This Man Was an Island
That’s an updated version of a title set atop a 1996 profile of the writer Nelson Bryant, who was known to his mainland friends and loyal readers as “Nelson Bryant of Martha's Vineyard."
Here was my go-grab-’em lede of ’96:
“Every one of them has taken an animal,” says Nelson Bryant serenely. Taken means killed. Bryant refers to a half-dozen guns, modern and antique, hung upon a rude wall in a clean, well-lighted cottage in the Martha's Vineyard village of West Tisbury. The guns are Nelson’s. The cottage is Nelson’s — for a second time (we'll explain shortly). It can even be said that the island is Nelson's, or at least it once was — that's the way it seemed to him. “When I was a boy, I just roamed around here, canoeing, hiking, fishing, hunting I hesitate to say, trapping. I used to have my own duck blind at Mill Pond when I was 12 years old. You do that now, you’d be flung in jail. It’s so different now. Martha’s Vineyard’s like a former girlfriend who has fallen on evil days.”
So, what’s this about?
Well, you certainly do not or should not recall that at the tail end of my last Post before heading for a week in South Carolina with the family I was thinking of following “Dad’s Nantucket Story” with little somethings recounting other adventures on those ever-paired, once-modest, now scary-luxe Massachusetts skerries, aka the Grey Lady and the Rock, aka . . .
I mentioned I wanted to revisit former good times on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard with a couple of (since-deceased) friends, whom I’d met during yesteryear assignments. These were characters who were tied umbilically to their islands like Gauguin to the Marquesas, Nappy to Elba, Papa to Cuba, Robinson Crusoe and Tom Hanks to TKTK (Mas a Tierra?) and Koming Koming (Who knows?), Bob Marley to . . .
My nominees for next-up Postings were Vito Capizzo of Nantucket and Nelson Bryant of Martha’s Vineyard. I was just floating ideas. Thinking out loud, as I always tell my wife . .
Within a day of newsllettering that pre-vacation piece I heard from an old college friend, Melon, who wrote from Texas that he was looking forward to the Bryant reminiscence in particular. He all but demanded it be next. Context, here: Melon was a year ahead of me in school, and remains a forceful personality belying his mild Cucurbitaceae fleshy fruit frat-foward nickname, so when Melon said he was hoping for a report on a fellow he had apparently known and respected personally, I heard the Melon speak.
Last week I mulled Melon’s ask last week as I lounged on the sand of Kiawah, listening to the rumble of the wind-whipped surf, wondering how to proceed: either flagrantly recalcitrant in the face of Melon’s “suggestion” or dutifully submissive to the “request” of my well-regarded upper-classmate, who happens to be a good friend still. On the beach, I turned to somewhat less complicated not to say less consequential matters, like whether these fierce waves had been whipped north by Hurricane Beryl, which I heard had become Class Five’s earliest-ever storm in the measured history of American Hurricanes, also whether we were all doomed because of such trends, which even now included another news flash: June of ’24 was clocking in as the warmest June in the history of our climactically-assessable planet.
Sure, what the very hell: Do Nelson now, for Melon. Who knows what tomorrow may bring?
Returning home to my where-ya-been? keyboard here, I made notes as to how and why I first came to know Bryant in the ’90s — as best I could recall small details 30 years on.
I figured I had, with my immediate introduction to The New York Times upon relocating to Gotham from New Hampshire in January 1980, become an instant admirer of the “Wood, Field and Stream” (later renamed “Outdoors”) column written each week by Bryant. My own interest in wood, field and stream distilled to hiking through pleasant places and up the occasional 4,000-footer in New England, not in pursuing game therein with bait or bullet, but I learned, upon investigating Bryant who this marvelous, multitalented writer was. I noticed that, in more than a couple of ways, his story and mine ran parallel.
A generation and a-half older than me, he’d been a Thoreauvian Massachusetts kid given to walks in the woods even more than ballplaying. Against odds, he’d been admitted to Dartmouth College out of Vineyard Haven High precisely 30 years before I opened my own happy-making Admissions letter in the Chelmsford High guidance office on the mainland. I, of course, did not, at age Zero, see my college career interrupted by service in World War II, but interestingly, perhaps, Bryant and my dad both served gallantly in the Army’s advance of D-Day and then during the Battle of the Bulge (albeit Dad was second or third wave at Normandy while Bryant, on the evening before the assault itself, parachuted into France, taking one in the chest during his descent. The bullet barely missed a lung as he floated to the ground. After a quick recouperation Wales Bryant returned to the front, as his and Dad’s platoons joined in the march toward Berlin.
