The Peeps Who Remain
Welcome to the slowest week of the year. Congrats
(Not my best. I need to think of another way to write this. But, the sentiment is true.)
The boat left this morning. It may come back today or it may not.
February vacation week draws a hard line. You are either leaving or you are staying. If you are leaving, you may have packed your car with swimsuits, suitcases, or skis. If you are staying, you may have rinsed out your coffee cup.
If you can afford to go, most people head on vacation in the fourth week in February. Nantucket Public Schools, in a quirk of privilege and good fortune, had changed the vacation week to the one after everyone else’s. On that week after, the ski lifts were empty, the flights were cheap, but the water was just as warm.
As a community, we think a lot about those who can leave for February vacation. They are the contractors, the lawyers, the realtors, the shop owners. They work for 51 weeks a year in order to spend this one week away. They have the money. Because of the island schedule, you can’t fly off in the summer, at Christmas, or in the spring. The visitors are coming either right before or right after all of those breaks. But not in March. It can all wait until they get back.
. In the peculiar mindset of islanders, Nantucketers tend to vacation on other islands. They fly on down to Turks and Caicos, Vieques, and St. John or to Europe and Malta or Sardinia. Skiers make different choices, but ski areas, like Sugarloaf and Sunday River, tend to be islands surrounded by an ocean of pine trees.
That Friday, the last day of school, was an exodus. A mass of students would leave early to catch the noon boat, and another mass would filter out to the airport for connecting flights to New York and Boston. At the end of my teaching career, we would be given the wink and the nod; Friday was for parties and videos, not for tests. Otherwise, the lucky ones had smiles, excitement, and an escape. We watched it happen on Instagram.
After the exodus, the island slips into a familiar torpor. The slowest week on the island passes like the ice in the harbor. The overcast remains, the wind remains, and the peeps remain. Work still needs to be done, be it at a jobsite, at the hospital, or at the grocery store. The peeps may not be able to afford to leave the island. The trip to St. Somewhere costs too much for right now, and the rent is too high, never mind the heat. The work may not let them go. Nurses need to nurse, and caretakers need to take care. The people who need still need, no matter what day or month it is. The travelers shake the sand from their shoes, but the peeps remain.
For contrast, the busiest week on the island comes at the beginning of August. The Pops are playing, the golf courses are jammed, and Old South Road will take forty-five minutes to go from Plumbing Supply to Rotary. Most of those 80,000 souls have homes and hearts somewhere else. They come here as a break from there; they come to see, to be seen, and to fill their Instagram. Solitude, God bless it, can be found in sunlight and in shadow, but at the end of a long sandy road.
From this week, solitude is just beyond the stop sign. All of the stores and restaurants that make Fodor’s and Forbes love Nantucket have flipped their chairs, emptied the register, and closed for the year. The psychotic potter hasn’t moved in yet, nor has anyone inhabited the ghost ship that is the Atlantic Cafe. Instead, the island is gray, brown, and red; shrunk down to a triangle between the Stop and Shop, Hatch’s, and home.
The peeps are home. Their minds aren’t on a ferry to St. John or a train down the Danube; they aren’t journaling their trip around the world. Their concern is in their backyard—nowhere else. The silent island is not dead; it is more focused, more intentional. The dump matters, the Stop and Shop circular matters, the incoming weather matters. Island peeps have a home, and they will fight to keep it.
From where I sit, the peeps have done well this year. Blue sky plans for low-income housing have developed basements and support beams. The island’s non-profits have come together with better enticements to get out of the house than cribbage and shut the box. Winter walks, line dancing, curling, and old movies: places to go, things to do, and things to do them with.
More to the point, the scallop fishery has increased enough that we have upped the box limit. The expanded deer hunt, along with the chili factory off of Surfside Road, went from gesture to action. The NP&EDC have figured out that no arguments over paperwork were going to help keep the island livable for peeps. The select board and its capital expenditure sub-committee dropped necessary bad news. Even the I&M is stepping up; I love seeing an editorial every week.
This week offers a reframing. The peeps on the island this week don’t have to serve the stockholders or wait for the stakeholders. They have to serve themselves and their children. They have to change the island into a place where they can live and their children can prosper.
I am sure many good-hearted, clear-minded, well-thought-out people have taken this week to get off the rock. But the ones who stayed, the ones who are open and working, have put their skin in the game. The boat comes around Brant Point, and it goes around Brant Point. But some just stay and watch.
I hope they go out to Cisco Brewers, take a seat inside the plastic sauna, and raise a glass. The Bahamas are nice, Killington is great, and Tortola doesn’t disappoint. But Nantucket remains. And it is worth it.
The Inn on Brant Point (Novella)
Milestone 1: The Boy Who Climbed the Windmill
Milestone 2: Remember
Milestone 3: Snitches Get Stitches
Milestone 4: Survival Ain’t Pretty
Milestone 6: Scars Last for Life
Moving On
Some of my writing…
Barr’s For Life: A substack of essays and claptrap
The Boat at the End of Lover’s Lane
(NEW) The Girl Who Ran the Polpis Road
The Inn on Brant Point (Novella)
Her Lover on Monomoy Road. (Novella)
Her Father Came Home to Deacon’s Way (Novella)
Love Letters (Novella)
Home is Where the Ghosts Are (Novella)
Winter: A Collection of Island Living Essays set between January and April 1.
The Boys: A collection of essays about my two sons, written as they grew.
Rolling in the Surf: Essays on Teaching.
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So, I expect I will come back to this topic sometime soon, because I like it, but I don't feel I addressed it well. Nantucket, still, has a population of peeps. Hard working people whose families have lived on island for generations. They want to see the island last for another few generations of their families and they don't think it is going to happen. February Break is a great moment to isolate this, because everyone who is still on island HAS to be there when the restaurants, the schools, and the stores are closed and WEATHER is inbound. Now, I know, for a fact, that similar thinking people are going on vacation, but the peeps play the Nantucket game for keeps. So, I will come back to this and do it better.
In my Academy Hill School years, I don’t remember anyone going away during February vacation unless perhaps grandma lived on the Cape. Vacation was at the same time as everywhere else. No special activities or programs for kids on island. I had my birthday party and read a lot of books from the Atheneum.
When I was in 7th grade, the Steamship started running to Hyannis and one might take a day trip to the Cape Cod Mall. If you were really lucky, you had an overnight stay at the Holiday Inn next to the mall and got to swim in the pool !