MORE SUMMER NOTES
BY DANIEL W. DRAKE ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER
Summer on Nantucket provides wonderful opportunities to expand our minds and restore our good humor (if we are so inclined.) As a community, we are blessed with enough lectures and plays and other amusements to keep us occupied almost every day of the week in the summer months. Such a plethora of things to do, beyond the utilization of Nantucket's natural attractions, is remarkable by any measure.

In July, 5,800 people attended the performances of Circus Flora. Countless thousands more went to the VFW carnival and to the antique shows. Tens, if not hundreds, showed up on many evenings to hear an array of fascinating speakers. The playhouse has been bright all season.

It is a tribute to the people who live on and visit this faraway island that there is an appetite for all of these activities. The organizations which put them on also deserve our thanks for persevering to provide us with the best of the best.

Summer on Nantucket is traffic. According to most casual observers, each year it is worse than the one before. The easy target of our road rage is the summer visitor. It isn't that simple. The number of cars coming to the island has actually been declining slightly over the last several years, according to Steamship Authority statistics. With a bit of patience and perseverance - not to mention good luck - parking spaces are findable at almost any hour. Sure there are traffic jams when the ferries come in and at the Milestone rotary and in front of Marine Home Center during our 15-minute rush hour, and in front of the high school at the end of the beach day, but the back-ups at the rotary and the high school at other times are more the result of commerce in action than anything else.

Again according to the Steamship Authority, truck traffic is up. The delivery of the goods and services upon which we have come to depend is the real culprit in causing our summer traffic woes. There is no simple solution - perhaps no solution at all - to this aspect of the traffic problem.

Summer on Nantucket is figuring out the routes one will take from one side of town to the other to minimize the time spent. There are byways which avoid some of the worst bottlenecks.

Summer on Nantucket is having someone walk up your driveway whom you don't recognize because he doesn't look more than two days older than when you first hired him more than 30 years ago and you hadn't seen him at all in perhaps 10 years. He had seen your name on the sign out front some previous year and, this summer, renting a house around the corner, he decided to stop by.

Summer on Nantucket is braving the hordes at the dump on Sunday morning and watching Allen Reinhard, our selectman and the Middle Moors ranger for the Nantucket Conservation Foundation, unloading the detritus from the previous night's party at Gibbs Pond. His pick-up truck, filled with pallets and other wood which somehow survived the bonfire, with empty bottles and cans, a gasoline container and other indescribable objects, is a testament to the ingenuity of the party goers and their total lack of sensitivity to their surroundings or to the man who had to spend two hours cleaning up after them; time which he said could have been much better spent.

As previously noted here, summer on Nantucket has become the season for the sprouting of port-a-potties. These unattractive, but probably necessary evils, infuse an inviting toxic aroma into the atmosphere as one approaches Madaket beach. It was inevitable that one of the free-standing ones placed right on the beach at the 40th Pole should be tipped over before summer's end. That is a clean-up job!

Sometimes the summer crowds are a bit hard to take, but summer on Nantucket is really all about people: the people here who make it happen; those who come to assist in welcoming and serving the visitors and the visitors themselves who, in turn, provide the wherewithal to make it happen. The visitors are the key to everyone else's success or failure and Nantucket very much depends on them. But both the world and Nantucket are changing.

Whereas a few years ago it was difficult to get a dinner reservation on short notice and if one didn't call to confirm the reservation it was lost, now the restaurants call the patron to confirm and, on recent visits to three of the islands very good restaurants, there were too many empty tables in the latter part of the evening.

A few days ago, the New York Times had an article about changing vacation habits. It noted that people were going on more, shorter vacation trips and that those trips were being planned with much shorter lead times than in the past. Instead of planning way ahead for a week-long vacation, the family that the article focused on makes it trip arrangements just a few days ahead for a three- or four-day weekend.

Such "buying behavior" results in much more turnover, something Nantucket's B&Bs have noticed in the past few years. It affords fewer opportunities to go out to eat in any particular destination. It has implications for the vacation rental market. In short, it has implications across the board for Nantucket which, to begin with, is not always the easiest place to get to, especially for those with limited time.

But, it is still summer on Nantucket - although certainly the last couple of days have felt more like fall. Let's enjoy what is left of the season. While we cannot lose sight of some of these matters which require our attention, for the moment we should content ourselves with enjoying whoever might walk up the driveway.

The "Lighthouse Keeper" reflects the views of the author and does not necessarily represent the editorial position of The Nantucket Independent. Please send any ideas or comments to drake@nantucketindependent. com.