Nantucket Today 2024 June

Na ntucket

Built in 1850

Rescued from erosion in 2007

A symbol of the island’s seafaring past and sea-level rise future

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PHOTO BY KEVIN STANTON

We often think of history as something that happened long ago in old black and white photos or diaries written on whaling voyages. But the move of Sankaty Lighthouse in 2007, to keep it from falling into the sea as Sconset Bluff eroded, is history many of us remember. It is illustrated in color, rather than sepia tones.

The lighthouse stands as both a symbol of this island’s nautical past and the ongoing threats of climate change-driven sea-level rise. Erosion keeps eating away at the bluff. We keep fighting each other about how best to deal with it, in a sort of never-ending loop.

The move itself was a feat of engineering. It was also a true community project, spearheaded by Bob Felch and the Sconset Trust, and documented by Felch and Rob Benchley in a book called “Keeping the Light.”

For many people it was also a matter of the heart. In this edition of History Insider, we see the move through the lens of Benchley’s camera. When he was a little boy and his family summered in Sconset, the beam from the lighthouse flashed into his bedroom window. He always considered it his nightlight.

I began going to the movies when I was a kid. Westerns mostly. We called them cowboy movies, good guys and bad guys clearly defined in a simple story wrapped around the pure action of horses and shootouts on a dusty street. Me and my pals acting up and hooting at the screen, until an usher would show us the door.

You sit in the dark with your neighbors, watching a light flicker on the screen, sharing a story. There is simply no comparison between that experience and watching the same movies on some streaming service while you are sitting on the couch alone.

The Nantucket Film Festival is back this month. We bring you the story of two filmmakers, brother and sister, one a Hollywood director and the other a local real estate agent, but both of them telling us stories on film.

The Nantucket Book Festival is also back this month. Anna Popnikolova sat down with Gabriella Burnham, whose second novel “Wait” is in bookstores now. Both women grew up on this island, and both of them have written for The Inquirer and Mirror

Dan Fost takes a look at what’s next for the landfill, as it groans under the weight of the ever-increasing development on this island.

The very idea of duck-fat-washed whiskey put me off, until I tasted a cocktail built around it. The drink was delicious. A good bartender, like a good chef, can make drinking and dining more interesting. Kevin Stanton tells us about fatwashed cocktails in this month’s Eat-Drink column.

We are well into the silly season of national politics. The new, angry politics can be difficult to watch. It can divide families and friends, and it can often feel as if the great experiment of democracy is on its way out.

Then there is Town Meeting. As we went to press with this edition, island voters filled an auditorium to hash out a long list of decisions that need to be made to keep Nantucket afloat.

One can make a strong argument for both getting rid of Town Meeting and keeping it just as it has always been. But the very idea of giving both sides room to make their points, and the way Town Meeting leans towards civility, is a balm for the madness of politics on a national level.

John Stanton Editor

Gabriella Burnham’s

Anna Popnikolova

PHOTO BY KEVIN STANTON Craft Cocktails

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Published by The Inquirer and Mirror Inc. 1 Old South Road Nantucket, MA 02554 508 228-0001 nantucketmag.com

Publisher Robert Saurer rsaurer@inkym.com

Editor John Stanton jstanton@inkym.com

Production & Design Peter Halik plhalik@inkym.com

Advertising Director Mary Cowell-Sharpe msharpe@inkym.com

Advertising Sales Peter Greenhalgh pgreenhalgh@inkym.com

Alexandro Sforza asforza@inkym.com

Circulation Karen Orlando korlando@inkym.com

Contributing Writers & Photographers

Virginia Andrews

Rob Benchley

Dan Fost

Anna Popnikolova

Mariano Russo

Kevin Stanton

Marianne Stanton

Contact Us: Nantucket Today, P.O. Box 1198, Nantucket, MA 02554. Phone 508 228-0001. Fax 508 325-5089. Advertising and subscription rates online at www.nantucketmag.com

© Nantucket Media Group. 2024 All rights reserved. Nantucket Today is published six times a year by The Inquirer and Mirror Inc. Subscription information: Annual subscriptions are available in the US for $40. For customer service regarding subscriptions, call 508 228-0001, ext. 10. All rights reserved. Reproduction of any part of this publication in any way is prohibited without written permission from the publisher. Printed in the USA. Send address changes to: P.O. Box 1198, Nantucket, MA 02554.

CONTRIBUTORS

These are just some of the people who bring their talents to the pages of this magazine, and allow Nantucket Today to reflect genuine island life.

Dan Fost is a freelance writer in San Rafael, California. He was a staff writer at the San Francisco Chronicle for nine years, and the author of two books about the San Francisco Giants.

Rob Benchley is a Nantucket photographer and writer, and a Sconset washashore. With Jim Patrick, he co-authored “Scallop Season, a Nantucket Chronicle,” noted as “a season with one of America’s last great bay scalloping fleets.” The book celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. Rob is currently the Sconset Trust’s keeper of the Sankaty Head Lighthouse.

Marianne Stanton is a 13th-generation Nantucketer with deep roots on the island and in the newspaper business. Recently retired as the editor and publisher of The Inquirer and Mirror, she founded this magazine.

Book Festival Books you want to read

“Why Father’s Cry at Night”

Kwame Alexander is a best-selling author, poet and memoirist. Here he taps into all of those ways of seeing, using prose, poetry, letters and even recipes to tell a story of love and grief that define family and how we grow into ourselves.

“Cork Dork”

Bianca Bosker’s book is subtitled “A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught me to Live for Taste.” If you agree that every bottle of wine is a world and a history to itself, this is the book for you. Bosker takes us on a walk through that weird little world, and finds joy at the center of obsession.

“This Other Eden”

Paul Harding won a Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for his book “Tinkers,” which explored the nature of love and loss through the last days of a dying New England clock repairman. In his new book, “This Other Eden,” he explores in fiction the fate of a real mixed-race fishing community on a small island off the coast of Maine. “Harding’s prose is mesmerizing,” said a review in The New York Times

“Leon Russell: The Master of Space and Time’s Journey Through Rock & Roll History”

Bill Janovitz makes the case for Leon Russell, whose 60 years in the music life included his own songs and albums, and connected him to Jerry Lee Lewis, Frank Sinatra, Joe Cocker, Tom Petty and J.J. Cale. In his introduction, Janovitz asks, “What happened? How did this genuine rock star end up in a ditch by the highway of life?”

“Birding to Change the World”

Trish O’Kane’s journey into the world of birders. In the prologue she writes, “Avians have probably been teaching our species for the estimated half a million years we’ve been on this planet. The earliest human art shows they were always among our very first teachers.”

Film Festival Films you want to see

“Thelma”

Directed by Josh Margolin

Comedy

It could be a comedic fable for our times. When 93-year-old Thelma Post gets duped by a phone scammer pretending to be her grandson, she decides to set things straight and get back what was taken from her.

“Kneecap”

Directed by Rich Peppiatt

Comedy

A comedy based on a real rap trio from Belfast, Northern Ireland, playing themselves, and rapping in Gaelic. The music is about Irish republicanism, young people making their way 30 years after the Good Friday Agreement, trying to define their identity. Like all good rappers they define a slice of street life. The film also stars Michael Fassbender.

“Porcelain War”

Co-directed by Slava Leontyev and Brendan Bellomo

Documentary

Making art in the face of war is a radical act, an act of resistance. When Russia invaded Ukraine, three artists chose to stay behind, armed with their art, their cameras, and for the first time in their lives, their guns. The tiny, porcelain figures they create not only capture an idyllic past, but they stand as a metaphor for hope in the face of war’s brutal destruction.

“Ghostlight”

Directed by Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson

Dramedy

A construction worker unexpectedly joins a community theater production of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” and finds comfort in the wake of his son’s death. The Hollywood Reporter said, “There are portraits of grief that bulldoze past our resistance, and their own shortcomings, thanks to the sheer force of their sincerity. ‘Ghostlight,’ from Chicago-based writingdirecting team Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson, is one of them.”

“Skywalkers: A Love Story”

Directed by Jeff Zimbalist and Maria Bukhonina

Documentary

The word daring seems inadequate to describe the couple in this documentary. They are what is called rooftoppers, a new generation of daredevils who climb to the top of skyscrapers and film themselves for social media posts. Variety said, “The film is brilliantly edited and full of amazing, terrifying, transfixing verite shots.”

Sankaty Light

BY JOHN STANTON

PHOTOS BY ROB BENCHLEY

the nautical past, the sea level rise future

To those who witnessed it, the moving of Sankaty Head Lighthouse was a feat of engineering as well as a feat of historic preservation. It was the last week of September 2007. Today very little has been done about the continuing erosion on the Sconset Bluff. Instead, it has become a 20-year political football, kicked back and forth by both sides.

Acriss-crossed latticework of railroad ties and other cribbing, supported by hydraulic jacks, was maneuvered into place.

“The sound of the surf crashing against the base of the bluff, less than 100 feet away, was a constant reminder of the reason for the move, which following some extensive restoration once the lighthouse is mounted on its new base, will cost about $4 million.” - The Inquirer and Mirror, Sept. 20, 2007.