Bryant completed his Dartmouth degree in 1952 and his first edit job was landed in 1954 down the road a piece from Hanover at the Claremont Daily Eagle, where he would become Editor, serving until 1966. My entry-level gig in magazines was landed in 1976 out of Hanover’s Reservoir Road, just north of campus, at New Hampshire Profiles, where, after it had relocated to Concord, I, too, ascended the top job because I came cheap. That dynamic — the standardly paltry New Hampshire pay — was the reason Bryant, who had started a family, felt compelled to move on in ’66.
A former colleague in Claremont told him that the Times’s longtime outdoors columnist had died and there might be an opening. Bryant took a shot and got the job. He very quickly developed a strong reputation in the critical circles that were to crown, in that and the next little while, not only him but such Sons of Jack London, Cousins of John Muir stylists as Thomas McGuane, Annie Dillard, wild-and-crazy Edward Abbey and Sports Illustrated’s Bob Jones, Bil Gilbert and Bob Boyle. Bryant had returned from New Hampshire to his forever home on the Vineyard and from there saw his national renown as a writer do nothing but grow for nearly four decades. I joined his legion at the midpoint. Bryant, still of West Tisbury, died in 2020 at age 96 at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital over in Oak Bluffs.
That’s the thumbnail. I’ll get into the weeds of West Tisbury as we progress.
Now, if these Posts have made nothing clear — and I’m not at all confident they have made anything at all clear — it is that I’m a diehard loyalist, pledging and bottomless fealty to my teams and towns, family and friends. So, knowing what I was coming to know in the 1980s about Bryant and his heritage — Massachusetts, the European Theater alongside my dad, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire’s nature, the islands of the Bay State’s southern sounds – rendered me a bigtime Friend of Bryant well before I met him.
I remembering wondering, when I became a cub reporter on the enviro beat at SI, whether Nelson had ever written for the magazine, or if it was our editors’ policy that we stick with our own on this marginal beat. Then one day in the later ’80s when I was on an editing trial, I was assigned to work a freelance piece by McGuane. Got knows I made few marks and no excisions. I enjoyed talking with the writer a great deal. The experience caused me to wonder again about Bryant — maybe we should call him? Maybe I, still a kid, should be so bold as to suggest we assign him a piece?
I did a little research in the Morgue and found that in Sports Illustrated’s issue of 9/13/65 the magazine had indeed run a long piece on trout fishing by Nelson Bryant of New Hampshire. He was not yet “Nelson Bryant of the Times” but someone high on the SI masthead had been impressed by his eloquence and storytelling. I’m sure I received that issue of SI in our Chelmsford mailbox in ’65 as part of my subscription, but at 11 years old I wasn’t reading long fishing stories (although I was getting into Jack London and soon enough local hero Thoreau). I did read it in the morgue’s hard-copy version 40 years ago, and it 2024 it is of course the work of a moment to summon a story from the SI Vault online, and I’ve re-read and enjoyed Bryant’s “Still Waters Run Trout” in preparing this Post. In it, Bryant recounts an adventure with a friend at a pond in New Hampshire: March Pond in Hill, New Hampshire. After enjoying a splendidly successful day of fishing, Bryant grows (presciently) concerned about the future of all waters: “Not many years will pass before most of these remote ponds are lost to civilization. Already the land around some of them has been purchased by individuals interested in developing campsites and house lots. Logging roads and foot trails are being bulldozed so that ordinary cars can reach the ponds, and once the roads are completed it is only a few years before a remote pond loses its beauty.”
At New Hampshire Profiles it was required that we editors know where every town in New Hampshire in fact was, and maybe because of this town’s distinctive name I still, 40 years later, twigged to “Hill”. I’ve now confirmed my notions with Wikipedia. Hill is a small, village-y place, a Currier and Ivesey town, a town-meeting-type town, a Grover’s Corners™ hamlet half-an-hour from Concord, somewhere near Ragged Mountain, where Kevin, Gail and I had skied as kids.
Indeed, as Bryant presaged, Hill three times as populous today as when he fished there in ’65: It is currently peaking above a thousand souls. But Bryant would be pleased to know that the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests is on the case, watchful of development in the area as the 21st century marches callously on everywhere.
