YACK on: Safety Complex
Grant Sanders
My buddy Stan and I were out by the corner of Fairgrounds Road and Old South Road the other day trying to find a tire rim that fell out of the back of Stan's pickup truck when he took the turn a little too fast one morning. I was not in the vehicle at the time or I would have said, "Slow the heck down, Stan!" As I often have to do. Well, he lost his tire rim in the bushes right there on the corner and he, of course, called me to help him look because I've already had all three kinds of tick-borne diseases and have suffered no ill effects except for the excessive ringing in my ears and the constant, unexplained craving for venison pot pie.

Well, I guess Stan had been traveling at a wildly excessive speed - even for Stan - because the rim was way back past the scrub oak and the broom crowberry near the edge of the parking lot of the old electric company building. I yelled to Stan to come get his rim and he gingerly walked around the brush and picked up the thing. It was pretty heavy, and I'm surprised it did not take out a tree or a "pedestrian crossing" sign during its flight from the back of the pickup to the Electric Company parking lot.

For a moment Stan and I were standing there looking at the old Electric Company building (which is quite beautiful, architecturally speaking) and Stan said something about the new Public Safety complex the town was designing for this spot. Fire station. Police station. Some other buildings for future uses - like in the future we might need a department of particle beam teleportation or the commission on distribution of Soylent Green or something. The whole thing was still in the design stage.

And then suddenly, Stan got one of his famous brainstorms and he puts up his hand to keep me from speaking and he goes all silent. About two minutes later he says, he thinks we ought to design the new Public Safety Complex and get the money the town would normally pay some off-island architect for ourselves. Stan thought we might be able to charge some really obscene amount like $500 a piece because the town really wants to do things right.

So off we went to the building department to get a map of the property that we could use as a starting point. Sure enough, the dummy off-island architects have accidentally left their plans at the building department and the nice lady there said we could have a copy. This was like stumbling on a gold mine! Now we could see what the competition was up to and steal all of their best ideas while improving upon their design.

The plan from those off-island architects was pretty funny. It put the fire and police station right in the center, facing Fairground Road and then had two potential future buildings off to the North. In between, there was this huge semi-circle of parking and a massive shrub in the shape of the island of Nantucket! This made Stan and I laugh for about 20 minutes. What could be dumber than having a big map of the island made out of shrubs? Like that's useful? It's not like you can fold it up and put it in your pocket. And if you get lost, you have to go all the way back to Fairgrounds Road to check to see where you made a wrong turn.

Well Stan and I went to work and we really burned the midnight oil. Actually we burned the grilled cheese sandwiches we were making to eat during the designing process in order to keep up our strength. And I must say that our design was quite an improvement. First off, we got rid of most of the parking. That's because the police should not need any parking if all of their squad cars are out on patrol, now should they? And the firemen can park their fire trucks inside the fire house. Duh. We left a couple of parking spaces for the chief of police and for the fire chief. (And a couple of secret parking places under a tree for me and Stan to use.) We also got rid of any housing for town employees for the spot because all of the town employees we know already have homes.

By getting rid of something like 150 parking spacesand 60 units of housing, we were able to put lots of cool stuff on the plan. Like a bowling alley. A skeet shooting range. A huge ferris wheel that could give the firemen a good view and allow them to see how much smoke was coming from what part of the island. Acommunity arts center. A community wood shop (because Stan does not like plays and singing and stuff and because I'm kind of tired of him coming to my house to borrow my belt sander). And a stunt ramp so that the police can practice maintaining control during high speed chases. We even included a sturdy plywood backstop covered in old radial tires that have been sawed in half to put on the corner of Fairgrounds Road and Old South Road to catch any tire rims that might accidentally leave a vehicle's truck bed at high speed. (This will hopefully be the first project to be completed in the community wood shop. It is sorely needed.)

I drew up the plans on a big sheet of clean cardboard that used to be a refrigerator shipping carton that I got from behind Marine Home Center. And Stan got to work building a scale model out of matchsticks and shellacked broccoli florets as trees. It looked amazing.

Then we took the whole thing down to the town building to Libby Gibson's office. Stan wore a beret because he said it made us look more creative and we might be able to get $750 a piece for our plans instead of $500 if we "looked the part."

When we got there, Libby was "out on official town business," or at least that's what the nice lady at the desk told us. She said we could leave our plan and the scale model with her. Stan told the nice lady to be careful with the model because it was made of matchsticks and the shellac on the broccoli was not quite dry and if the thing caught fire, it could go up in about 20 seconds and shoot flames 10 feet into the air owing to the extreme flammability of shellac. She suggested we take the scale model back with us, which we did but only because a couple of the broccoli florets had fallen over on the way into town and we needed a chance to fix that.

Before we left, we mentioned that we would be happy to present the whole thing to the selectmen on any Wednesday night (except next Wednesday which is wing night at our new Yacht Club), and the nice lady smiled and nodded and told us she would tell Chairman Willauer about it and see when he could get that on the agenda. We left our names and addresses in case the town liked our designs and wanted to know where to send the $750 checks.

As we walked back to the truck, with the highly flammable model, we chuckled to ourselves and then agreed that we really showed those off-island architects a thing or two.

YACK on. I

Grant Sanders is the Host of YACK, The Nantucket Online Community at yackon.com and he often wonders if the HDC would approve a ferris wheel. His views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of The Nantucket Independent. Or his wife.