It is not unusual to see a house being moved on this island. But moving a lighthouse is different. The stone structure makes it unforgiving. The fact it is 70 feet tall and weighs 405 tons does not help.

The task was made even more difficult and urgent by years of steady erosion, marked by powerful nor’easters and extraordinary erosion events, meant the Sankaty lighthouse was now only 79 feet from what would have been a 100foot, almost vertical drop, into the Atlantic Ocean.

What’s more, the 12 feet closest to the edge of the bluff would not support the heavy equipment needed to make the move. That left 67 feet of usable ground and the footprint of the proposed construction site needed to make the move was 55 feet in all directions.

“It was an excruciatingly slow process, in many ways almost invisible to the naked eye, but by the time they were finished the lighthouse was suspended 10-12 feet off the

ground,” the newspaper reported after the first day of the move.

Engineers had worried that the foundation might break away from the main body of the lighthouse as it was jacked up. That did not happen. The Expert House Movers crew working with a crew from International Chimney, of Rochester, New York, was ready to begin moving the lighthouse back some 280 feet from the eroding bluff.

For almost two decades, it had been clear that Sankaty Light’s years at this location were numbered. A powerful storm in October 1991 had been a reminder of the threat the red-striped lighthouse faced. The storm left it just 100 feet away from the edge.

It was not difficult to imagine the lighthouse tumbling into the Atlantic Ocean, down the almost vertical face of the bluff.

It had been built in 1849 at an estimated cost of $12,000, although the actual cost came in at $10,330. The beam could be seen as far away as 50 miles by ship captains trying to

find their way through the dangerous shoals.

It was manned by lighthouse keepers until 1944, when the United States Coast Guard took over the lighthouse.

Keith Bills, a USCG lieutenant, emphasized in May of 1992 the need to move the lighthouse as soon as possible. Five feet of the bluff had been lost since the beginning of the year. The forces of erosion were accelerated now by the steepness of the bluff.

That October, The Inquirer and Mirror called a vote in both houses of Congress to support a bill that handed over ownership of the lighthouse from the Coast Guard to the Nantucket Historical Association “a major victory” in the fight to save Sankaty Head Lighthouse.

That same story put the rate of erosion in the Sconset and Sankaty area at 10 feet a year. Another winter storm that year raked the east end of the island and took houses in its wake.

“The surf surged over the cottage, spinning it in a whirlpool of devastation. As the waves crashed against the walls

It was not difficult to imagine the lighthouse tumbling into the Atlantic Ocean, down the almost vertical face of the bluff.

and roof, shingles and boards were ripped off and flung into the air. Within three minutes the ocean smashed the house to nothing.” –– The Inquirer and Mirror, Dec. 17, 1992.

Official ownership of the lighthouse ended up in the hands of a conservation group called The Sconset Trust. Awareness was raised. Money was raised. The first week of October 2007, a crowd watched as the lighthouse was moved about 267 feet at a snail’s pace along steel rails.

When they were done for the day, the lighthouse was approximately 130 feet away from its new foundation, near the fifth hole of the Sankaty Head Golf Course. By the end of the week the move was complete.

“It took eight days of work, several months of preparation and years of planning, but by yesterday afternoon Sankaty Light was safely ensconced just above its new foundation on stable ground.” – The Inquirer and Mirror, Oct 1, 2007.

The lighthouse was pushed by hydraulic cylinders along skids that had been greased with Ivory soap to provide lubrication. The structure had to be kept perfectly vertical during the move. It had gone off with barely a hitch. The only thing left now was to lower it and attach it to the foundation.

“The conclusion of the move was marked Wednesday by a ceremonial fly-by. Trailing decorative smoke, a vintage biplane piloted by Bill McGrath soared over the lighthouse and the golf course.” – The Inquirer and Mirror, Oct. 11, 2007.

Bob Felch, then the president of the Sconset Trust, told the newspaper that October morning that “Sankaty is a special landmark, not just for Sconset but for the whole island. It gives a sense of place, a good feeling to people. If you wiped it off the map, the east end of the island is not going to be the same.” ///

John Stanton is a writer, documentary filmmaker, associate editor of The Inquirer and Mirror and editor of Nantucket Today.

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Managing our Trash

BY DAN FOST | PHOTOS BY MARIANO RUSSO

To know a place, it is helpful to look at its trash. This is as true today as it was when Wampanoags owned this island. Nantucket has changed dramatically over the last few decades. To know the changes at the dump is to see that story unfold.

The island’s trash disposal has grown from a simple, rural operation – one of basically tossing every undesirable thing into one of two giants holes in the ground – into a modern, sophisticated complex, where refuse is sorted into 25 different waste streams for reuse, recycling, composting, shipping off island or, ultimately, dumping into a landfill.

It’s been an effort to maximize the use of space – so precious on the island – and to keep up with newer environmental regulations.

In the not-so-distant past, everything that Nantucket residents didn’t want would go, indiscriminately, into one of two dumps – one in Sconset, on the east end of the island, and one on Madaket, at the west end.

These were open dumps. People could drive up and simply hurl their trash into the pits. They weren’t lined. They weren’t guarded. If people saw something potentially useful—a table, a door frame, a child’s toythey could take it.

A Department of Public Works report on the state of the two dumps mentions the rodent problem. That problem did not require an official report. People had already been going out to the dump at night and shooting rats for sport.

The Sconset dump closed in 1971, and the town began making slow progress toward a more modern, environmentally-conscious form of trash disposal. A new lined pit opened at the 174-acre site at Madaket.

It was still a simple, almost bare-bones, operation.

Tim Soverino was a member of the Board of Selectmen during the beginning of those changes.

“We had one fellow with a rake running the dump,” he said. “When the pile got to be too big, he just set it on fire. We never had a great big mountain of trash, so it seemed to work pretty well. Nantucket was also a much smaller, less wasteful community than it turned into.”

The State Weighs In

In 1997 the Commonwealth of Massachusetts began enacting new rules for how communities must treat their trash. Soverino and his colleagues, on what is now called the Select Board, negotiated a contract with a Rhode Island Company called Waste Options. They established a public-private partnership with Waste Options to run the Madaket landfill.

They built two plants: First, a materials recovery facility, or MRF –pronounced “Murph” – to sort out non-compostable materials. Then they built a composter to heat and aerate materials to break them down so they

Tim Soverino

The Madaket landfill doubled from roughly 40,000 tons in 2017 to 80,000 tons in 2022, according to a

presentation by the town’s solid waste consultant, George Aronson of CommonWealth Resource Management. It dropped back

to about 70,000 tons last year.

would take up less space in the dump. Some of the compost is used to maintain the dump.

Today some clean compost is sold to landscapers and gardeners on the island. Some of the new crop of young small farmers use the landfill’s compost to supplement the island soil.

In the beginning, however, building a compost plant had been controversial. The compost leaves the landfill under the name “Nantucket Gold.” Between 10,000 and 15,000 yards were used by local farmers and gardeners last year.

“There are still people who think the community made the wrong choice,” Soverino said.

In part, he said, people were upset because the cost to the town was about to triple, from paying $30 per ton to dump items into the landfill, to paying $90 per ton.

“It wasn’t my call,” he said. The state Department of Environmental Protection “was putting pressure on us to do something. The town had already set a direction and appropriated money. I got the short straw. My job was to go forward and bring the landfill into compliance.”

Soverino looks back across 23 years and feels that both environmentally and fiscally, it was the right move.

“I like to think my generation coming along didn’t think (the

old system) was right. We had the aquifer. Long Pond is right there. Who knew what it was that we were burying?”

He also feels vindicated on the price. Opponents of the plan were advocating that the town send its trash to the Southeastern Massachusetts Resource Recovery Facility (known as SEMASS), an incinerator in Rochester, Mass., which was taking trash from all over southern New England and turning it into electricity.

More than a few people thought that was the answer. Martha’s Vineyard went that route, signing up with SEMASS, at a cost of $135 per ton.

“We were turning ours into a usable commodity that people could put on their tomatoes or their lawn, and we were taking out the recyclables, and we were doing it for $45 a ton cheaper than the Vineyard from day one,” Soverino said.

It even gave him, momentarily, a crazy idea. The Nantucket composter was built to handle 100 tons a day to meet the needs of the island’s peak summer population.

“What if we ran ours at 100 tons all year round? We could take all the trash from the Vineyard at $90 a ton,” he said.

But he knew how Nantucketers would react to that notion.

“It would have opened up a discussion we didn’t need to have,” he said. “I was already bleeding out of a hundred holes.”

A Growing Island, a Growing Landfill

Over the years, the state has imposed new laws, and the landfill has evolved. The state ordered the town to build an indoor facility for its construction and demolition debris, which Waste Options built, along with a recycling facility.

The town operates its popular Take It or Leave It service, where people can leave clean, usable items for others who might want to bring them home. The Take It or Leave it is often called the Madaket Mall.

