Summer Interlude 2 — Dad's Story, Revisited

Having decided the break from the year-long "Jog" series on this Substack site should be a Fourth of July Weekend three-post mini-series, I offer Part Deux. It's a little old, more than a little long.

[Note 07/05/25: I have an amended plan. Yesterday, compelled by events in the Halls of Congress on the Eve of “Independence Day,” I wanted to recall a tough speech delivered during a much earlier Nation’s Birthday commemoration by Frederick Douglass. That led to thoughts of Douglass’s time on Nantucket, and those led to memories of a long-ago trip to Nantucket with my family, then constituted of Mom, Dad, Kevin and myself, with Gail but a gleam in our parents’ paternal/maternal eye. I promised that something called “Dad’s Nantucket Story” would follow. Back when I first presented “Dad’s Nantucket Story” in “That Reminds Me of a Story,” it was serialized in three rambling, discursive posts (digression my wont, admittedly). Re-reading those posts last night on the front porch, as the fireworks from two towns down played out against a black sky, its horizon line glimpsed through the leaves of the tall oak on the front lawn, with muffled booms following at three-second intervals, put me in a lazy/hazy summer mood. But the re-read also caused me to know that my off-roads in the original, three-beat telling of Dad’s tale were not all that amusing, and more than a little intrusive, interruptive, or downright annoying. So they not struck me, anyway. So: the new plan — You make the new Summer Interlude on Substack a one-weekend/Fourth of July-weekend package, starting with yesterday’s post; then you re-edit and assemble you “Dad’s Story” in one place, one piece, without your most self-indulgent BS; then, thirdly, in the final part of your Summer Interlude, you revisit that other Fourth of July, the one during the Year of the COVID when you wrote about Hawaiian shirts and Proud Boys, if you can remember and find that piece of writing. Must be somewhere? So that’s the new plan, as of now. Here comes “Dad’s Nantucket Story” in its Authorized, Abriged-yet-Unabridged, Unexpurgated, somewhat tighter, somewhat less bothersome version. I hope it feels like summer to you.]

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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 a 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.

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.

********

Kevin and I skipped off the boat and onto the dock. Nantucket didn’t exactly spread out before us. It sort of poked through the greyness here and there—the marina, a chowder shack, a bike-rental shack, a dry goods shack, a shack that just seemed to be a shack, a bunch of beat-up old boards that might once have been a shack, an unassuming five-and-dime whaling museum shack on Broad Street (which today is the big-as-an-Antarctic-Blue Whaling Museum on Broad Street, of which Montauk or Disney might be proud. I love spending time in there; check it out for sure if you go.).

We walked a block to get away from the aroma of the port. I always welcome the smell of salt spray and/or fried clams, but this had more than a dash of benzene in the brew. We headed uphill with no particular place to go. Mom had heard that biking was tougher on Nantucket than, for instance, Martha’s Vineyard, so we had nixed that option. Kevin and I were eight and six in ’60, and Dad, not having a clue as to what “tougher than Martha’s Vineyard” could possibly mean, nonetheless could spot a bad idea a mile away. We would hike.

I mentioned, a bit back there, Lowell: Mom and Dad’s hardbitten home city.

Kevin and I, too, were already, as kids, well familiar with Lowell, which after all had for two centuries before its 19^th century founding been just the easternmost sector of our own town, Chelmsford (founded 1654), and was still, in 1960, the place where Mom and Dad both went to work, and where we all sometimes went for Disney movies at the Keith or Strand. Lowell had a couple of cobblestone alleys remaining in 1960, so Nantucket’s thoroughfares weren’t foreign to either Kevin or me, but they were seemingly more authentic, having been trod, no doubt, by Aha in his day, trod today by Ahab’s grandsons or great-grandsons (Ahab had unknown heirs? Unlikely? I’ll ask Nat Philbrick next time we meet.)

These cobblestones had to be different than Lowell’s, I figured. We were on an island, so the road had to be paved with cobblestones, yes? Because there was nothing else available out here. Right? Isn’t that why?

