Dad’s Nantucket Story

It’s a Saturday in summer. It’s been hot and humid here in the Northeast all week and will continue to be this weekend. Let’s find us an island where breezes are blowing.

I have no idea where this typing trip might take us but I do know that it starts in the waking hours of a Saturday. No other day possible. Another certainty: This was Dad’s doing. It was one of Dad’s Planned Days. It was hoped, by Kevin and me, that it might approach “Our First Fenway Trip,” another of Dad’s Days which had occurred earlier that summer, if this was the Summer of ’60, which I think it was.

This new one, this new Dad’s Day, was called “Nantucket.” We were told Nantucket was an island. We worried — well, Mom worried; Kevin and I didn’t worry about much in those days — that it might be as sea-sickening as “Deep Sea Fishing with the Clancys,” a day that had been featured in, I’m thinking, the spring of ’58 or ’59. The Clancys’ fishing day in the Atlantic off Seabrook was a relatively fresh horror.

Dad had Nantucket in his head for some reason. He had sought and been supplied with his reliable Channel 4 Weather by Don Kent, and we were going to go to Nantucket. Why, beyond the quest — which phrase presupposes that there was any reason beyond just the quest; a large presupposition — Dad wanted to take Mom, Kevin and me to Nantucket is elusive. He certainly had no connection to the island. I doubt he’d ever been there. Even though young Dad had admired the big, fat and convoluted Look Homeward, Angel, I very much doubt he had read the unabridged Moby-Dick, and I know beyond question that there’s zero whaling — hardly any fishing, even — in our familial CV. Moreover, Mom and Dad were not Cape people. They were New Hampshire and Maine people for all beachy jaunts, no doubt owing not only to Mom’s north-facing Quebecois heritage but also to the fearsome, too-tight Bourne Bridge, which even back then in a less calamitous day was notorious for traffic jams on weekends. Although Dad bought some snazzy used cars from Johnny Costello off the lot at 1400 Motors, he didn’t like sitting idle in them in traffic jams, so among the many other things that Mom and Dad were not, they were not Cape folk. And not island folk, beyond bridge crossings of 20 yards of so on a span above half of the Merrimack River when going to visit our cousins in Dracut.

So why Nantucket?

“The islands” of 1960 — which comprised only that, Nantucket, and Martha’s Vineyard, not Block, for any island-indifferent Massachusetts family — were not particularly alluring even to dedicated oceangoers. They weren’t today’s Vineyard and Nantucket. The pair of them required a major effort to get to and, once you had made that effort, they weren’t much to brag on. Or so Dad and Mom would have heard at Lowell’s watercoolers.

“Ramshackle,” is a word that would have been applied, and “moldy.”

“Definitely not worth the trip.”

“Go to Hampton.”

“Go to Gloucester.”

“Go to Rockport, except it’s dry.”

“The hotels on Nantucket are threadbare, like Wentworth.”

“Pretty shabby, overall.”

“Go to Nantasket, for God’s sake. Much easier than Nantucket.”

Block Island, a little further across the water and not even part of Massachusetts — Rhode Island, for Chrissakes — was, if Mom and Dad had bothered to learn of it, which they did not, was even worse for wear, useful only as a southernmost point of reference in Mr. Kent’s “Eastport-to-Block Island” weather summaries. Block, rhyming with rock as readily as dock, even had a forbidding name. Christ, at least the Vineyard musta been a vineyard, once. Viveyards are nice. They have them in France! I’ve seen the pictures. Rock’s suck.

But Dad had Nantucket in his head, just like I get things in my head, and so we as a sleepy-eyed family would rise with the Parlees’ roosters (if we heard them cross-town, and I only romantically assume that we ever could), and we’d pile in the Oldsmobile and drop our infant Gail in Lowell with Mama for the day. Then, Mom, Dad and “the boys” would head south to a place with a fantastic pirates’ name: Woods Hole. We were going on a day trip from Woods Hole to what, in Kevin’s mind as well as mine, was already being reimagined as Treasure Island.

(Years later, after I became that journalist guy on the enviro beat at SI and then LIFE, I would contact the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and inquire after one or another of its staff scientists as a quotable source on the latest, freshest deep-sea crisis plaguing our besieged planet. I could have called the Scripps Institution or Monterey Bay Aquarium out in California, or even the seemingly Most Authoritative or at least Federally Official National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration down in Washington, but I’m a homer, as you know by now, so I routinely phoned Woods Hole with my queries. I figured the folks there were smarter, savvier, than Californians or capital bureaucrats. They were surely Harvard or MIT or some kind of Bay State-bred Adams/Thoreau/Emerson/Melville/Douglass/Dickenson/Whistler/Dr. Seuss/Spenser/Bernstein/Yo Yo/Red/Tito/Cora/Belichick smart; a Tanglewood or Wilco’s festival in North Adams brand of smart, perhaps; a Mass General, Brigham and Women’s, Beth Israel, MFA, BSO, the Clark Art Museum in Williamstown stripe of smart. Massachusetts Smart. (Massachusetts Smartass.) Smart is in our water. There are motes of bonehead, too, sure, I know that, but I romanticize that our gang was much more smart by a considerable measure. So Claim We, and we’re smart enough to know. I was raised to be a politely arrogant little loyalist asshole.)