Refuse is now separated into 25 different streams, ranging from the dirt, asphalt, brick, concrete and “mixed excavation waste,” or MEW, that comes from digging new foundations and other construction work – to yard waste, cardboard and other recycling, mattresses and tires, and construction and demolition debris. Hazardous wastes are also separated out.

All told, the amount of waste processed at the Madaket landfill doubled from roughly 40,000 tons in 2017 to 80,000 tons in 2022, according to a presentation by the town’s solid waste consultant, George Aronson of CommonWealth Resource Management, made to the Select Board in January. It dropped back to about 70,000 tons last year.

The town’s relationship with Waste Options has sometimes been contentious over the years, but by and large it served the town’s needs.

As an island with huge tracts of land preserved forever, and the value of developable land constantly soaring to new record highs, Nantucket cannot afford to expand its landfill, or look for a new landfill to open.

It already ships its construction and demolition waste off the island, a costly undertaking largely subsidized by fees on those contractors creating the waste, and often passed on to their clients.

New Contract, New Deal

The town’s contract with Waste Options is on the eve of expiring. When it ends next year, the town is ready to embark on a new era: It wants to buy the buildings and vehicles Waste Options owns on the site and.

It will likely contract with someone to run the landfill – perhaps even Waste Options – but the idea is for the town to own the buildings and equipment.

“It really just gives us more control,” Select Board member Brooke Mohr said. “It’s a little more complex of a situation

when the contractor owns the facilities. It’s just a different relationship of authority and control, as it were.”

“There’s a lot of planning and a lot of thinking that went into it. I do not know of another community in Massachusetts that has what Nantucket has to offer for their community. It’s amazing. It really is a testament to some very forwardthinking people that decided they were going to do something different.”

- Christopher Lowe

The town and Waste Options have agreed to a price of $4.4 million for two of the buildings, the composting facility and the construction and demolition waste facility, according to Nathan Widell, chief executive officer of Waste Options.

Anything else would be subject to further negotiations –including what Widell called “rolling stock.” That’s Caterpillar, John Deere and Volvo dump trucks, front-end loaders, excavators, bulldozers, screeners and the like.

The original unlined landfill won’t take any more trash, and will be capped as soon as the town gets a permit from the DEP, Christopher Lowe, who moved to Nantucket last year as the town’s first solid-waste manager, said.

The “cell” being filled now will eventually be capped as well. There are other cells on the site which would extend the life of the landfill at least 15 years, and probably longer, Lowe believes.

Saving Space

In the dump’s modern incarnation, Nantucket composts what it can, recycles what it can and tries to minimize what goes into the landfill as much as possible in order to extend its life.

“There’s a lot of planning and a lot of thinking that went into it,” Lowe said. “I do not know of another community in Massachusetts that has what Nantucket has to offer for their community. It’s amazing. It really is a testament to some very forward-thinking people that decided they were going to do something different.”

That’s not to say that more can’t be done.

One of the largest streams of waste coming into the landfill is construction and demolition waste, known in the trade as C&D. Nantucket took in 8,000 tons of C&D waste in 2023, Lowe said.

According to a 2005 story in The Inquirer and Mirror, C&D at

the time accounted for 37 percent, or 15,500 tons, of the total solid waste stream and more than 80 percent of the landfill space.

It’s unclear if those figures included other waste that is often a byproduct of construction and demolition and which are now separated out, such as asphalt, brick, concrete and “mixed excavation waste,” or MEW. The law changed in 2006, requiring C&D waste to be handled in a separate building.

Now, however, C&D doesn’t take up space in the landfill. It is carted off the island.

That’s expensive, but it’s paid for by charging construction companies $300 per ton to drop C&D waste at the dump, Widell said. Waste Options then loads it onto 80 to 100-cubic-yard trailers, puts a tarp on top, hitches them to a truck, and drives the whole thing onto one of the steamship vessels.

“Then the trucks come back over on the steamship and we load them up again,” Widell says. “That’s the same steamship that brings over a lot of the fuel or food or materials that keep the island alive. The same steamship. Everybody’s scrapping for the same limited available space.”

When the C&D waste reaches Cape Cod, it’s sent to a processing facility, where it’s sorted further. “Some of it gets shipped out to Ohio by rail,” Widell said. “Some of it goes to wood-burning facilities. And, of course, they try if they can to pull out what can be recycled rather than dumped or burned.”

A Better Way?

Could that recyclable material be pulled out of the C&D pile and reused on Nantucket? Mary Bergman, executive director of the Nantucket Preservation Trust (and an occasional contributor to Nantucket Today), believes it could and it should.

“Nantucket has been a leader in recycling for a long time,” Bergman says. “It just seems to make sense that finding a better way to recycle or repurpose our construction waste is a natural next step.”

The Trust partnered with ReMain Nantucket on a “Nantucket Building Material Salvage Study” in 2022 that concluded at least 4,500 tons of building materials could be salvaged for re-use on Nantucket per year. And that is at a value of about $100 per ton.

On top of the cost savings, not having to transport the material off the island would save as much greenhouse gas as taking 869 cars off the road.

Bergman said Nantucket gives the appearance of being a place where it’s hard to tear things down. Historic buildings are protected, and everything maintains a timeless weathered shingle veneer.

In reality, she said, the town’s demolition delay only slows things down for 30 or 60 days, which isn’t enough time for someone to raise the money that would persuade new buyers not to tear down a home.

In addition, the Historic District Commission rarely intervenes

the Historic Commission rarely intervenes to stop a demolition, Bergman says. And increasingly, wealthy people who buy Nantucket’s costly homes want something that’s their own, rather than someone else’s—and they can afford to tear it down.

to stop a demolition, Bergman said. And increasingly, wealthy people who buy Nantucket’s costly homes want something that’s their own, rather than someone else’sand they can afford to tear it down.

Bergman and others point to the sale last fall, for $18 million, of a compound at 72 Pocomo Road that once belonged to Yankee Candle founder Michael Kittredge. The new owner, a trust, has applied for permission to tear it all down.

“Nobody wants that interior from the 1980s anymore. It has no staying power,” Bergman said. “You spend $10 million on a house, you don’t want somebody else’s kitchen.”

That doesn’t mean those appliances and cabinets should go to the dump. “I would take it,” Bergman said. “So would a lot of people.”

Bergman would like to see Nantucket adopt a “deconstruction” ordinance, as cities such as Portland, Ore., Milwaukee and San Antonio have done. It requires homes to be carefully taken apart, rather than demolished wholesale, so that someone else might re-use the material.

The salvage report notes that, “Nantucket has a long and proud history of repurposing buildings and building components, dating back to the 17th and 18th century, when reuse was common and disposing of building materials as ‘waste’ was unthinkable.”

Nantucket homes have been moved across the island, and barged to other locations. Lowe, the solid waste

“Nantucket has a long and proud history of repurposing buildings and building components, dating back to the 17th and 18th century, when reuse was common and disposing of building materials as ‘waste’ was unthinkable.”

manager, lives in Orleans, across the street from a former Nantucket home.

Deconstruction would also provide resources that could help keep historic homes in good condition.

“Nantucket’s Oldest House was struck by lightning in 1987 and had to be rebuilt,” Bergman said. “We don’t have a store of materials that could be used to restore those oldest properties in town.”

It could particularly help with demolitions to come.

“Look at Sheep Pond Road in Madaket,” Bergman said. “A lot of houses are threatened by increasing storms, sea level rise, erosion. Are we going to demolish those? Things can be salvaged. It is a historic practice of using and reusing.”

Bigger Problems Ahead?

Landfills tend to cause concern in any locale because of the toxic nature of some of their contents. In an age when per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances – known as PFAS and often called forever chemicals – seem to be everywhere and threatening people’s health, they’re naturally a concern at Nantucket’s landfill.

“My concerns have been that the town take a long-term view of this issue in its current Madaket location,” Select Board member Matt Fee said in an email. “We all are learning the dangers of PFAS and other forever pollutants, and these will likely only get worse as we learn more.”

Fee is also concerned about the landfill’s long-term viability at its current location, next to a storm tide pathway and not far from Long Pond. Yet Widell said moving the landfill could cost $100 million – making the idea not only cost prohibitive but without a viable place to put it.

“There is no relocating the landfill,” Widell said. “That will always be there for the rest of time, unless somebody wants to fork over $100 million and dig up every last thing that’s there and ship it off the island.”///

Dan

Fost is a freelance journalist and a frequent contributor to Nantucket Today.

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Brother & Sister Behind the Camera

BY JOHN STANTON

COURTESY OF PENNY AND TOM DEY

PHOTOS

You can find Tom Dey’s name on IMDb, that Internet data base of Hollywood movies and the people who make them. His page includes the feature films “Shanghai Noon,” “Showtime,” and “Failure to Launch,” as well as the names of actors who starred in those movies: Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson; Eddie Murphy and Robert De Niro; Matthew McConaughey and Sarah Jessica Parker.

You

can find Penny Dey at her real estate office, Atlantic East on Easton Street, where she is both a broker and the owner. She understands this island and its stories,

having

lived here for four decades, but only recently began to tell them through the lens of a video camera.

