands, but these, too—the odd jobs that arise from the whims of the summer people—have to be dealt with. One of them wants a ship’s mast mounted on his roof, and another one needs a rock weighing half a ton, and it has to be round. A person can find anything if he takes the time, that is, if he can afford to look. And while he’s looking, he’s free, and he finds things he never expected. Sometimes people are very predictable: they want a kitten in June, for example, and come the first of September they want someone to drown their cat. So someone does.
Even the taciturn, remote grandmother falls prey to the summer people’s mindset. She modifies — and defaces — the family’s little island with plants from afar, uprooting native flora to create a pastiche of mainland life. She alters the world on the basis only of her whim — like the summer people on Nantucket whose sprinklers are ever-spraying over the too-lush grass that would die in a moment without constant irrigation. There is a destructiveness to this, to these people, both the tourists and those who live in a place year-round, those with dreams and wants and time to look, who have come to modify themselves and their homes to fit the mould constructed by the summer people, to fulfill the summer folk’s wants and demands until the locals too demand more of the island itself than it can give.
I’ve never been to Tuckernuck, that familiar shape across the water from where I so often stand on Nantucket’s westward edge. The swift, deadly currents between the islands stop me swimming the few hundred yards across. We have no boat. I wonder if, there, things are different: There are no roads, just a score of houses passed down through the same families from time out of mind. The only way in is by boat, or perhaps helicopter, if you had one. You’d need an invitation from one of the families there to go much beyond the beach. Another island, further removed, beyond the whims of the summer people, or so it seems from the far shore where each detail is removed by distance. Another island, solitary — lonely, maybe. And beyond that, one more: Muskeget, invisible from Nantucket’s shores, where there is one old shack to keep the seals and the voles company.
***
An island is at its realest when you and it are most vulnerable to the sea. You are enveloped by the island, by its essence, when the prospect of death by wave and wind is foremost in your mind.
If a person drives to the far-northeastern edge of Nantucket’s paved roads and parks by a hotel where a night will cost at least $1,500, they can walk five miles nearly to the island’s northern tip. On that spit of land, past the bare sand of the Galls where in winter storms the sea washes over and births a new island to the north, past the lagoon and the last two shacks without electric power or running water, they will find a lighthouse. From afar, it looks like a cigarette stuck into the land, a little white stick standing miraculously firm on a sandbar. The whitewashed brick tower is sealed, but there is a room — open through its rough-cut windows to the sea wind — where they can sit for a while and rest before they walk the five miles back. In it, they can look upon the seals, their rookery jutting up from the sea. They can look upon the water. They can look upon, in early summer, the expanses of beach rose, pink and white and untroubled by the salt.
Sophia, Jansson’s small creation who thinks just once of her mother, is trapped on an island far from her family’s own one afternoon, caught by a storm she herself prayed for. The grandmother, the father, and the girl take shelter in an abandoned building that seems to me much like that lighthouse:
Sophia climbed up into the tower. The tower room was very small and had four windows, one for each point of the compass. She saw that the island had shrunk and grown terribly small, nothing but an insignificant patch of rocks and colorless earth. But the sea was immense: white and yellow and gray and horizonless. There was only this one island, surrounded by water, threatened and sheltered by the storm, forgotten by everyone but God, who granted prayers.
Nantucket — without any help from sea-level rise — has little time left to it. Great Point, the long, thin neck where the lighthouse perches, has less. There is nowhere to run when high ground no longer clears the top of a wave. I think often: What if there were a tsunami today? But doom is slower than that for most: In four hundred years — eight hundred since it was first seen by European settlers — the island will be gone, the detritus of the Laurentide glacier’s southward march at last downfallen beneath the waves. On an island the world around you is a few hundred yards across, when and around that there is only sea — sea that drops into the depths, sea that will ere long wash away the speck of sand on which you sit, not because the sea hates the island, but because it is indifferent.
That is the terror of islands. You fear not only for yourself, a vulnerable speck, but for the vulnerable speck on which you stand, a piece of land littered carelessly upon the Earth by the vicissitudes of geology.
In The Violins of Saint-Jacques, Patrick Leigh Fermor conjures that impending doom, the knowledge needling from the first few pages of his novel that all must end in cataclysm. Fermor — famed for his long walk across Europe, his fevered letter-writing, and some wartime heroics on Crete — conjures something reminiscent of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea: A European’s view of the Antilles, of isles remote and far-flung and almost mythic, ripe with blossoming doom. His characters are, mainly, white: The Creoles of the colonial French establishment, a few French-born figures (including his narrator). They view Saint-Jacques both as outsiders — as, too, are its black inhabitants; only the Caribs are true natives — and as its residents of centuries, a state of being familiar to many descendants of colonizers on the New World’s isles. Fermor does not condemn them, nor does he lionize them; colonialism is simply the way of his fictional island (like its contemporaries in reality). Saint-Jacques itself is “pricked down on those early charts” by cartographers and historians who “unconsciously conspired to ignore it.”