That’s authenticity, kiddo! Lowell could tar over its straggling streets whenever it wanted to (and no doubt would do soon enough, if it could find the money) but Nantucket, well, there’s simply no asphalt on an island. Right? Isn’t that it? Yer not in Lowell anymore, me maties.

You concoct your own mythologies to entertain or at least satisfy yourself and your audience. It’s what I do, anyway. I figure, this is pretty much what mythologies are all about: Good stories with correct or faulty information in them, entertainingly told. Campbell said as much, in a way. More often than not, a mythology has some moral at the end. Cave dwellers did this. Homer did it. The Romans chased his Greeks with the habit. All cultures have done it since all of those so-called Ancients. Religions did it bigtime and still do. Clubs do it. The Masons did it. QAnon, a religion or a cult or a club, whatever, tried it (what’s up with QAnon these days?). The Red Sox do it; the BLOHARDS, our Red Sox fan club in New York City, does it; nations do it; birds do it; bees do it; cold Cape Cod clams ’gainst their wish do it; lazy jellyfish, constantly; Geoffrey of Monmouth did it; Stan Lee did it; Kavalier & Clay did it; Tolkien did it; Lucas and his pal Spielberg did it and others now do it in their names: in their “series” and “offshoots” and comic-book versions. It might be sacrilege for a Sullivan to say so, but Saint Paul probably did more than his fair share of it. Ask a Philippian.

Kevin and I did it. We were still in the process of mythologizing our personal Lowells and our views of, say, Dad’s Part in World War II, and now we became engaged in mythologizing Our Nantucket.

It’s fun, today, to think of how closely the “Nantucket” fancified by Kevin and me in 1960 came to be the Colonial Williamsburgian Ye Olde Nantucket that has been so successful in the 21^st century — and that Luci and I love thoroughly when we ferry out to see Glo and John. Someone else besides the Sullivans saw, in the late 1950s into the early\‘60s, just how beautiful this place was and could continue to be — the term “it’s a dump” sometimes in play in Lowell was absurd — and down the subsequents years, in the fine weather months, then with a bigger hospital, better schools and the addition of a Christmas Stroll and even a film fest, Nantucket climbed higher year after year as the years progressed.

I like to think it was destiny: There really was something special in the Nantucket air, something even kids from Chelmsford could sense blowing on the breeze, fairy dusted, back when Nantucket was very hard up. I’ve never read an Elin Hilderbrand novel so I don’t know if it’s in there, but I do think it exists in the island’s nature. It’s a bless-ed isle. Every time I go out there I feel this when walking some empty beach at dawn, or when glimpsing the tip-top of the windmill on the horizon.

(Fun facts for me and Luci and I hope you: I know Hilderbrand got married at the Chanticleer in ’Sconset sometime in the 1990s. Get this: Luci was in Beth’s wedding out there in that same period and the rehearsal dinner was at the Chanticleer! The fun goes on and on: In 1980, when Nantucket was well embarked on its own latest rehab ascent from Legendary Whaling Port to Erstwhile Whaling Port to Truly Down and Out to 21^st Century Marvel, the grumpy, ex U.S. President Richard Nixon, in the sixth year of his own enforced Next Chapter, slipped onto the island from some buddy’s yacht for needed R&R and, alongside his ever-loyal sidekick Bebe Rebozo, rode a limo cross-island and, after a few paces on the ’Sconset Bluff Walk, enjoyed (as much as Nixon could enjoy anything) what was no doubt a splendid dinner at the Chanticleer. Nantucketers, fingers always to the wind, knew he was on-island and most wished him well when they spotted him. One Beantown smartass yelled when he saw Nixon in town, “Where’s Checkers?”)

Nantucket’s cobblestones are still in roughly the same places in the 2020s as they were 60 years past. Without question, however, in the present day there are billions of Nantucket-affiliated dollars and plentiful stores of asphalt ready —eager — to bubble forth as from Kileuea’s cone and pave everything over, literally and metaphorically fill in the cracks.

But the cobblestones have grown to be “charming” in their ever-older age as they continue to break the ankles of successive human generations of tourists, and so they are indispensable line-items in the Nantucket Master Plan—2024 spreadsheet.

