Time & Tide Read Online Free Page A

Polpis Harbor halfway to ’Sconset. One week to the day after Maggie moved in with me her mail started to be delivered to my post office box. No instructions had been given, no forms filled out. It just happened. I imagine Sinclair Lewis would have thought it was terrible. We thought it was wonderful.
    THIRTY YEARS AGO the ferry ran from Woods Hole on the laconic Winter Schedule during the off-season, and on the expanded Summer Schedule during the season, which was a good deal shorter then than it is now. The ferry loomed large in those days, bringing copies of the
New York Times
to The Hub, the single store allowed to sell them, as well as bringing milk, meat and eggs, mail, lumber, and other essentials. The ferry was an institution, like the Atheneum, or the windmill, or the clock tower above the Unitarian church. It carried people, of course, but not many during the off-season. If you had to go to the mainland to get a root canal or for some other essential business, stepping onto the ferry on your way back was like stepping onto the island itself. You would probably know more than half the people on board, and so the almost three-hour ride would pass quickly if the sea was calm. One felt halfway home.
    Or, at least in the case of one island restaurateur, perhaps more than that. With a weighted suitcase strapped to each wrist, he stepped over the rail behind a storage area and launched himself into Nantucket Sound, never to be seen again. We all knew the poor fellow, and no one was surprised, somehow.
    IT ISN’T EASY to get across how fragile, how vulnerable the island really is. The words have been repeated so many times about so many places as to become meaningless. Nantucket’s highly exposed acres contain about a third of the heath lands, or moors, in America. Nantucket is not typically American, concerned with its large treasures like the Grand Canyon, the redwoods, the Mississippi, or the deserts and mountains. Nantucket is in the realm of the small. The small but valuable endangered species such as the piping plover, the Muskeget vole, the osprey. Dozens of species of plants, mosses, berries, and grasses exist nowhere else. The almost unbelievable complexity of a hundred-square-yard salt marsh can be destroyed by one house too many, one failed septic system. Nantucket has a greater variety of vegetation than any other place similar in size in America.
    Excluding marine species, and further excluding birds, animal life is less varied. Deer have become a pest as in so many other Eastern built-up areas where they must compete for space and rub shoulders with humans. (My wife cannot leave potted flowers on the deck at night. They’ll be gone in the morning. Once a deer chased her into the shed.) Pheasant, rabbit, and feral cats survive in the scrub; turtles lumber from pond to pond.
    But until fairly recently there were no squirrels. When we first came as college kids there were none, and no one could remember when there ever had been. The oral history tells of a truckload of lumber coming across from Woods Hole on the ferry with a family of stowaway squirrels sometime in the sixties. By the seventies people would occasionally call Wes Tiffany at the University of Massachusetts Field Station to report a sighting. By the eighties squirrels were all over the island, fighting for every tree, every sheltered area in the winter, every hollow log. They too had become pests.
    When, much later, I started teaching on the mainland at various universities, The Barn was usually closed up for the winters and became, in its partially sheltered location, attractive to mice, owls, and most particularly to squirrels, who chewed through the outside soffits under the eaves, created a large colony and nursery comfortably insulated by chewed-up quilts stolen from the inside of the house and stuffed, piece by piece into the long, dark, and snug expanse of the soffits area. When my middle son Will and our friend Phil were