Read Online Time & Tide by Frank Conroy - Free Book Online

after land, commanding the highest prices out of town, is the high ground with water views (even distant water views). Almost all the houses erected in the nineties are sited thus. I remember, a long time ago, when a choice area called Blueberry Hill off Polpis Road, where Nantucket families had picked fruit since time-out-of-mind, was bought by some summer people who built an impressive house. Tom Giffin, then the editor of the
Nantucket Inquirer
and Mirror,
wrote an editorial bemoaning the situation. He wondered if all the high ground, wherever it was on the island, would be bought up and built upon. At the time some thought him an alarmist, but his remarks turned out to be prophetic. What he worried about has happened. There is no unprotected underdeveloped high land left on the island. (Of course “high” is a relative term. Nantucket is so flat, for the most part, that even a modest elevation is significant.) Trophy houses abound, which is one of the reasons why one must go on foot, rather than driving the roads, to get a better feel for the island. From the roads you see the summer mansions on high ground to the left and to the right. On foot it is possible to discover surprising places—a ramshackle little cottage (called a “tear-down” in the real estate business) at the edge of a salt marsh, the cranberry bogs, the wild and beautiful land and water around the University of Massachusetts Field Station, or a large pond in a shallow valley in the moors. (The Field Station recently closed, making everyone both sad and nervous. The director, Wes Tiffany, was much admired and is now gone. The large spread of land is so astronomically valuable that the pressures on the university to sell it— they promise they won’t—must be strong indeed.) It is a sad fact that many visitors to Nantucket do not, in fact, ever see much of what is most beautiful about the island.
    RECENT TRENDS ON Nantucket bear out the observations of Thorstein Veblen, the economic thinker who, in Chapter Four of
The Theory of the
Leisure Class,
first proposed the idea of “conspicuous consumption” as a driving force in human affairs. Enormous houses have sprung up like expensive mushrooms, making the old whaling days’ competition on Upper Main Street look like small potatoes (to mix my metaphors). Long before the stock market began its bearish trend, the island became a status symbol much more potent than the Hamptons, or Palm Beach, or indeed anyplace on the East Coast. Seriously rich people began to make their mark as more and more young ordinary people were forced to leave the island where they were born because they could not afford to live there, because they had no future there.
    An irresistible example of the degree of stratification in the society is implicit in the case of Tom Johnson, a forty-year-old ordinary Joe who got around the land and housing problem by creating a living space hidden underground on unimproved property in the woods owned by the Boy Scouts of America. Johnson, whose abode was discovered in 1999 by a deer hunter, should certainly have qualified for Eagle Scout merit badges by making, as described in
Nantucket
Only Yesterday,
an “underground home . . . found to be warm and comfortable, with heating and plumbing and water and shower facilities.” Johnson was of course busted by the town, but quite a few native islanders were tickled pink at the man’s ingenuity. He had not needed a million or two to make his home. The story was picked up by the national press and television, and the island got a good deal of publicity, albeit a special kind.
    Who will do the construction work for the conspicuous homes when the labor pool of islanders in the trades is too small to meet demand? When the cost of even temporary housing for working people is prohibitive? Off-island crews, who fly in from Hyannis and New Bedford every morning, sometimes bringing lunch, to put in their eight