Lowell’s cobblestones, as was hoped for by a parade of mayors, were gone as soon as fiscally possible and Lowell herself — unfortunately or not — went through an extended period of forsaking much of its mythology. Today it likes to talk about “the mills” and Kerouac, and some civic booster will mention that Dickens once visited and wrote positively about the place. Whistler may come up in the conversation, or Bette Davis or Ed McMahon or Olympia Dukakis or Paul Tsongas or Mickey Ward or Michael Chiklis. But there’s often a hint of apology to much of it. Lowell sometimes seems to be trying to make amends for past urban-planning mishits. Few talk of An Wang anymore few know who he was. Lowellians have been famously torn about Kerouac, even, although Jack seems to finally be winning the day as, on Merrimack Street, there’s a perceptible tilt towards “Proud.”

Like anyplace, Lowell, like Nantucket, would like to be proud of itself, and dress nicely for dinner. (I still love that city, or my personal mythology of it, God help me.)

On Nantucket, we Sullivans made our way, haltingly, carefully, gingerly uphill. I sensed that Dad was thinking about what in the world he had been thinking about when he suggested this trip. Mom was certainly wondering what Dad had been thinking. Kevin and I were looking for something to see beyond the Grey Lady’s grey-shingled houses, which seemed to us in need of paint. But we were already miles beyond happy with the progress of the day. We were constantly but quietly bursting with joy.

Now, we boys were apparently misunderstanding about the grey houses needing paint. They may have been wanting paint, but . . .

Y’see, according to my friend, John (aka Killer), who lives in Providence and has a place on the island, his and Glo’s property being situated about a half-mile inland from the harbor, there is — at least there is now — a civic regulation — something firmer than a tradition — that Nantucket homeowners in scores of designated old houses or specific neighborhoods cannot paint their Nantucket-grade (not Kennebunkport-grade) white-cedar (not red-cedar) shingles any old color. He or she must choose a subdued shade and more or less leave the shingles’ visual fate and eventual rustic/severe/sage coloration to a proscribed communal hue, fashioned as much by wind and weather as Sherman Williams. Such civic well-being has long been the Colonially Williamsburgian way, and it’s Nantucket’s way, too. I’m betting that there was no such community rule in 1960, but I don’t know this. I’m betting that, back then, colorful paint on the island was an afterthought along with asphalt, for many of the same practical and economic reasons. An enforced code stipulating that everyone must leave his or her shingles relatively un-spruced might have been greeted with a Portuguese- or Greek- or Southie-accented, “Youse gotta be shittin’ me? Why, for chrissakes? I got this leftover red from the boat, and I’m paintin’ it. Screw you. Wasn’t even gonna paint it till you tol’ me . . . ” That’s not the same language a prominent Nantucket realtor now uses online in its info section, trying to explain the 2024 situation: “Some people describe the [uniform] color as gloomy due to its dull hue. However, if you stay longer on the island, you will appreciate the artistry employed in the color scheme . . .” That’s verbatim, and fact-checked.

Suddenly, to our left on the near horizon as we stumbled along, there loomed something great, something worthwhile, something new, something like nothing I’d ever seen in my life . . . This was the glimpse I mentioned earlier and remember now as well as I remember it the dozens more times I’ve glimpsed it since . . . the first glimpse of the windmill.

It hove into view like a ship on another horizon. It grew (it was so much bigger then, when I was six, than it seems now, 64 summers later). It was large and it was grey — I’m betting by neglect rather than edict. It was stoic. It wasn’t in motion, but I was sure that it had been in industrious motion in days of yore.

I was only six but I thought I understood windmills, at least a little. I had probably picked up something from Hans Christian Andersen. Thumbelina might have bumped into a windmill once upon a time; I can’t remember. Now, here before me was, irrefutably, an actual specimen. Dad had put the Olds on Rte. 495 in Lowell, headed southbound for the Cape. We had taken a ferry from Woods Hole to a Massachusetts island and somehow landed in Holland, and in the pages of a storybook.