The island of Saint-Jacques is, in the novel’s final moments, engulfed by a volcanic eruption that ultimately splits the sea itself, causing the island to be swallowed whole. The basis for Fermor’s work was the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée on Martinique. Unlike Saint-Jacques, Martinique itself survived; like Saint-Jacques, few of its inhabitants did: The 1902 eruption claimed around 28,000 lives and the total number of survivors was little more than the dozen or so Fermor depicts surviving his fictional eruption. (For many years, legend had it that only two people survived the eruption on Martinique; in fact, the number was somewhat higher, though it likely did not reach the triple-digits.) The doom of the eruption stands at odds with much of Fermor’s novel; though there is a constant foreboding, a sense of dread that fills the book, much of the actual novel consists of one of literature’s great party scenes.
The eruption strikes at the conclusion of a boisterous, romantic, absurd Carnival thrown by Berthe’s adoptive family. The world before the ball — the world before the eruption — “retreats … into a kind of pre-natal oblivion and the world waiting for you when you wake up next day seems as vague and shadowy as the eternity that waits beyond the tomb.” The ball itself “goes on and on and the incidents stand out in retrospect like a life’s milestones against a flux of time whose miniature years are measured out in dance tunes.” The ball allows Fermor to construct Saint-Jacques at its best, at its most alive and most joyously, essentially frivolous even as he is engaged in a personal conspiracy to destroy it. The security, the triumph (because any successful party brings, in the eyes of its host and its attendees, a sense of triumph) are manifest first: The island is solid, a piece of rock that has withstood winds and hurricanes and even other eruptions. But Berthe is taken away — in pursuit of her cousin, who has decamped with a lover — she sets off across the water and is left to see the island for what it is: a remote thing hanging in the endless sea, its very essence able to sway within the waters, held captive by them and subject to them. An islander must, as Berthe does somewhat and her friends and family seemingly do wholesale, be able to forget that you are in danger when you live upon an island. It should be something you can banish from your mind — for a party, for a day at the beach, for a drink overlooking the long brackish marshes on the little point far out away over the white-wood bridge. Here not five years ago the sea rushed in, forcing the sand to fill a bay that had sat there unmarked for decades, forcing down the last house into the surf and spilling over across the weak boundary dunes whose sinecure lies in the fallacy that they could ever stop the North Atlantic’s landward march.
***
Buildings are temporary on an island. One of my regular walking trails — one I took most on weekends, but when the days were long could complete after work — led me first north, through the moors that abut my parents’ home, then along a rough dirt road lined by a string of houses that must endlessly reinforce the sandbags saving them from the waves. Later on the trail, where I met the ocean again, workmen tore down a house last winter. There had been a storm; fifty feet of Nantucket washed away. The house, which had sat safe enough, was teetering on the edge of a newly-made bluff and so an emergency work order was issued. It was gone two days later.
And the houses themselves: Even when they stay on dry land, their existence is predicated upon constant upkeep. Never are the work crews quiet on Nantucket; never do the lawnmowers and saws and hammers cease. That is the way of an island house. In her memoir of her friendship with Graham Greene, the Australian novelist Shirley Hazzard returns repeatedly to the nature of island homes. They decay quickly — those not built by the Romans — and ungracefully. One home she enters, once “cared for and comfortable,” has “suffered from neglect and damp.” Hazzard writes:
The decline of a sea-girt house offers no phase of seedy charm. Salt destruction comes in quickly, bringing green mould and brown rust; a powdery corrosion of metal fittings, the rotting of good wood. A decaying house by the sea is without present or future. There is only a past, of whingeing doors, palsied windows, and memories damp to the touch.
Another home she encounters — a massive villa that had belonged to Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen — has transformed into a series of “pale, disintegrating rooms.” At this house, “portions of the terrace fell away, the stair itself grew dangerous, the ballroom developed fissures, the airy ground floor showed strain … holes at the far edge of the garden path terrifyingly revealed the emerald sea far below.”
Books about islands are permeated by the fascination with collapse, with buildings torn away from land and cascading into ruin. Even my childhood picture-books noted this decay: a small shack I remember only vaguely from a book where a Newfoundland rescues a kitten is crumbling, the Cornish coastal house of Susan Cooper’s Arthurian tales slowly declines. For Jansson, there is not just the ruined house from which Sophia watches the storm but the endless maintenance on her own family’s house — and, in one scene, the hubris shown by neighbors who have constructed a massive new home upon a nearby island. For Fermor, everything on Saint-Jacques will perish in salt and flame, strong French buildings lost in a moment.
But that same decay is part of the fascination of islands. So many of Schalansky’s distant lands — islands so remote they are uninhabited, or visited only by long-lost whalers or research crews — feature only abandoned research stations or whaling posts, sheds and barracks left behind to rust and rot. Do they mar the islands? They may; but they also add something to them, an idea of things gone by half-remembered. There was, once, a mystery on Bouvet Island: A small dinghy left, in this, the world’s most remote spot, its origins unaccounted for. The island is a block of ice, bar one small landing point; whoever sailed the boat there and left it would have nowhere to go. Once, I read for hours about this boat: the blog posts and articles written by mariners and internet sleuths devoted to finding its origin (likely a Soviet expedition, as it turned out). The boat itself — rusting and useless and abandoned — became a part of the island, a part of its lore and story, even in its decay, its ugliness, its misplaced solitude.