“When I turned 49 years old I said to myself I needed a new challenge creatively,” she said. “So I learned how to play the cello. Some years later I was no longer playing the cello and needed another challenge.”

Tom began his career. after graduating from the American Film Institute in 1993, directing commercials.

“He was first known as the hair guy,” said his sister Penny. “He did a lot of shampoo commercials.”

Penny’s path to filmmaking began when she heard that NCTV, the island’s cable-access station, was offering classes on videomaking, on understanding the tools and skills needed to put a story on the screen.

“I think it is terrific that the access to filmmaking tools has become democratized and that enables many more people to tell stories they feel emotional about,” Tom Dey said. “I am thrilled Penny has caught the filmmaker buzz, and it is terrific.”

You can find both of their films at this month’s Nantucket Film Festival. Penny’s film, “Lost in Nevers Land,” (20 minutes) looks at the disappearance of Margaret Kilcoyne, who was never seen again after disappearing on a frigid night in January 1980. It won the Audience Award at the Nantucket Shorts Festival in November, a showcase for beginning island filmmakers.

“People were really scared, and I was fascinated by the story” she said.

“It was the first time I ever remember thinking we have to lock our doors here.”

“One of the things I am mostly fascinated about are things that are not neatly explained or solved. This wasn’t. There were three or four different theories about what might have happened to her. My film is about the questions.”

On a Zoom call from Los Angles, her brother offers his own view of his sister’s film.

“The first thing that came to mind watching ‘Lost in Nevers Land,’ is that when you have a small community 30 miles out at sea and somebody goes missing that leaves a hole in the community. And there is clearly an emotional response to that,” Tom Dey said.

On the surface, Tom Dey’s film “JUMPMAN” (20 minutes) is about Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Jacobus “Co” Rentmeester. He was instrumental in creating close-up images of athletes.

During an assignment for Life magazine to create a photo essay on Olympic athletes, Rentmeester brought a college basketball player by the name of

Michael Jordan to a hilltop against the setting sun and asked him to attempt a ballet move called a grande jete.

The resulting photo, an expression of weightlessness and power, which out of context appeared to be Jordan flying to the hoop for a dunk, eventually became the model for the famous Nike logo. The creative director of Nike, Peter Moore, licensed the photo under an agreement to use it only for “slide presentations, no layouts, or other duplication.”

When his career ended, Rentmeester sued Nike for copyright infringement and lost.

“I have seen how carrying this weight for all those years has been a burden to him. So I saw an opportunity to tell his story and have him be recognized in what he created,” Dey said.

Dey’s film raises the question of who gets to decide what is considered art. The film also has a personal level: Rentmeester is Dey’s father-in-law.

“The film is rooted in the idea that a photograph is more than a sum of its parts,” he said. “If you judge it by its details, you are missing the point of what art

The Dey family packed for a summer vacation on the Nantucket of the 1970s. Penny is second from the left.

is and what Co created.

“I hope it also asks questions about this age we live in, where the making of something is being more and more relegated to artificial intelligence. What is art? Is it still art if you hand over the making of it?”

The film uses the power of Rentmeester’s compelling and sometimes iconic photographs to ramp up the audience’s passion for this story. You have seen these images before, and they mark a period of time in your memory.

“My story is about an older white male who is aggrieved. And we live in an age of grievance, so I really did not want to make a hit film on Nike. I really didn’t want to make a film that ended with sour grapes,” he said. “I wanted to make a film that really showed the making of a piece and trace that creative mind as far back as I could.”

Tom and Penny grew up in a family of four children. Their mother was a watercolor artist. Their father was an associate dean at Dartmouth College. The family rented a place in Quidnet for six weeks every summer.

They went to Saturday night movies at the Sconset

Casino. “During the ‘Poseidon Adventure’ Tom ran screaming from the theater when the man with the burned face popped up on the screen,” Penny said.

“I had to go after him and was not happy about it. I think he was about 7 years old. I believe that is where his film career began.”

They both remember her parents being very encouraging to their kids to be creative.

“Our parents established a thing they called a ‘craft allowance.’ They would fund the materials for any project each of the four of us wanted to create,” Penny said. “It went on until our brother Andrew decided he wanted to build a 16-foot lapstrake dory. That was the end of that.”

Tom credits that creative environment as the beginning of the skills he now brings to films as a director.

“We grew up in a visual environment. Art was always around, sometimes simply on the kitchen table,” he said. “The first thing I studied in film school was cinematography. I always thought if I can build a single frame, then I can tell the story out of that single image.”

“JUMPMAN” is the first documentary film he has

Jocobus “Co” Rentmeester

Rentmeester’s iconic photo of Michael Jordon was at the center of a lawsuit against Nike.

finished, but it is not the first one he tried to make. He had been trying to make a film about a project his father helped create in the 1960s called A Better Chance, a radical integration program of scholarships.

“Our father was always for the underdogs. He was a long-time Mets fan,” Penny said. “He was all about opportunities for people who were not afforded the opportunities that we had.”

A Better Chance is now a nationwide program, and 16,000 students have come through it. By-in-large they are minority students. Tom and his dad traveled around the country tracking down some of the first students in that program. They were now in their 60s, and they reflected on the program, and how it had affected their lives.

The idea was to make a documentary about his father, through the story of the project he had been passionate about. Unfortunately, he died before the film could be competed. Their mother died the same year. Then Tom ran into the eternal problems of funding.

“JUMPMAN” has been selected to screen at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it will premiere before heading to Nantucket. He is hoping the buzz from that prestigious festival might manifest itself in funding, so that he can finish his film about his father.

When you make films for a living, a big slice of your job centers not around the making of a film, but in its distribution. Passion for story must be balanced with the marketplace.

His sister’s work is not burdened by the need to make a living from filmmaking. Her first experience behind the camera was called “Dr. Winslow’s Heart,” about a doctor in the 1800s who stated in his will that his heart was to be cut out and buried on Nantucket.

“My only motivation is to tell stories,” she said. “This is not a career or anything. I love all the pieces and how it comes together. I could never have done this without a lot of help.”

Her brother is quick to say that when he was a young

The Dey kids enjoying a summer treat. Tom and Penny are on the left.

man, just out of film school, he was much more proprietary, more of an auteur. He no longer sees the film world through that lens.

“Now that I am older, I can see that I could never have made this film without some very talented people who are committed to this story and rose above and beyond what their job descriptions are,” he said.

He has written a script that takes place in Spain and is now putting together a team of those people who bring talents to a field past their job description, as well as funding.

Penny is thinking about making a film based on a man named Benny Cleveland. In 1888, he put an ad in The Inquirer and Mirror offering his services to “stay the night with timid ladies during stormy nights.” He charged 15 cents for one night, a quarter for two nights.

She is thinking of approaching the film as a farce.

Tom and Penny Dey have the easygoing cadence you only find with certain siblings. They laugh together, they push each other to tell this story or that story, but they also give each other the room to talk.

“My brother is a professional writer and director. He has had a number of large feature films and has had a long career,” Penny said. “But I was careful not to share what I was doing with him until closer to the end, maybe a week before we did the final edit. I just didn’t want to

be influenced.”

“He bounces scripts and trailers off me all the time. I would have been very distressed if my film had gotten in and his had not. His film is beautiful and has a professional score. It is such a different look.”

After hearing his sister talk about her next project, Tom said it would be great to work together but his take on the Benny Cleveland story would be different.

“My version of that would be we make a feature film about a woman filmmaker making a film about Benny Cleveland and of course she falls in love with the actor playing Benny and she has to deal with that,” he said.

Such is the difference between Hollywood movies and local documentaries. ///

John Stanton is a writer, documentary filmmaker, associate editor of The Inquirer and Mirror and editor of Nantucket Today.

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“He took my hands in his, smiled, and said those two simple words, ‘You’re Janet.’ I was found. I looked into my father’s eyes, and finally I made sense.”

A Daughter’s Search for her Birth Mother and Herself

BY MARIANNE STANTON | PHOTOS COURTESY OF JANET SHERLUND

For as long as she could remember, Janet Sherlund felt like she had a deep, dark hole at the center of her being. Raised by adoptive parents, along with three siblings who were also adopted, there was a constant, gnawing question deep inside her. Who am I? Where did I come from? Who do I look like?

“Our parents never hid from us the fact that we were all adopted. It was part of our bedtime story,” Sherlund said.

Growing up in New Jersey, as Janet Leaf, she had a stable home life with two parents who both worked and provided a comfortable existence for their family. She had friends, did well in school, went on to college and had the middle-class lifestyle that was common to many growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet, she always felt a sense of unease and of not belonging, wherever she was.

She chronicles the journey of self-discovery, of finding out who she really is, one of pain, heartbreak and joy, in her book “Abandoned at Birth: Searching for the Arms That Once Held Me.”

“I wrote the book to affirm to other adoptees our experience. It’s pretty universal. And to explain to others what it feels like to be adopted,” Sherlund, 69, said. “You feel and retain that trauma of separation at birth from

Janet Sherlund as a young girl with elder brother Eric and younger brother Mark.