“A windmill!” I exclaimed. And so we went left, climbed a bit more, and looked at the windmill up close. Then someone, probably Mom, said something that probably went like, “Let’s see what else we can find!”

*******

One moment, please, and this is a digression that I’ve not yet edited out and decided just now to keep in, for reasons I can’t explain quickly, so I’ll skip.:

I’ve got a theme to this Nantucket trip. Indulge me in this, please, for just a sec.

Let me further this theme along in these next few paragraphs by telling you what I now know about Nantucket’s windmill at its rising. The theme is, clearly: Then and Now. It’s one of my same old, as-ever, going-to-the-well themes, as our kids know from their mandatory “Another of Dad’s Stories” sessions at Thanksgiving, which they seem to tune out more readily at they’ve crept into young-adulthood. Then and Now is my companion to Ever Thus, a variation on, or elaboration of, the same ‘ol theme.

In this particular Then and Now Lecture I hope to wind my way to concluding that we (and in this case, Nantucket too) were in 1960 much the same as we are today, although we seem to present as so very different. We have changed, sure, but not really. This is simple and obvious material to grasp. How many celebrities have you heard say in interviews, “In my head, I’m still 25.” And if we can’t trust our celebrities, then who . . .

It's a bonehead’s theme, perhaps, but maybe there’s something to it? Just look at us — Luci, Kevin, Gail, me — 64 years later. Time has passed, taking its toll, yes, but also filling out the picture as intended in our American mothers’ and fathers’ paint-by-numbers kits. There has been progress and regress, successful details added, and mistakes made when straying outside the lines. But generally, life has gone on, as the country has hurt itself and healed itself around us, just as the world has hurt itself and healed itself and hurt itself again, sickness has ebbed and flowed around us. Look at where just America has traveled and landed since Kevin and I boarded that ferry — to the moon, back to the moon, to Globally Warmed and Climate Changed weather, to Vietnam, to the Middle East and via its weaponry to Ukraine and into Russia . . . Us, to all those Sox and Pats championships, and the C’s 18^th(!) — All of us, to and not yet through Covid-19, from the Pettis Bridge and the assassinations of ’68 to Rodney King through George Floyd . . . From Bobby Kennedy to Bobby Jr. and how’d that happen? Where was Eunice? . . . to a hundred million weddings and a hundred million wakes, to the births of 200 million children, to spreading ghettoes in many precincts and sacrosanct shingles becoming law in others . . . to Margaritaville as an enclave in Florida, a state where the governor has busied himself in the last few days signing laws that disallow slow driving in the left lane and also make it legal to kill “Crack Bears,” should a Floridian happen to encounter one in Margaritaville, Disney World, the Everglades, Daytona or anywhere else from Key West to Panama City . . . Margaritaville, a retirement community rather than a harmless ditty that peaked at Number Eight in 1977 on the Billboard Hot 100, when I was already a fan, happy for Jimmy haing a Top Ten but thinking the song not a patch on “A Pirate Looks at Forty” . . . to this 2024 election season we’re saddled with, and you tell me what to think about that, and I guess you will . . . And yet we roll on, those of us who are left, and some of us think a thought, as I just did, and feel we’re still 25, or six.

We members of our family have been damned lucky in this, sure. Nantucket, were it able, would no doubt think the same about itself, but of course an island is lacking those crucial human synapses that allow for reflection, also self-regard, introspection, wonder, appreciation, regret. Therein lies my metaphor, which is why I dwell on Nantucket so much — in my head if not my home. Nantucket and us: Lucky Massachusetts bastards for sure. I mean, really: Look at Nantucket today. Holy Canoli, right?

*********

The windmill is known as The Old Mill. It was known to the Quakers as the brand new mill in 1746, when Nathan Wilbur, one of the not-unusual Nantucket sailors who experienced Holland in his journeys, took inspiration from the Dutch and had it erected not far from the propitious site where the Round-Top Mill was already taking advantage of prevailing winds just above town. There would eventually be four so-called smock mills up there near what is now New North Cemetery.

