Living on Nantucket, you get used to waiting. I am told by some who do not live on Nantucket that this island is not the real world. The real world has highways and bridges, the real world has overnight mail and discount stores. The real world is not so confined, so heavily regulated, so controlled. The real world is not so uniform in design. Maybe in the real world, you do not have to wait so long.
(I happen to think Nantucket is plenty real, with many of the same problems and challenges that larger communities face.)
Right now, we are waiting to see what the impacts of Hurricane Lee will be. Caretakers are pulling boats out of the harbor, amateur forecasters weigh in on windspeed estimations. Brides-to-be with September weddings planned remind themselves that rain is an omen their union will last—a wet knot is hard to untangle. Time for charcoal grills, kayaks, and beach chairs that have been camping out on my back porch to hibernate in the basement.
I have spent this summer in a near-constant state of waiting for one thing or another. I should be more patient, living on an island where it takes two hours and fifteen minutes to get to the next town. Out here, nothing on the island is more than twenty minutes away. We don’t have everything you need, but we have most of it. I met a man in ’Sconset, the far eastern village seven miles from the center of town, who said he hadn’t left Nantucket in eight years. That is one way to contend with everything off island being so far away, so out of scale to what we are used to. But never leaving comes with its own challenges. Then again, if you don’t have anywhere to go, you don’t care if the boats get canceled.
When a storm comes, the rest of the island joins me in waiting. They are unaware we are all now keeping a joint vigil. There is a eerie stillness in between bursts of work, and watching the sky. You wonder which boat will be the last for a few days. It is a lot of work for something you pray does not come to pass. We have so much more time to prepare for a hurricane than other storms, swirling satellite images of weather events with women’s names.
Maybe living in a sandy place shifts your idea of distance, of waiting. It is difficult to judge how far away something is along the beach. Maybe you’ve experienced this yourself, walking along the shoreline, waiting to go around the bend in the distance that you never seem to get to. You might get to the house in the distance you were walking to, but as you get closer, the shoreline straightens out. I always think things are closer along the beach than they really are. Even cartographers have a hard time measuring the length of a shoreline, a phenomena known as the Coastline Paradox. If you measure the coastline with increasingly smaller units of measurement, the length of the coastline becomes longer, as there are increasingly more features to measure. Maybe the best you can do is estimate it.
Or keep walking, and hope you get there eventually. It is an island after all. How much further could it be?