Audrey and Bob Leaf adopted Janet and her three siblings after trying for five years, unsuccessfully, to have children of their own.

your birth mother, but you don’t really know what it is. I always felt that I was someone else.”

“We (her siblings) didn’t talk about it, but we felt it. A separateness, and a difference. We weren’t all bonded. We weren’t of the same DNA,” she said.

“I refer to it as animalistic. We weren’t of the same blood. As we were all sitting around the dinner table, I felt that we weren’t a clan. We were each in our own genetic dust, like there was a bubble around each of us. I didn’t feel that biological connection.”

As these feelings simmered, Sherlund lived her life. She graduated from high school, enrolled in college and graduated and eventually married her college sweetheart, Rick Sherlund. They raised two sons, Will and Ben. They eventually found their way to Nantucket as summer residents in 2000, where she became involved with the Garden Club and the Nantucket Historical Association, of which she eventually became president. They now live on the island year-round.

“We were each in our own genetic dust, like there was a bubble around each of us. I didn’t feel that biological connection.”

- Janet Sherlund

Even as she raised her own family, Sherlund wondered about her origin story. She eventually found a way to contact her birth mother. She was a 75-year-old real estate agent named Shirlie Chalmers. She lived nearby.

The adoption agency contacted Chalmers, but she made it clear she wanted nothing to do with the daughter she gave up.

“Her denial was wrenching, and my center twisted into a knot so tight that I went numb,” Sherlund wrote in her book. “That was devastating to me.”

The agency asked Sherlund if she wanted to meet her birth father.

Larry Grogan was a widower with three grown children. A retired New York State Trooper, he had dated Shirlie Chalmers for two years in high school. He had no idea that she had become pregnant or of his daughter’s existence.

Father and daughter met, on Jan. 8, 2011. It was a life-changing moment for both of them.

“Adoptees talk about a big, black hole in their center that is jagged and deep. The moment I met Larry and looked into his eyes, that hole filled right up,” Sherlund said.

“I wasn’t prepared for the connection, to see myself in his eyes, his

“Dyanne told me she wept reading my letter, and while our mother was cold and self-centered, she was devastated to see her be this unfeeling. She admitted Shirlie had not been a good mother and commented that I was lucky not to have been raised by her.”

face. I wasn’t prepared for the lifelong hole in my gut to slam shut the moment he took my hands in his, smiled and said those two simple words, ‘You’re Janet.’ I was found. I looked into my father’s eyes, and finally I made sense.”

Janet Sherlund would have two years with her biological father, including summer visits to Nantucket with him and his children, before he passed away from cancer.

A few years after Grogan died, and after another attempt to meet her birth mother failed, Sherlund followed the suggestions of the social worker at the adoption agency. She decided to connect with Chalmers’ five children.

She found the names and addresses of all five siblings and sent them each the same letter through overnight mail identifying who she was, her story, and asking to meet with them.

The next day she heard from her sister Dyanne, then Carol, then a brother, Steven. All three were surprised, but overjoyed, to learn they had another sister and were anxious to connect.

“Dyanne told me she wept reading my letter, and while our mother was cold and self-centered, she was devastated to see her be this unfeeling. She admitted Shirlie had not been a good mother and commented that I was lucky not to have been raised by her,” Sherlund writes.

Sherlund’s newly-discovered sisters confronted their mother about why she wouldn’t meet her other daughter. One day Chalmers sent a text message to Sherlund. Was she available to talk?

Her heart felt like it was going to stop. Yes, of course she could talk.

Sherlund and her birth mother, now 81, met over lunch. It was not the happy reunion Sherlund hoped for. Chalmers was cold and icy. It was an agonizing three hours with no emotional connection.

Over the next year Sherlund continued to get to know her siblings: Dyanne, Carol, Steven, Gary and Bill and their families. She learned more about who her birth mother was as a person and a parent.

“Sadly, the conversations I had with each of my siblings were loaded with disturbing information. They told me shocking stories of Shirlie’s parenting that traumatized each of them. It’s not my place to describe that abuse, but it broke my heart. It was clear I was lucky not to be raised by Shirlie. The more I learned about her, the more horrified I was that I came from her,” Sherlund writes.

“Given my years of searching, I was surprised I didn’t want to be related to my birth mother,” Sherlund writes, and felt ‘less than’ because I was. She was awful. Denying me to my face was crushing and underscored my sense of unworthiness.”

Over the next few years Sherlund made several more attempts to connect emotionally, hoping for a bond to form, hoping for a moment to come when her birth mother would reach out to her with loving arms.

- Janet Sherlund

Janet’s biological parents, Larry Grogan and Shirlie Anne Jones, dated for two years in high school.

That moment never came. Shirlie Chalmers died in 2022. For Janet Sherlund it was the end of a painful odyssey.

“Someone asked me, if she were still alive and you could say one last thing to her, what would that be?”

“I’d tell her I’d still want her to want me. I’ll never be over it, but I’m stronger now in the face of it. It was very important for me to do the search,” Sherlund said. ///

Marianne Stanton is the founder of Nantucket Today. She was the editor and publisher of The Inquirer and Mirror for over 40 years, until she retired in 2023. Her column Here and There appears weekly in the newspaper along with a food column Delicious, that appears in This Week on Nantucket.

Janet Sherlund, center, with her family on Madaket Beach. From left, sons Will and Ben, her husband Rick and daughter-in-law Caroline.

Steven Rowley

Nancy Thayer Casey Sherman

Safiya Sinclair

Tara Karr Roberts

Jim Patrick Ben Mezrick

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Kwame Alexander

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Gabriella Burnham’s new novel

takes place on Nantucket, but it is not a beach read. It’s a boat read. The car ferry lurches forward. We’ve barely started moving and my dad is already asleep in the driver’s seat. I lean back and crack open my advance copy of “Wait.”

BY ANNA POPNIKOLOVA PHOTOS COURTESY

OF

GABRIELLA BURNHAM

Within an instant, I am sitting in a dorm with Burnham’s protagonist, Elise, and her college best friend Sheba. I will also soon be sitting in a dorm. I am traveling to something called an admitted students weekend, and “Wait” is accompanying me along the way.

Elise, Burnham’s main character, has left working-class island life to see what the mainland holds after graduating college. She is pulled back when her undocumented mother is deported to Brazil after two decades as a tax-paying U.S. resident. Elise must return to her younger sister Sophie and pull together a life on the island where she grew up.

In between assemblies and lectures, I will find hidden spots around campus to escape into Elise’s world, even just for a few minutes at a time.

Much of the first half of the book takes place on the ferry. People leaving, people coming back, people clambering on and off the metal decks - which could not be more fitting.

Burnham understands, painfully and artfully, how much of island life depends on the boat. She understands all parts of island life, of course, having moved here from Brazil when she was just 10 years old. The novelist and

I share a hometown. It feels, in part, like we also share a childhood.

“With Elise and Sophie, I wanted to intentionally create characters that felt modern,” Burnham said. “I wanted them to have the same concerns that most teenagers have. They’re interested in relationships, they’re on their phones, they argue with their siblings and then they make up.”

“All of those things I wanted to feel true, even though these are two girls that are dealing with incredibly adult problems like housing insecurity. Their mother’s been deported, (and) they’re living on an island where there’s intense wealth disparity.”

Burnham’s characters are filled with life, thought and contradiction. She shapes vivid characters that are obdurately female.

I was on the boat again when I read the last page. This time, not in my dad’s truck but sitting outside on the fast ferry’s deck, a red sunset behind me, the wind winding my hair around the wet railing. I closed the book and watched the sun go down. Then I went back inside.

“These are the kind of stories I like to tell, the sliver of a life,” Burnham said. “The feeling should be that all of these characters had a life before the book and they’ll have a life after the book. The book is just an intersection.”

Flora Medawar, the author, Blakney Young. Childhood friends.

Burnham sat

down with Nantucket Today to talk about her latest book.

Nantucket Today

What problems does writing fiction about the place where you grew up, especially on a tiny island, present?

Burnham

The difficulty with writing that story was actually getting over my fear of writing about a very personal experience she said. In order to write this book and bring it to its final state, I actually had to stop thinking about it as my story at all. In early drafts, I was really thinking about characters or places like, “This is exactly my experience on Nantucket,” or “This is my sister, or this is my mother” – and it was hindering the book.

Q: Why is it important to tell stories like this, about what Nantucket is actually like?

A: Everywhere in the U.S., there are multiple versions of Nantucket and the version that we are told over and over again about extreme wealth and fancy parties and galas and charity events and clambakes is actually not the full story.

Anyone who lives on Nantucket knows that people are really poor on Nantucket, and they’re the ones who maintain the entire island. They’re invisible because if they don’t exist in that myth, then you don’t have to deal with the problem.

Q: Why did you have Gilda’s story end the way it does?

A: Reality. I worked in immigration law for many years, I still do some contracting work and the reality is that if you overstayed your visa and you were deported, your chances of coming back within the next 10 years are basically nil. The feeling that maybe it could happen and maybe there’ll be a happy ending and maybe she’ll come back would be too fictionalized.

Q: I loved reading Sheba. How did you create her?

