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watching a rental movie one October evening, they became aware of a small group of squirrels watching along with them from one of the beams. Although the philosophy of The Barn with regard to other life forms had been pretty much live and let live—we called it “organic living”—Will and Phil decided things had gone too far. The next day, using borrowed thirty-foot aluminum ladders, they pried open the long boards under the eaves and held on for dear life as hundreds of terrified squirrels flew off in every direction.
    â€œThe word is overused,” Will told me on the telephone, “but it was
awesome.
”
    This tribal catastrophe no doubt struck deeply into the collective squirrel mythos, since, once the soffits were rebuilt and the few holes covered with copper sheathing, the rodents never returned. The Barn itself must have taken on some powerful squirrel juju for it to still be off limits after all these years, generation after generation.
    For many more years the open moors and bramble teemed with dog ticks. Every dog owner’s nightly ritual was to sit down with pooch and pull out blood-sucking insects by hand, and deposit them in a jar of kerosene or the like. A disagreeable nuisance, but then, with a degree of speed perhaps only possible on a small island, the dog ticks almost disappeared. I haven’t seen one in the last ten years. (And my dog runs free, swims in the harbor, plays in the woods and the salt marsh.) An ecological mystery, followed by the less mysterious and no less sudden ubiquity of the tiny deer tick. A serious matter. Minuscule insects no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence, catching the occasional ride with a mouse or a deer, latching on to tall grass, reeds, wildflowers, waiting it seems, for a human to come along. Finding skin soft enough and thin enough to penetrate and begin the exchange, the tick takes blood while leaving behind the spirochete for Lyme disease or the germ for babeseosis. This sets the stage for potentially dangerous afflictions, which most people shake off, but others endure for years, worrying about the rare complications involving damage to the heart and the nervous system. In the summer, at a lawn party, it is not unusual to see a young woman with a small I.V. drip attached somewhere on her person, the thin plastic tube running down her bare arm to the firmly taped needle on the inside of her wrist. Continuous, long-term antibiotic therapy that doesn’t interfere with mobility. A perverse kind of jewelry. An island status symbol.
    If there were any Indians left, and were there a shaman among them, he might speak of the land resisting interference from humans. The need to dominate nature is deep inside us all. Lawns, for instance, are a statement of ownership, dominion, and what used to be called husbandry. On the mainland lawns seem innocuous enough, but as more and more of them are created on Nantucket problems have arisen. Chemicals seeping into the ground water, nitrogen from fertilizer impacting the marshes, ponds, and inlets. (When I built the barn in ’69 we went down ten feet for water. Modernizing the plumbing in 1998 we thought it prudent to go down ninety feet, where the water is presumably purer.) People are advised to wear masks when they mow, because the lawn grass attracts rabbits whose dung lies uncovered, becomes powdered and airborne from the force of the mower blades, and sometimes has the power to sicken unto death. In terms of their ecological impact, no one knows how many lawns the island can sustain, even as more are cultivated. Fifty years ago it seemed people took pleasure in the unique, delicate wilderness of the island. Now it seems people are coming for different reasons, and may be made slightly uneasy by what they misperceive as bleakness. So they “improve” their plot of land.

The White Elephant Gig
    IT WAS MY SECOND WINTER ON NANTUCKET when I first learned my social security