Ferries to the islands departed from Woods Hole or Hyannisport, both of which were located on the oceanside belly of the Cape. Woods Hole’s passage promised to be somewhat shorter than Hyannisport’s, so that was the destination for any savvy suckers from Chelmsford.

We beat the Bourne Bridge Bottleneck. Dad, pedaling to the metal on Rte. 128, was thrilled to find cars “at least moving” up and over that leviathan steel-arch hump. He parked us in a Woods Hole field. We bought tickets from a gruff guy at the window. We boarded under a cloudy sky. We were off and away.

Kevin and I were already as pumped as Dad was, although we did not register our excitement by chain-smoking Kent Kings. As with any trip into Boston, to Hampton Beach or Franconia, this new destination, as it had been vaguely defined for us by Mom, seemed to promise bulletproof entertainment: go to Cape Cod on the notorious, always thrilling Route 128 (“we’ll leave early, boys, so we can try that way rather than 495,” she said, talking to herself), head then for something called “28,” take a bridge in order to gain the Cape, thence to Robert Louis Stevenson’s very own Woods Hole (he surely visited at some point), board a ferryboat named (I’m making this up, of course) Pequod, then enjoy the thrilling act of riding old Pequod up-and-down-and-out onto/into the choppy Atlantic Ocean, where beneath the wild waves prowl, menacingly, voraciously, a million Great White Sharks and Killer Whales and ginormous octopi (“octopuses” to us, which is also correct, by the way) — such dangerous denizens of the deep unimaginable and yet imaginable to two boys familiar with few fish beyond the Red House crappies of West Chelmsford’s Stony Brook (I know, I know: faulty relationship re. relativity of animalia, as whales are marine mammals, and octopi are Mollusca; but, hey, sharks are in fact fish, even if their bones are cartilaginous; and, hey, also by the way, we were, after all, kids, kids, so go easy on us here) . . .  

Well! Wow!! . . . And I can reliably report from 6/22/24: Not only was all of this (after Dad’s well-established anxiety about Rte. 128) brand new to us, it proved in the event to fulfill even our bountiful expectations. The day, which might have be deemed in afterthought to set up as something bordering on boring by an adult, was highly and increasingly dramatic at each turn to two young boys from Chelmsford.

I hadn’t even dozed on the rear couch of the Olds during the drive — I just couldn’t — and Kevin and I were poised as if on lookout when our wave-busting ferry began to slow, its island destination dead ahead. “C’mon, let’s be first off!” we implored Mom and Dad. “Let’s go!”

Mom hushed us. She set us straight, saying, “Kevin, Bobby — this is only Martha’s Vineyard. Nantucket’s further out.” Whether Mom was being merely reportorial with this sad news — “Nantucket is further” — or if there was a hint of sarcasm, tease or causticness directed Dad’s way, I will not say because I do not even vaguely remember her tone of voice. I only imagine it, which makes me smile. Mom, I will affectionately submit to this written record, could indeed be caustic when causticity was called for, but she was always reservedly so — clever, winking, minor-key, kinda-sweet caustic, kinda is-she-being-caustic-or-honest? caustic — and therefore an adept wielder of irony and razz (not a Bay State law firm). She could be one of those confident, quiet and, again, sweet Massachusetts Smartasses. Mom resembled in this not so much Jack Benny as the also great Jack Parr. (That reference will mean nothing to you kids, but you might YouTube Jack Parr for reference and enjoyment.

(Easier and quicker: Think Amy Poehler, with her pause, that slight does-she-mean-it? smile. No surprise, she was born in Newton to two schoolteachers, raised in Burlington, which played us in football in the Merrimack Valley Conference. She’s a young master at what Mom could do.)

At the Vineyard’s dock, 50 folks, maybe fewer, disembarked down the gangplank with their day-bags and a few bikes. Then, we stouter-stuff shipmates headed back out to sea, our departees waving to us from the parking lot below. They were joined in our slow-moving end of Act One number by natives and already registered weekenders on the widow’s walks above Edgartown, all of whom were waving “Hello” or “Goodbye”: Fare thee well, dear brave Nantucketers! Fare thee well!!

The open-ocean voyage from Martha’s Vineyard to Nantucket knocked a bit of the ripe and ready out of me and Kevin. In 1960, ’61, the one-way passage from Woods Hole all the way out to Nantucket, which today barely leaves time for a second beer if you’ve ponied up the East Eggy fee for the about-an-hour catamaran cruise, swallowed every bit of three hours on a smelly steamship on a “good travelling day,” much of that period spent bobbing atop an always rocking, always rolling, sometimes visibly roiling churn. Luci and I enjoyed a couple of days on Block Island last summer or the one before and our commute from New London aboard the Block Island Express seemed like travelling on a smooth-as-silk, open-air tram. It was a ride out of Disney. But back in the summer of ’60, the purchase of a package of Tums was prescriptive at any ticket window in Woods Hole booking passage for Nantucket.

But we made it. Still standing. Call us Ishmael. Call Dad Ishmael. Call Mom Mrs. Ishmael.

. . .  That’s enough for today, I think. We’ve reached the island. The summer continues here in 2024, and so does this heat and mugginess in the Northeast. So will “Dad’s Nantucket Story” on another morning soon enough.

Time for lunch. I wish we could find some good fried clams around here. The fried clams in Westchester are a rubbery joke, says the old asshole loyalist formerly of Massachusetts. (Hey, Knicks fans: Have you heard we’ve won Number 18? Can you believe that? Eighteen!)