A: In order to encompass the class dynamics that are really present on Nantucket, I think it was important for Elise and Sophie to be the main voices in the book, but there needed to be a contrast.

Sheba in some ways fulfills that contrast, but also the most fun I had writing the book was writing Sheba’s scenes. She’s this very uninhibited person, largely because she’s grown up so wealthy; there’s been no reason for her to watch what she says, to be careful in certain ways. She will do whatever she wants and have sex with whoever she wants and be friends with whoever she wants and there’s no boundaries for her.

Having a character like that was very refreshing for me. Both in “It is Wood, It is Stone” and “Wait,” my main characters are people who are very aware of how their words affect people and how their actions will affect people and can be kind of withholding - so then, to have Sheba is a joy.

Q: What do you hope that people will come away from the book feeling?

A: First and foremost I hope it’s an enjoyable read. I read books because I want to feel challenged and engaged and I want to be swept away by the story and I love beautiful writing and descriptions of nature and food.

Beyond that, if the book challenges you to think about what an immigrant family looks like, if it challenges you to think more about the complications of class antagonism, especially through the lens of Nantucket, that would be great. If it challenges you to think about the relationships between women more, that would also be great.

Q: In this book, as well as in “It is Wood, It is Stone,” you have really effortless queer representation. You don’t really make a comment about it - it’s just there.

A: There are some writers that make a point that they’re writing about a certain identity and there’s a didactic element. That’s not how I move about the world. I’m not walking around with a name tag that says I am a BrazilianAmerican and this is how I identify gender-wise and sexually.

Representation is so important in literature and I really believe that, but when you’re actually trying to create a story about the contradiction of identity, the concept of being represented in a book can be counterintuitive to that. ///

Anna Popnikolova grew up on Nantucket. She interns summers at The Inquirer and Mirror and is heading off to Harvard University in the fall.

The author and her friend Amelia O’Connor in elementary school.

In the world of craft cocktails, things can get strange real quick. Enter the process of fat washing. It works much the same way as an infusion. The spirit of choice is combined with a fat, be it browned butter, bacon fat, olive oil or in this case, duck fat.

Now I understand that the idea of any type of fat in a cocktail sounds, well, utterly grotesque. But therein lies the beauty of the fat-washed spirit. Although fat is not soluble in water, it is to a certain extent soluble in alcohol.

Just enough to impart flavor and for lack of a better term, mouthfeel. It adds a richness and allows you to make a twist on a classic cocktail without making any major changes to the structure of the drink.

The first time I had a “fat-washed” cocktail my wife and I were visiting New York City and happened upon an Italian restaurant in Williamsburg called Have & Meyer. As we sat at the bar, perusing the drink list, a guanciale-washed Old Fashioned caught my eye. Guanciale, for those who are not familiar, is cured pork jowl. It’s a meat typically found on a charcuterie board.

The process sounds pretty simple. Combine spirit of choice with fat of choice. Incorporate the two, let sit for a period of time, freeze the combination and skim off the fat once it solidifies. Easy, right? Well, I sure thought so. So, I took a shot at it this past winter and I have to tell you, the concept is easy enough, but the final product takes a good amount of trial and error.

In my case, one dreary day in February, I tried fat-washing vodka with olive oil. And for all intents and purposes it worked. The vodka took on the floral notes of the olive oil. But, in the end, I couldn’t really find a way to use it.

There is a reason you typically see this process done with a spirit like whisky and a rich, smoky fat like bacon. Ultimately it is easier to make a cocktail with those components. Plus, no one really wants to sip olive-oil flavored vodka.

If you are interested in learning how to fat-wash a spirit there are resources online that can help guide you in your journey. That being said, it’s more fun to just sit at a bar

Fat Wash Fusion

STORY AND PHOTO BY KEVIN STANTON

and try one without all the work. Think about it this way. I am here to make mistakes so you don’t have to.

In full disclosure, when I am not writing freelance for this magazine or in my studio painting, I am also a bartender at The Pearl. To my surprise, the new bar manager Tyler Lawrence has added a cocktail called “Duck a l’Orange” to the opening menu.

“Fat-washing is a pretty simple process. It takes a bit to get it dialed in depending on the type of fat you use. Bacon fat is super-salty so you don’t want to use too much of it. Butter, you can use a little more of. Duck fat I have dialed it down to about half a cup per 750 ml of spirit,” Lawrence said.

“Fat-washing incorporates a nice round mouthfeel that you normally wouldn’t get in a cocktail. It holds things together and gives a little bit of a savory character to the drink. It’s more of a culinary approach. I think it goes great in this cocktail specifically because it is a boozier cocktail and instead of adding sweetness it rounds out the bitterness and gives it a nice savory component. And again, the mouthfeel. Those are the two major things you get with fat-washing.”

The drink is a spin on a classic Negroni variant called a Boulevardier. The original recipe swaps gin for bourbon. In Lawrence’s iteration he has done all the dirty work for you and washed Jefferson’s Bourbon with rendered duck fat. The drink also incorporates a smoked mushroom and soju, a Korean liquor typically distilled from rice. Those components mixed with Campari and sweet vermouth result in a complex cocktail perfect for the start of a meal. ///

Kevin Stanton grew up on Nantucket and is a graduate of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. He writes regularly for Nantucket Today.

Crows Get No Respect… But Perhaps They Should

STORY BY VIRGINIA ANDREWS | PHOTOS BY TOM GRISWOLD, VERN LAUX AND TRISH PASTUSZAK

Everybody has a crow story. And few people lack an opinion about crows, usually either strongly for, or inflexibly against, their very existence.

In historic times, crows and ravens were widespread when the Pilgrims arrived from Europe. Ravens were persecuted to the point of extirpation by arriving Europeans, but crows held their own.

Much anti-crow prejudice comes from cultural traditions that crows, and even more so ravens, are evil. That they bear messages of death and pestilence. Watch a couple of episodes of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” and you find people shuddering in fear at the messages ravens bring.

But there are also cultural traditions in which they are tricksters or sources of wisdom. Spend enough time in Dr. Tim Lepore’s eccentrically decorated waiting room and you might notice two smaller-thanlife-size plastic ravens guarding the door that says “Nobody gets in to see the wizard, not nobody no-how.”

They represent Huginn and Muninn, representing thought and memory,

in old Norse. The stories say they collected news of the world and sat on Odin’s shoulders, giving him daily briefings.

On Nantucket their numbers have generally been modest. There were five pairs observed and additional migrants spring and fall, according to a 1940s account. An early cartoon representing a bird club outing shows a large boxy vehicle with protruding binoculars. The caption reads “6:30 a.m. What’s a big black bird that goes “Caw, Caw, Caw?”

But that is only half the story. Crows and their relatives have their own opinions about us, too.

As anyone knows who has tried to scare crows away from bird feeders so the “nice” birds can eat, they seem to find us humorous.

They regard shouting and arm-waving much as a new puppy regards a game of “can’t catch me” when it’s time to get on-leash and go home. Conversely, they have

Crows are very intelligent and researchers have noted their ability to use tools, improvise strategy and remember faces.

been known to avoid attempts to feed and befriend them, to the extent of watching people inside the house, waiting until no one is visible through the windows, before eating.

Crows are very intelligent and researchers have noted their ability to use tools, improvise strategy and remember faces. Recognition studies give a hint that crows particularly remember people who gave them grief by trapping them, banding them or other unpleasant activities.

They also apparently share information with their offspring, extended family, even flock-mates, about people they consider dangerous. They hold grudges. Several years and crow generations later, irate crows still mob researchers at the University of Washington. This comes close to an oral history tradition on the part of a bird, something once considered an exclusively human prerogative.

Crows, in the Corvid family of birds along with ravens, are far from “bird-brained” in the usual sense. Recent studies have led scientists to find that the neurological stuff of the mind, the cognition of which we humans are so proud, is equally present in the brains of a number of birds. Although shaped differently, their brains can equal ours for the number of dendrites, the neural connections which we use to make mental maps, find our way, process emotions, remember events and communicate.

They are far from the hard-wired slaves of instinct that we once assumed. They have been observed to play, another method of learning.

By shooting and clearing trees, the Pilgrims pushed common ravens north and west. One specimen was collected from Williamstown in 1877, but they remained rare. In 1980, two were observed in a courtship flight near Mt. Watatic. In 1982, three pairs were breeding in the state and they continued to spread out.

But they were still rare on Nantucket even 10 years ago. It was a different story after

2019. Suddenly there were numerous sightings around the island. A pair nested on the Sconset water tower in 2020, raising two young. They continued nesting there every year thereafter, and an additional pair probably nested in Madaket the following year. This year a pair was noted building a nest on Tuckernuck.

The American crow is part of a larger genus called Corvid . They are not the only bird of that group with an island pres ence. Fish crows, ubiqui tous in the South, started moving north in the twentieth century

Forbush places one on Nantucket in 1927. They are best identi fied by voice. Last year they were finally documented with record ings. Quoth the Fish Crow, “UH-oh,” may not have the creepy, lugubrious appeal of Edgar Allen Poe’s raven, quorking “Nevermore.”