A smock mill was a single building with all machinery housed within and a capacity, via a rotating cap, to turn its sails into the wind. The Old Mill, when new and for decades thereafter, was by accounts a well-performing smock mill. But by 1828, the Old Mill was truly old and decrepit. It sold that year for twenty dollars. The generally presumed intention was that purchaser Jared Gardner would scrap the mill for firewood, but he had bolder plans. He renovated, innovated and got the warhorse up and running again to grind corn. This it did for decades more. Then it stood idle until tourist boards were formed.

The mill still whirls today for the edification of visitors whenever the wind does blow during the summer months, which it does pretty much daily. The Old Mill stands, happily enough, and we assume (granting it those anthropoidal synapses for a moment) proudly enough, as a kind of offshore Plimoth Plantation attraction, minus waistcoats, funny hats and musketry. This mill, the only survivor of the quartet that once congregated on Nantucket’s highest hilltop, is said to be the oldest continuously operating windmill in America, and in 1992 it was designated an American Society of Mechanical Engineering Landmark — no small honor.

In 1960, Kevin and I could go up and touch the lonely old thing, which stood completely undesignated and attracted no crowds. Kevin or I might’ve taken a splinter to the finger. Today, we would take a tour, as Luci and I did a summer ago or the summer before that, of a mill that has dressed for dinner.

And 65 years from now, 70, 71? Who knows, regarding the mill? My bet is, it will still be up there, buttressed in miracle fibers. Nantucket will be smaller, tighter island, the sea rising every year, ‘Sconset long gone, those old houses built in the 2030s threatened next. Some people — you? Spielberg or Lucas? — might bet that the Old Mill will be gazing upon its greatest great-great-grandchildren: massive wind-farm turbines cropping up from the sea like corn stalks, a new horizon stretching beyond New England’s once lonely islands.

I guess I’ll be 135-to-141 then, still typing this stuff 64 summers into my crusade to resist AI’s assistance, which no doubt could’ve helped me (and you!) long ago to clean this up . . . A hundred forty, trying to think my own next thought, remarking to myself how much this new notion resembles one I had at 70, or 25, or six.

*******

Ahh, yes . . . The Future.

The rock will still be known as “Nantucket,” whether it’s above or below sea level, whether it’s a setting for, or a memory of, East Egg-esque cocktail parties. It’s not just Woods Hole oceanographers and ‘Sconset homeowners who know, today, that ACK may well be underwater one day. All of us know that. Should the rising tides of a warmer Atlantic have prevailed by six decades hence, Nantucket still will be being visited, but by tomorrow’s Jacques Cousteaus and James Camerons in their submersibles, who will be making docs about the bygone famous cataclysm that claimed Nantucket, Kiawah, Miami and so much else.

Then again, Nantucket may be fine and buttressed, owned wholly by Bill and Melinda’s or Eric Schmidt’s descendants, young ’uns who finally decided one fine spring morning, when looking out at the lighthouse or up at the windmill, that they needed a little more room, a bit more privacy. Perhaps Elon, now that he’s done with Washington, will develop a taste for Nantucket Bay scallops along his spacey way and eat the island whole, like the whale with his Jonah, and Elon’s heirs via his couple-dozen kids with a dozen women, whose fleet is docked in the Bay of Tesla,™ will have built their wall.

Or . . .

Nantucket may be weirdly and newly iterated, standing upon pontoons. It may be sitting upon floating pods.

I joked about being 140 years of age in seven more decades, but let’s be honest, I may not make it. If I do not, my Mom and Dad, my wife and I will be where we once were before we were here on Earth with you, and it will be my and Luci’s kids having their hips replaced. Our descendants will be doing their human thing, and Nantucket will be doing its rock thing, stoic in the face of what “the humans” have in store for it next.

It’s all a rock can do, after all. Left behind as a formation of some volcano or as the trash of a glacial migration, it then just sits and erodes, between times used and sometimes subjugated by humans, or blasted away by them as they seek more valuable rocks hidden behind or below. If a rock is really lucky, it is flat, smooth and small, and it can be skipped — one merry hop, two, three! — across the surface of a placid pond, then allow to sink slowly to the bottom, where it rests forevermore.

