Grey Lady of the Sea
- there was a fine, boisterous something about everything connected with that famous old island...
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick
As always, click on thumbnails to expand images
The winds and clouds had first come ashore at Yaquina Point and other wild places like it, three thousand miles to the west. Across the Rockies and the Plains; across the Great Lakes and the Appalachians. And now the racing clouds took their last leave of the continent over the rolling green hills of Nantucket, isle of windblown sand and wave. Nantucket, it's beauty equal parts natural wonder and the high days of sail, captured in time. This was the place of magic dawntreader42 had brought us to, was kindly sharing with us all.
dawntreader42, dear friend from Lindgren days, kind host so many previous trips to Boston, kind host once again. And at the end of four heavily packed days of science at ISSCR, a daytrip to Nantucket she kindly offered to lead us all on; offered to share with four of us newcomers the magic of Melville's eternal Nantucket. Myself, two of her close mates, and two dear friends of my own - the ebullient hypatiasghost, and her dear Thomas. And a wonderful, wonderful day on Nantucket it was.
The group met early in the morning at the dock at Hyannis, the fast ferry racing across the waters where North America ended and Nantucket began. Into the grand harbor that once welcomed home tall ships from across the world's waters. Landed in the port town still clad in grey cedar shingles and streets paved in brick and stone. In an age where so much of America has been homogenized into Wal-Marts and Wendy's and strip mall after strip mall; where Laurel looks like Livonia looks like Ladue; Nantucket beautifully, unmistakably resembles little else except itself.
dawntreader42 adeptly guided us across all the great treasures of Nantucket. The Nantucket Whaling museum, capturing the history of the wooden ships and iron men who had made Nantucket wealthy in its time, and whose whale oil lit the night, in the age before kerosene and electricity. Villas and manors and elegant gardens, preserved intact from Herman Melville's age. The great Nantucket Windmill, still operational to this very day, preserving the engineering genius and weather-skill which for hundreds of years ground the grain of much of Western civilization.
(Indeed, from the docents, we learned just how complex the actual work of a windmill operator was. The fine skill he had to hone to "tune" the operating mill's speed and direction, to match the ever changing wind. Allow too much speed, too much pressure, too much of a variance between the windmill's facing and the wind, and the inbalanced forces would wreck the grind, or even tear the windmill apart.
From the craft of the windmill operator came the phrase "three sheets to the wind" - a windmill with an odd, inbalanced number of sails set (like three sails on a four-sail rotor) would badly wobble and stagger, as a drunkard would. From them too came "nose to the grindstone". Along with watching out his window the count of the sails and the swaying of the trees, hearing the clack of the machinery and feeling the tension and pull on his control levers and lines, smell was also a critical, subtle clue to the status of the windmill. The grain being ground between the millstones gives off an aroma which changes as the efficiency of the grind changes with better or worse tuning of the windmill to the wind. Changes in that smell would be a windmill master's first warning the tuning of the mill was off; and so a dilligent miller would position himself in such a way as to be able to catch that sutble smell - "nose to the grindstone".)
And then there was of course the sea itself, a ribbon of sand and surf at the edge of sweeping emerald hillsides and ornate grey-shingled homes. Much of the day did we spent together splashing through the waters, or skipping rocks out to sea, or caught up in discovery, led by our fearless, passionate field biologist hyaptiasghost. Just as she had in Woods Hole two years before, hypatiasghost caught us all up in the wonderous designs of nature, the secrets stories told by fragments of shell and the hidden beauty nestled among just the right plants or in just the right pool. The natural world is her passion as well as her profession, and her enthusiastic education added yet another layer to a long, lazy, laughter-filled afternoon along the shore.
At long last, as the sun began to paint the skies with fire and the evening breezes began to blow, it was time for us to set forth back to Boston. There was ice cream and seafood and hugs and then sailing through sunset and moonlight back to Hyannis, back to Boston, back to Baltimore and duty. But memories of beautiful day with friends old and new, memories to set beside Mackinac and Point Reyes, Key Largo and the southern Pacific Coast Highway. Memories of wind, and sea, and above all, friendship and joy.
The Sea; Once it casts its spell holds one in its net of wonder forever.
- Jacques Cousteau