Call it a Southern accent. Fish crows have soft, pleasing, eccentric voices, more conversational than either of their relatives. They gurgle and bark gently. Smaller birds, they catch a lot of grief from the local crows. But this year several groups were sighted in several different places on-island, and a pair was seen building a nest on Smith’s Point. It looks like they are plan ning to stay.

With three kinds of Corvid to watch, it will be interesting to see how they get along with each other. These birds have survived every possible hardship around the globe. As we learn more about their intelligence, what will we learn about ourselves? And are we intelligent enough to get along with them? ///

Call it a southern accent. Fish Crows have soft, pleasing, eccentric voices, more conversational than either of their relatives. They gurgle and bark gently.

Virginia “Ginger” Andrews writes Island Bird Sightings, a weekly column in The Inquirer and Mirror and leads bird walks for the Maria Mitchell Association.

Green Havens: Nantucket’s Gardening, Farming, and Landscaping Gems

BY NICOLE VAWTER

Amidst the tranquil beauty of Nantucket, where cobblestone streets wind through historic neighborhoods and coastal breezes carry the scent of salt and sea, a vibrant community of gardening and landscaping businesses thrives. In this idyllic island setting, where plush gardens blend seamlessly with New England architecture, these businesses play a vital role in enhancing the island’s natural beauty and preserving its timeless charm. From family-owned farms to sustainable gardening techniques, Nantucket’s gardening and landscaping artisans weave their expertise into the fabric of island life, cultivating beauty and character with every project and service.

What started as a roadside tomato shop that operated out of a wheelbarrow has become one of the island’s most cherished farms. Moors End Farm is proud to be family owned and operated and has had two generations run the farm which owner, Abby, says makes their customers “feel like they are getting a piece of old Nantucket when they come to us.” Everything that is sold at the farm has been grown from either a seed or is a plug plant from Nantucket. Because of this, their “plants are acclimated to the Nantucket climate and didn’t come off of a truck from somewhere else,” says Abby. She goes on to proudly state that “if you buy a plant from Moors End Farm it is going to last.” The farm grows and harvests over forty different fruits and vegetables throughout the area and ensures customers that they are using only the best and most responsible farming methods.

Moors End has a vast selection of perennials and can source any plant that you desire if you cannot find it locally. The farm also boasts a large selection of deer and rabbit proof planting materials to ensure that your beautiful gardens and landscaping don’t become a furry friend’s snack. Moors End is excited to open their produce stand at the end of June; the fan-favorite strawberries will be making a return this season.

Bartlett’s Farm, another family owned and operated business, is Nantucket’s oldest and largest family-owned market and garden center. This seventh-generation farm grows vegetables, flowers and ornamental plants on 200 acres. For all of the islanders that are preparing their gardens for summer, Bartlett’s boasts what they call “the best selection of tropical plants on the island.” Fernanda, the head of the Garden

Center, shares that they carry over 100 different colors of farm grown annuals which they proudly grow themselves. “In my opinion, the more color the better; it makes me happy to see so much color on our island,” says Fernanda. In addition to shopping at the farm’s Garden Center, you can also browse their food market, bakery and wine selections. Throughout the summer, the kitchen offers week night dinner specials available for pickup - including a fan favorite of prime rib served every Tuesday.

In addition to the bountiful island farms, an important part of keeping the curated spaces on the island so scenic are the landscaping businesses that have been serving the community for years.

Nantucket native Ryan Conway had a passion for landscaping since the age of fourteen, which he maintained through college; after gaining experience at a well-established landscaping company, he launched Ryan Conway Landscaping in 2008 - whose business is a past winter of the ‘Best of Nantucket’ by the readers of The Inquirer and Mirror. He offers a range of services including fire pit installation, patios, lawn care, hedge trimming, and seasonal yard cleanup. Conway prides himself on the fact that his clients will personally see him working on their property; he prioritizes prompt communication, committing to returning calls and texts within the same day.

Another Nantucket local, Dave Lombardi, expanded upon his brother Marks’ passion for landscaping into the now flourishing venture known as Arrowhead Nursery. Together with Mark, they opened their nursery in 1997, cultivating not just plants but a reputation synonymous with excellence. Arrowhead Nursery swiftly gained a reputation

for its unwavering commitment to customer satisfaction, fair pricing, and the allure of their outdoor furnishings. Fast forward to 2003 and the Lombardi brothers expanded their business to Wampanoag Way where they created an expansive furniture showroom alongside additional greenhouses and nursery space. They offer a large selection of indoor and outdoor furnishings, home decor accents and unique gifts. Arrowhead also boasts an extensive selection of trees, shrubs, perennials, annual blooms, pottery and planters.

Jardins International is another landscaping design firm that has been providing for the island for several years. The firm, which first opened its doors in 2005, specializes in residential landscape design as well as small commercial projects. Jardins International emphasizes the integration of landscapes within the larger context of their surroundings. The firm says that they care deeply about the health and natural allure of the island’s environment. Owner Elisabeth O’Rourke started exploring gardens as a young girl and has never looked back. O’Rourke “remembers transplanting [her] first forget-me-not at the age of four.” Decades later O’Rourke “still marvels at leaves, flowers, landforms, views, stone color and architecture.” This landscaping enthusiast makes a point of visiting gardens whenever possible, which helps enhance her style.

“We try to tap into the uniqueness and characteristics of each site, taking into consideration the client’s aesthetics, the natural land and the existing conditions in and around the particular property,” says O’Rourke. Jardins International aims to embrace these attributes and maintain them as essential elements of the firm’s designs, priding themselves on shaping different garden styles for each individual.

Also created in 2005, Allan’s Landscaping, previously known as Stonescapes of Nantucket, provides services such as masonry, lawn care and landscape maintenance. Owner Allan Regalado recently took over the company from his father and is excited to continue the family tradition. Regalado says that the company “believes in traditional values,” and is committed to providing all of their customers with high-quality and timely services; they strive to create long lasting relationships with their valued clients, ready to help all homeowners and contractors with their landscaping needs.

A landscaping company that has consistently won ‘Best of Nantucket’ by the readers of The Inquirer and Mirror is Tom Hanlon Landscaping. Established in 1996, Tom Hanlon Landscaping provides garden design, landscape construction and property management services. The firm aims to optimize the look and feel of their clients outdoor living spaces. They pride themselves in providing top-notch landscaping services for residents, backed by their years of experience in the industry, as well as their dedication to delivering total customer satisfaction. The Hanlon Landscaping mission is making sure their clients happy are after seeing their finished project.

With all of the scenic landscaping, gardening and farming that takes place on the island, it is important to keep sustainability in mind: this is the Toscana Corporations main goal. The Nantucket owned and operated business has been on a sustainability mission since 1979. You can look to them for excavation and site work, building moving, ready-mix concrete, containers and recycling, cranes, demolition, marine construction and organic soil.

Their compost is made with 100% recycled non-woody yard waste which includes fallen leaves, grass clippings, and plant remnants dropped off to them by local landscapers and homeowners. Toscana proudly notes, “we did not send a single blade of grass to the landfill in 2022 or 2023; they plan to accomplish the same thing in 2024. If we don’t use it, it just goes to waste,”

says Eric Rogers, who states, “they are a part of the community, and…..are here to service the local landscapers while also doing the right thing for the environment.”

They are not alone when it comes to caring for the environment and well-being of the island. Blue Claw Associates, founded in 2019, is an all-electric and

eco-friendly full-service landscape construction and maintenance firm. Its mission is to provide top-notch services to the residents of Nantucket while also keeping sustainability at the center of all they do. Blue Claw is passionate about sustainability and reducing their carbon footprint and “using electric vehicles and implementing environmentally friendly practices,” says Emma Feliciano. “We believe we are doing our part to protect the planet, it’s something we take pride in.”

Blue Claw provides driveways, custom pools, stone work, drainage systems and lawns on Nantucket and Cape Cod. They strive to create relationships with their clients as well and “want [their] clients to feel confident that even when they are away from the island, we will always make the best choices for their homes,” adds Feliciano.

Caring for the planet while also caring for our gardens, homes, and farms is a common theme on the island. Kristina Wixted Gardens is a garden and floral design company which specializes in organic gardening. They prioritize water conservation while ensuring gardens maintains their health, beauty, and balance. Some of their services include garden design, pruning of ornamental trees, shrubs and roses; design and installation of containers, and floral design. If you

(508) 648-9427

are looking for a way to add color and natural perfume to your indoor or outdoor living space, Kristina Wixted Gardens believes that “garden design is an art form which is given to outdoor spaces of all sizes.”

If your desire is to feature a water garden or pond at your home, Dietter’s Water Gardens provides Nantucket with full design services and pond maintenance. Owner Craig Dietter has been building and maintaining water features for thirty-eight years and notes, “his dog has been his best assistant.” He started his work in water features at the age of sixteen and hasn’t stopped since; Dietter still loves his job as much as he did when he started as a young boy.