What interests me when I think of this is: Nantucket’s evolution up there in Massachusetts. It seems like an avant garde variation on that theme of my own families’ progress. The Sullivans of Chelmsford were pretty modest and unassuming — perfectly fine, not down-at-heel but certainly paycheck-to-paycheck — in 1960, not unlike Nantucket in its Wampanoag days before Bartholomew Gosnold, of all largely forgotten English barrister/explorer/privateers, first sighted it in 1602. Our family, native of Massachusetts Commonwealth just as Nantucket is native of what would become the Commonwealth, has been met by what is called largely good health and good fortune. We certainly feel fortunate, as I’ve said, and I know Mom and Dad always felt fortunate during their adulthood. Just the fact of Dad returning from the war intact and therefore able to marry Mom in Lowell and start a family in Chelmsford encouraged feelings of having had good luck, being on a Red Sox 1960-vintage win streak, which is to say: Don’t get heady. Their take was something along the lines of: Whatever came Artie and Lu’s way in 1960, which happened to be a Really Great Thing named Gail, was gravy.

Happiness kept coming in the 1970s, ’80s and onward — to us and to Nantucket. Are Luci and I happier now than we were in 1960, when I was going on seven and she was so very much younger, as she would eternally remain? Well, sure, in a way we’re happier because we found one another in the earliest ’80s at a party in Lexington. We’re happy some folks we both knew threw that party we met at. We’re super happy we have our kids. We’re a little wacked out by what’s going on in Washington, but . . .

I think we were perfectly happy in 1960 and are perfectly happy now. We’ve sort of been a human Nantucket, sitting there, seeing what life brings next, selfishly basking in the happiness of the moment.

I guess if you grew up in postwar America as part of the Baby Boom, you — at least, we — were preconditioned or taught, in some elementary and entirely incorrect way, to think that life would always or at least usually go well, and that all post-neanderthal people, all post-Geo. Washington and Abe Lincoln Americans certainly, would be well and act well. We weren’t to be worried about the many human-made wars inevitably to come, the floods and famines — and we would thank our gods, if we believed in gods. It seemed to us kids that it would be pure bad luck that would cause one to not be happy in America.

There are two modern things that got me wondering about all of our early life lessons about the future that we were taught in Chelmsford and then later, two enduring, quantifiable scientific fissures: the creep of Climate Change, and that sudden and surprising onslaught of COVID-19.

Okay, at some point the COVID of the year 2020, which remains a scary thing in 2025 in its tamed state, will take its assigned place in the Historical Roster of Plagues, and may, in that finalized tally, be well down the list when death-toll-in-terms-of-total-global-populations is factored. I don’t know where the horror-shows of the Bubonic Plague or “Spanish” Flu or Polio will sit. Polio will surely make a comeback with RFK (very much) Jr. calling his shots. What I do worry about is: Covid-19 was named because it emerged in 2019. Twenty-nineteen.I don’t care whether it escaped from a Chinese lab, was passed by a cow or transmitted in a wet market. Lab seems to have pulled ahead in that contest, but I don’t care. Our future world will continue to have labs, cows and wet-markets, and something will probably develop in each of them in centuries to come. What chills me is: We’re demonstrably not ready for whatever it is or however much worse than Covid-19 it might be. I figure we’re being made much less ready still by Bobby Jr. More than three a-half million people have died in less than half a decade in the modern-science 21^st century due to Covid-19. How does that even happen? Aren’t we supposed to be ready for anything? What worse might still happen, out there?

I didn’t used to believe the sci-fi movies. I didn’t believe things like Covid-19 were possible. Now, I believe something may be lurking that’ll surprise us just as readily and make Covid-19 look like a summer cold. Might it wipe us out? I’ll bet DraftKings has a line on that. Christopher Nolan is ready with Contagion’s sequel.