I hadn’t thought, back, in the 1980s when I was at SI, and certainly after I switched to the staff of LIFE in 1991, of writing a profile of Bryant. I was pretty busy with the day-to-day and largely let others direct my assignments. Then Glenn Wolff came into my life.
How that happened:
I had, by the ’90s, reached the point with Bryant’s “Outdoors” column where I would set my watch for its anticipated weekly arrival. The reasons were two. I loved the artistic prose, and I loved the artistic interpretations of nature that accompanied his words. Clearly a single illustrator had been synchronically paired with Bryant by a smart “Outdoors” editor on the newspaper’s Sports desk. Bryant’s detailed factuality, characteristically enlivened by what Rachel Carson called “a sense of wonder” — even joy — had been perfectly matched with intricate sketches by someone credited (suitably; naturally) as Glenn Wolff. When Bryant contributed the occasional longer feature to the Sunday paper, this guy Wolff was brought along. There he proved — to me, at least — that he worked as brilliantly in color as in black-and-white.
Among my editing assignments at the monthly LIFE was to handle the back-of-the-book feature called “How Things Work,” which would explain, in words and pictures, how one docks at the Space Station, say, or, step by step, how a bill passes through Congress. One night Luci and I shared dinner with the Amazing Randi so that the magician might explain for LIFE’s readers how the notorious Three-card monte scam in Times Square works, and how a summertime tourist might detect the trap when hanging in town before a Broadway show.
I had an even crazier thought for our December number and my boss, Dan Okrent, was crazy enough to approve it: “How Reindeer Fly”. I would get a few scientists and adventurers who had been friendly sources when I was at SI to now play along regarding certain criticalities — the Bernoulli Principal as it applies to Rangifer Tarandus Pearyi, the world’s smallest, fastest reindeer; the number of round-trips to and from the Pole required by the elf to cover 75 million miles in 31 hours on his big night (bonus hours gained when factoring the dusk’s migration around the globe); the speed of the sleigh (650 miles-per-second) — and, once our experts weighed in, we would illustrate their assertions with doctored photography.
Now, once you start contemplating Santa’s astonishing accomplishments, you just can’t stop. I thought of more and more fun tidbits, and finally asked Dan if I could turn our feature into a book. He said sure. I knew I would use photographs aplenty but also needed an artist to partner. I called Susie Adams, a friend from the tennis beat who worked in Sports at the Times. “Do you folks have a number for a guy named Glenn Wolff on your Rolodex? He works the Nelson Bryant column.”
“I’ll check with the Art Department.”
Susie came through, I called the number, and it turned out Glenn Wolff lived a couple of blocks from me in Greenwich Village. I and Luci hosted him for dinner one spring evening in the courtyard of a small bistro that was a favorite. I floated my nutty idea and Glenn smilingly came aboard, and thus began our collaboration on the 1996 book Flight of the Reindeer: The True Story of Santa Claus and His Christmas Mission. Rarely have I had more fun doing a thing and never have I enjoyed the company of a collaborator more than I did Glenn’s. We became friends for life during in the course of our project. Considering that Glenn is the world’s nicest guy, I asked him at one point what Nelson Bryant was like. I would trust Glenn’s judgment. He said Nelson was the world’s nicest guy. Good to know, I said. “Do you have his phone number?”
And that’s when I decided to try a profile on Bryant, then freelanced what became “This Man Is an Island.”
And now, . . .
Goodness me! I have typed and typed and am coming to the bottom of Page 5 on my laptop file, yet haven’t reached the material in that feature, beyond leading with my grab-’em lede of long ago.
I want to lean on that piece as I share the Martha’s Vineyard stuff therein, not to mention Nelson’s voice, which is quoted throughout, but I’m going to amend my plans, however slightly. Material from the feature will be at the heart of tomorrow’s Post. This will be it for today’s: just a prelude that ran away with me. I apologize for letting that happen. I had scratched a few notes before I set forth — “explain the coincidences, your life and Bryant’s, college, first job, etc. . . .”, “introduce Glenn and that connection to Bryant . . .”
And, well, there you go.
Tomorrow, then, or the next day: The man on his island. Have a nice rest of your evening.
Nice story Sull, can’t wait to read part 2
Just my opinion, but Melon needs to escape Texas in the summer and return to New England.
Finally, Martha Vineyard is nice but Nantucket is better. Remember that when the Vito story is written.
Glad to know my vote still counts. BTW, just experienced Beryl a bit more intimately than you. 80mph winds ain't fun.