This water feature professional, “is an extremely creative person; I am proud to be called an artist by many of my clients. My life’s purpose is to make as many people happy as possible.” On a typical day, he feels “blessed to be able to make people happy through [his] work.” Dietter plans to continue restoring and repairing any existing ponds or water features as he enjoys “reducing the maintenance on existing water features, and eliminating unnecessary water loss.”

Nantucket is filled with companies that have been serving the island and its people for generations. Marine Home

Center first opened in 1944 as a lumberyard known as “Marine Lumber” and has become one of the market leaders for high quality and performance building material. They changed their name to Marine Home Center in 1973, and their five-acre campus has expanded to include retail departments - offering organic soils and compostshardware, paint, tools, home furnishings, appliances and environmentally conscious and neighbor-friendly battery-operated tools. Marine Home offers sales expertise, professional delivery, installation and in-home services to the building trades, contractors, caretakers and homeowners. They consider their customers not only clients, but partners.

Similar to Marine Home Center, the Island Lumber Company has a known following and has been on the island since 1965. Founded by Charles Fisher and still locally owned, it is a retailer of high-standard building supplies and materials. With inventory ranging from lumber and masonry products to flooring and roofing tiles, Island Lumber has an ample selection for all your building needs. “They pride themselves on providing an expan -

Owner: Anita Nettles Stefanski

Company: Florabundant Inc. • Phone: 508-423-5109

Email: dog02554@yahoo.com • Instagram: @anitans

sive selection of supplies for homeowners, landscapers, contractors and ‘do-it-yourselfers,’ while making sure their prices remain fair and affordable.” They also carry premium gardening supplies - from nutrient-rich soil blends and top-quality grass seeds – along with numerous gardening tools available to transform all your outdoor needs.

Specializing specifically in flowers is Florabundant. The business was created over two decades ago by current owner, Anita Stefanski, and her friend. Stefanski was previously a chef but wanted to pursue a career where she could combine her love for nature with her profession. “I love to watch things grow and have always enjoyed being outside,” says Stefanski. She believes Florabundant is the essence of island-grown elegance, stating that their “flowers are a testament to Nantucket’s rich soil and coastal charm.” Their flowers are cultivated with care on their farm, where they grow all of their flowers.

Florabundant also designs arrangements that can be sent to your home. When asked what she wants readers to know about their business, Stefanski playfully replied, “That they are awesome.”

JARDINS INTERNATIONAL • LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

Landscape design firm integrating projects with their surroundings since 2005.

Embrace nature with Jardins sustainable outdoor design for client satisfaction and ecological awareness.

Address: 53 Pleasant St • Phone: 508-325-9911 Fax: 508-325-9917 • Email: eo@jardinsintl.com jardinsintl.com

Our full set of digital products, including the island’s only news APP, our website, social media and e-mail newsletters, generate over 6 million page views annually.

Our print products include the island’s only newspaper, Nantucket Today magazine, our hugely popular Nantucket Restaurant Guide and other speciality publications.

WHO’S WHO IN REAL ESTATE

HEIDI DREW

BROKER/PRINCIPAL, ABR, RSPS, SRS

Heidi@NantucketRealEstate.com

M: 508-325-2121

O: 508-228-7707 x 212

LINDA BELLEVUE

BROKER, GRI, CBR

Linda@NantucketRealEstate.com

M: 508-325-2700

O: 508-228-7707 x 235

MARY D. MALAVASE

BROKER, GRI, ABR, RSPS, SRS, SFR

Mary@NantucketRealEstate.com

M: 508-221-2093

O: 508-228-7707 x 219

M: 917-806-8213

O: 508-365-2833

michael.passaro@elliman.com www.michaelpassaro.com @michael.passaro

David@jordanre.com

WHO’S WHO IN REAL ESTATE

Susan Chambers

Broker

susan@maurypeople.com

508.228.1881 ext. 100 cell: 508.560.0671 @susanchambersnantucket www.susanchambersnantucket.com

37 Main Street, Nantucket, MA 02554 maurypeople.com

Mark Norris

Sales Associate

mark@maurypeople.com

508.228.1881 ext 185 Cell: 508.566.2013

37 Main Street, Nantucket MA 02554 maurypeople.com

Sheila Carroll

Agent | Sales and Rentals

Sheila@maurypeople.com

508.228.1881 ext. 129 cell: 508.560.0488

37 Main Street, Nantucket, MA 02554 maurypeople.com

THE QUESTIONS

STORY AND PHOTO BY KEVIN STANTON

Tucked away off Meadow View Drive is

Keaton Goddard’s

shop, called Faraway Forge. The 29-year-old Nantucketer considers himself a jack of all trades. The barn he works in is a mix of machine shop and forge. On the weekdays he is a bladesmith, making chef knives and swords. Swords that are historically accurate as well as those from popular video games.

“Nobody needs a sword anymore,” he said with a smile. “I do YouTube videos. I’ll make something and the video is the making of it. And if I sell the piece, it’s a bonus. I’m making money on the videos. That’s half of my business and the other half is the knife production.”

His ethos is one from a Nantucket all but forgotten; if you have the tools to build something, why not get your hands dirty and build it yourself? I stopped by his shop and talked with Goddard about his journey from hobby to profession.

Q. How did you get into making knives? Did you go to school for it or apprentice with somebody or are you self-taught?

A. “Completely self-taught. The first class I took was two years ago, 10 years into doing it. I just watched YouTube videos and got my hands dirty. I’ve built up tools over time, but also literally built tools. Totally from scratch.”

Q. Nantucket has a long history of people salvaging things. Does that play a part in your process?

A. “Yeah, definitely. The kitchen knives are a very specific type of metal. They are stainless steel. But most of the swords I make from scrap metal. This is all free trash I’ve gotten from auto shops or junk yards or wherever. Ease-wise the leaf springs, which are these big long ones, are the best because of the shape. But I have wrought-iron anchor chain and then this is hundred-year-old railroad track that I got from Karl Ottison. Beauty-wise this material is totally different.”

Q. What sets apart the old, salvaged scrap metal from the modern steel?

A. “Modern steel is very high quality, but it is not as visually interesting as this stuff. This is handmade. So, you have a lot more character in a finished piece. All of that swirl on the surface is from the wrought-iron. This is more difficult to work, more time consuming, more labor-intensive, tool-intensive, but it’s the artwork.”

Q. Something like blade-smithing falls between an art and a trade. How do you balance the form and functionality?

A. “That’s one of my goals with knives and swords. I made a thousand kitchen knives

last year. Five different styles, two hundred of each style. That’s again the bread and butter. That being said, I still want to balance form and function. It’s a tool. It has to be a tool. But I want it to be a piece of artwork as well. The swords are the artistic outlet for me. It’s a one-off piece. I could make 40 knives in the time it takes to make one sword.”

Q. Time-wise, what are we talking about? How long does it take you to make a knife?

A. “I could make this knife start to finish in four hours. This is simple, bare bones and that’s the point of it. But I could make a much more complicated version of this knife and it could take 40 hours. With swords, I can do something quick and rough, which is a different aesthetic. Or something polished and historical. That could take 100 hours, 200 hours or 300 hours. It just depends on the complexity of the piece.”

Q. Travel can be very important to the creative process. Have you incorporated any travel to meet any other bladesmiths to broaden your horizons?

A. “I would love to. I haven’t really. Like I said earlier, I did that class two years ago. That was in Montana, and that was cool to meet other guys. And I guess ‘Forged in Fire’ I was traveling and meeting people. I would love to go to Japan. Katanas are my wheelhouse.”

Q. Can you tell me a little about the trip to Montana?

A. “I went to Montana, and we learned how to make iron from iron ore using one of the historical methods. So, we literally hiked up a mountain and camped at this old mine and got iron ore and brought it back and turned it into metal. Eventually I am going to make knives and swords from homemade iron. One

of my end goals art-wise is to do a katana (a Japanese handmade sword) from scratch in the historical method. And that’s the start of it.”

Q. You were on, and won, the show “Forged in Fire” on the History Channel. What was it like to step out of the shop and into that realm of reality TV?

A. “The reason the show is difficult is because of the time constraint. So, once I was in there, I was so in the zone that I didn’t even notice the cameras. I was in my element. I had three hours to do a six-hour job. I just had to focus and work. I think ‘Forged in Fire,’ in particular, is less of a reality show than a lot of them are. I just mean, the camaraderie and the appreciation of the craft is in my opinion really present in that show. On ‘Forged in Fire’ the guys are helping each other when they can. The vibe is different.”

Q. Where do you sell your knives?

A. “I do the Sustainable Nantucket farmers market in the summertime here. And the Christmas markets and stuff.

I haven’t been able to produce enough inventory to sell anywhere but these markets. Until the huge push I did last summer and fall to get ready for Snowport in Boston’s seaport, I never had inventory. They just sold faster than I could keep up. So, I haven’t even tried to sell them on the Internet or anything. Which is a good problem to have.”

Kevin Stanton is a Nantucket native and a graduate of MassArt, where he studied painting. He lives on-island year-round with his wife Danielle and their dog Lou.

LAST LOOK

PHOTO BY JENNIFER POWER