***
I read most of Greene on Capri, Hazzard’s memoir, on a bench overlooking the Atlantic. The beach was nearly deserted: An older woman walked her dog, a couple frolicked in the surf, a father stood by with towels as his daughter and her friend swam.
I left the bench after hours in the bright afternoon sunlight and walked through the spreading, reaching dune grass to the shore. The water was warm on my feet. Hazzard’s book would be splashed with salt and bent, the paperback curved where I shoved it into my shoe, held by the dangling laces. It was more than a mile up to the next path inland, the sun setting fast to landward. The beach, now empty.
Greene, as Hazzard tells it, was interested less in Capri’s beauty than in its isolation. While his contemporary, the Russian-born choreographer and dancer Léonide Massine, had — on a neighboring island — set himself about endlessly building and renovating and improving his home, Greene seemed uninterested, content with a “tin cabin-like interior.” “Massine had chosen beauty, with its inexorable servitude; Greene, autonomy,” Hazzard notes.
It is notable that Hazzard does not seem to share Greene’s ambivalence toward his surroundings — both the place and its people. One of her projects is a catalogue of various Capri personages — expatriates and locals, writers and fascists, some close to Greene, some only tangentially connected. The result is biographical less of Greene than of the island itself, at least in one era. Those who have lived on little resort-islands would recognize it: The people, local and interloper, who make up the character of the place, larger-than-life because life itself seems small surrounded by the pounding sea. There’s the local with ambitions, buying up land; the writer who builds for himself an artists’ colony which disappears when he dies (or merely stops visiting); the daughter of the gentry, herself accomplished, who grows into a grandee of the little social life that exists cut off from the world. Fermor saw it too: The carnival party at the heart of The Violins of Saint-Jacques is nothing if not sociological, albeit fictitiously, a study of a people and a place now lost and only possible to begin with because of the wide gulf of open sea that allowed, like Darwin’s finches, something new, recognizable yet distinctly its own, to develop.
Neither view, of course, is wrong. To isolate oneself, to avoid distractions and find autonomy: It is the nature of life upon an island, whether one wants that isolation or not. But so, too, are the personalities of the island, the people — the little oddities — that push through it, those whose existence inspires, often, such loneliness.
***
Not far from my parents’ house — a half-mile away, toward the spot where I would stand and look out over Tuckernuck and Chappaquiddick, near the dunes where I hoped to see snowy owls — is Madaket Harbor. Robert Lowell once described the spot — a place apart even from the bulk of Nantucket, slung low on its western edge — in a poem mourning the loss of his cousin:
You could cut the brackish winds with a knife
Here in Nantucket, and cast up the time
When the Lord God formed man from the sea’s slime
And breathed into his face the breath of life,
And blue-lung’d combers lumbered to the kill.
The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.
This is the Madaket I see, too: A place where nature in a primordial violence smashes its fist again and again into the sand, where in winter the harbor freezes and in summer the sharks play offshore. This is a land built by Sophia’s god. When she prays for a storm in The Summer Book, it came from this same place: The place where the sea is a god and the land is ever-threatened, where you must be solitary and alone, where the threat of cascading surf feels like an axiom, part and parcel with the essence of the world.
I left Nantucket after more than a year when the summer season was still in full swing, the boats lining the wharves, the charity banquets ongoing, the shops not even thinking yet of shutting down for the winter. It was one sort of “miniature world,” but not the one I think of first: That is of the winter and its age of solitude. In the summer, Nantucket is less a world unto itself, even as it feels more rarified, more unusual. A flight from New York takes less than an hour in the summer— it’s a quick hop over on JetBlue or United. In the winter, I take a train: four hours. A bus: another two. Wait in the ferry terminal. Then, the boat — an hour at least, perhaps more than double that. Even to fly would be hard: to Boston first, then across Cape Cod Bay and Nantucket Sound in a little Cessna so small I might be asked to sit in the copilot’s seat.
In the winter, Nantucket is away from the world — less remote than Schalansky’s islands, but still a place apart, removed by the whims of God or of glacial detritus from America, as locals call the mainland. It is, then, first a solitary place — not a lonely one.
Parker Richards is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn. He is currently a fact-checker at The New York Times and was previously the digital editor of The Yale Review. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The American Scholar, among other publications. You can follow him on Twitter @ParkerTRichards.
Art by Betty “Juniper” Kim
Betty “Juniper” Kim is a comics artist and writer currently pursuing an MFA at the Center for Cartoon Studies. Their work has recently appeared in Nashville Review, Black Warrior Review, Catapult, and SweetLit, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. You can find more of their work at bettyjkimportfolio.com, or say hello via Instagram @doodlingjuniper.