The Nantucket Voyage

I know I wrote on Friday that I'd try to do audio posts over the weekend. The trouble was I was figuratively and near-literally speechless the whole time Lynne and I were there. One of the best readings I've ever done, thanks to poetry venue darlings Len Germinara and Sarah Otkay.

The rest of the time I had words, they were given to the two companies who have boats going from the cape to Nantucket. This was Saturday, during that gas spill some of you Massachusetts locals may have heard about. We found out that morning that a man refueling one of the boats had a heart attack and somehow the gas pump he was working didn't turn off.

The place where we reserved our tickets in Hyannis refused to tell anyone that it was their one and only speed boat that the poor man was refueling. Therefore, it was the least likely to be running by the end of the day. They wanted to hold on to their customers' money for as long as they could, even asking me if I still wanted to reschedule. Even after the whole day was cancelled and we ended up going to Woodshole for an alternate route (thanks to Lynne's quick thinking).

As a result, the commute up was stressful, but arriving was worth the wait when Len and Sarah picked us up and immediately carted us off to one of the half-dozen or so restaurants left open during the winter season. One of the best meals of the year (assisted in no small part by the bay scallop appetizer and a chef who knows what medium rare means when someone orders a steak) was followed by a quick tour of the UMass Boston Nantucket Field Station, where Sarah is the head honcho. Apparently, very few people even on Nantucket knew about this place until she and Len moved in and she started making the place a more open atmosphere.

It has to be said that Nantucket is just as beautiful when it's cold and raining. Also, the lack of rampaging tourists is definitely an aesthetic plus. And the differences between stargazing there and in the states are vast. Too bad it rained so much we couldn't just hang outside to look up as many other performers have in the past.

Len has been going crazy with his digital camera, documenting the wildlife (even finding an unknown species or two) and decorating the walls anywhere he can, making the area warmer and less inaccessibility academic. The slide show he played on his laptop, combining the nature shots with various past features, made me hope that he either starts sending his work out, gets some gallery space, or publishes more chapbooks with his photos for covers.

Sunday morning before the reading was pretty active, playing a little bit with their dog Jake and going to watch Len read a performance collaboration at the island's Unitarian church. Lynne was very much "it's okay" (she has a bigger beef with church than I do), but it was my first time in a non-Catholic venue, so it was more amazing to me to actually see and feel an accepting, all-encompassing atmosphere that the Catholic church always promises and fails to deliver.

The room in the field station that they use for the poetry reading fits twenty people easy, thirty if people sit on the floor, and there was close to thirty by the time I was on. This brings me to the audience. It's been a while since I've been to an open mic venue that actually has a good mix of open mic readers and people just there to listen. No one was a mic hog going up, and everyone had something to contribute, even if it wasn't their own work. As the first open micer, Lynne actually upstaged me, reciting poems from Mary Oliver and David Whyte. If she hadn't won Len and Sarah over before that, then she sure as hell did it there.

Sure you can argue that there's nothing to do on the Island yadda yadda, but no one was at the reading out of boredom. And there were half-a-dozen other things going on that same day. And if some are bored, so what? With all the outlets availale to people on the mainland, people in both the cities and the suburbs have done much much worse with their boredom. I'd like to think that the Boston area could learn from this crowd, but as I'm trying to state a specific example how, it almost feels like trying to explain a different culture.

No wonder the locals say they're going to America when they get on the boat to Hyannis. Pondering the jokes I made a couple of weeks back about fleeing America, it really did feel like I left the country for a spell.

I can't wait to go back. Thankfully, with Lynne having talked with Sarah about a feature, my next trip up could be real soon.

My only small regrets were mis pronouncing "hubris" in one of my poems (which I didn't catch until someone at Stone Soup the next day pointed out, dammit!) and not being able to write a Nantucket poem for my set. Now I have no excuse. I owe Len and Sarah far more than the CARE package Lynne and I are putting together.