I believe all sorts of things now that I thought only Ray Bradbury believed when I discovered The Martian Chronicles in the wire rack at Page’s Drugstore in Lowell in, oh, maybe 1965. I believe that in 60 years weather patterns will be nothing we recognize today, and Canada’s ski industry will be booming. Moscow will represent an altered kind of autocracy and Washington will represent some evolved or devolved version of democracy, last night’s debate a footnote to its progress or retrogression. Visitors from the Kepler exoplanets will have arrived or not; they’ll be chummy or not; they’ll be hanging with Elon’s great-grandkids on Nantucket, or not. I believe any of that might come to pass.

Us and Nantucket, Then and Now, Ever Thus, Always the Way, Dust to Dust, Tried and True, Nothing New Under the Sun, The Way of All Flesh, The Progress of Man, Human Nature, Mother Nature — all the same theme, I guess, at The End of the Day.

Which brings me back along the curvy path to the Nantucket cemeteries.

After Mom, Dad, Kevin and I were done with the windmill we found a few graveyards, and I thought these were cool in the extreme. Mama and Margot were still alive in Lowell, and since Kevin and I had been deemed too young for Papa’s funeral, I had never yet been to a burial ground. This was so cool.

Nantucket was clearly a place that properly honored its dead, of which there were, quite obviously and surprisingly for such a small place, reasonable multitudes. In 1960, it seemed the island had deeded nearly as much of its acreage to the dearly beloved as to those still standing and building small cottages.

I have no idea which graveyard we started with but can logically assume it might have been New North, which really wasn’t so very new since it had started accepting overflow candidates from Old North in 1820. I cannot forgo or longer forestall the lame joke, so will deliver it now, as much to get it out of my system as anything: New North, like a couple of other cemeteries we chanced upon in the next hour or so, had not only lots of coffins but lots of Coffins. Coffins were clearly preeminent in the first Caucasian generations to settle upon the rock. Also found were an over-abundance of Folgers, Gardners, Husseys, Swains — Nantucket’s old guard, its “founding fathers” as judged by White-Euro lights (with the Wampanoags issuing a dissent). Those Olde Anglo names were absent in the so-called Indian and Colored cemeteries, but they were again dominant in the small but well-kept Quaker Burial Ground.

I think Dad’s family trip to Nantucket engendered in Kevin and me an affinity for graveyards and ghost stories. When Mom and Dad guided us on the Freedom Trail in Boston in later (but not much later) years, I was more taken with Mother Goose’s grave than with Old North Church, and in Concord I thought the modesty of Thoreau’s and Emerson’s plots on Authors’ Ridge was fitting and, in their simplicities, moving and inspirational. I haven’t been an obsessive about this throughout my life. I didn’t make a pilgrimage for Jim Morrison when in Paris, or Karl Marx when stationed in London. But at some point, I took to reading the fiction of M.R. James every Hallowe’en season, and my favorite Henry James is probably The Turn of the Screw (which is also, praise the God of Literatoor, a whole lot shorter than The Golden Bowl). I remember enjoying the graveyard scenes in Tom Sawyer, Frankenstein, Great Expectations, Hamlet, The Nightmare Before Christmas and, with our kids when they were growing up, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

The Sullivans of ’60 finished with our Nantucket graveyards tour and looked around. We could just about see the ocean from up there, just above the hillsides. It looked nice and still, as if having been painted into stillness. The vista was odd and seemingly endless, a slate-black/blue fading to grey mainland meeting up with a slate-grey sky on a horizon heading off towards what Dad might have mentioned, as if it were some beloved auld sod of his, Ireland — that-a-way. The breeze up here was strong. Wind turbines were in Tomorrowland’s picture, not this one. It was a regal Turner sky melting into Homer’s ocean swells.

We weren’t going sailing or swimming this day and tried to figure what to do next. We decided on lunch. So, we headed back down the hill. Near the marina, we found a shack for chowder. The soup was very thick and therefore good to a chubby six-year-old with a whiffle haircut and a new adventure now in his pocket. Then it was time to re-board the three o’clock ferry since, for Dad and Mom, and particularly now with infant Gail back home with Mama as a factor, everything had to be a day trip.

Kevin and I slept on the couch of the Olds as it climbed up and over the Bourne Bridge, all cars moving. Think of that. All cars moving on the Bourne Bridge. We were darned lucky folk, we Sullivans of Chelmsford.