Nantucket for nostalgics

An off-season jaunt to the tiny island off Cape Cod reveals its timeless appeal

The last time I visited Nantucket was about 12 years ago, and upon my return this fall, I realized what I most looked forward to seeing was not how things had changed, but how they hadn’t. Nantucket traffics in nostalgia, but in a way that doesn’t seem twee; it never feels like some Epcot-ian caricature of itself. One Nantucket newspaper is aptly titled Yesterday’s Island, speaking to a dream shared by locals and visitors for a place buffered from tomorrows, as adrift from the mainland as it from change itself.

Even the airport, which served as the set of the early ’90s sitcom “Wings,” is on-brand, looking almost eerily suspended in time, more like a child’s idea of an airport, like some collab between Fisher Price and J.Crew.

No place so perfectly telegraphs the Massachusetts island’s esthetic as the Wauwinet, the hotel where I check in. The 1875-built grey-shingled manse is secluded on a fivekilometre ribbon of private beach, cosseting with views of ocean and bay. The resort’s palette takes its cue from driftwood and whitecaps and dunes. After about six minutes of wandering the property’s vast lawn, I feel the urgent need to ditch my wardrobe in favour of cableknit crewnecks and critter-embroidered Oxford cloth.

In 1876, the Inquirer and Mirror reported, “The Wauwinet House was the scene of a pleasant time. A glorious sail up harbour.” Nothing has changed, it seems. Which on Nantucket is the highest praise.

On a balmy late-October morning, I set off to visit Siasconset, a former fishing village on the island’s wind-gulped eastern tip. Nantucket was once the whaling capital of the world, and by the mid-1700s, ’Sconset had bloomed into a sort of Hamptons for mariners, a shoreside reprieve from factory work and the stench of whale oil in the wharf.

Today, ’Sconset seems airlifted from some more poetic time that may never have even existed. The village is mapped with a lone provisions store, a collection of red-clay tennis courts, and a sailor’s knot of 18th-century white-trimmed saltbox cottages, their shingles the shade of storm clouds.

Laneways here aren’t paved with cement (too charmless) but opalescent, crushed local coho clam and oyster shells that crack satisfyingly underfoot. And just a shell’s throw away is the spectacular ’Sconset

Bluff, where Atlantic waves toss themselves melodramatically against honeyed cliffs.

As I wander, I come upon a particularly magical cottage called Snug Harbour, which looks like it should be inhabited by a family of (billionaire) seafaring bunnies in Breton stripes and Sperry boat shoes. It’s tiny, with a clamshell knocker, and its wee garden, glutted with dahlias and late-blooming roses, snuggles up to a wooden fence bearded in reindeer lichen.

There is an enchanting collision of the wild with the contained, a rugged vastness of the landscape tempered by the humility and harmony of the architecture. It’s worth noting that if these residences are petite, their price tags are not. I set sail on the fantasy of the person I would be (wealthy?) if I summered at Snug Harbour, how rested, productive, happy I could be.

I gather it worked for John Steinbeck. During the summer of 1951,

Steinbeck rented a house in ’Sconset, where he wrote most of “East of Eden.” It was a fitting backdrop, as Nantucket is its own eastern Eden, a salt-air sweep of moors and peeling waves and lonesome lighthouses. “A beautiful place and the most peaceful I have ever been,” Steinbeck wrote.

I would venture that it is also the freshest. It’s the kind of place — frankly the only place — that makes me want to bicycle past cranberry bogs, take up scalloping and acquire a sperm-whale weather vane (I spy one nearby, poking into a sky islanded with plump October clouds).

I settle on the bicycle part and pedal to Cisco Brewers, Nantucket’s craft brewery. The island may not be as tranquil as it once was, but during the off-season, its relative emptiness escorts you closer to Steinbeck’s Nantucket. I ride past country roads touristed more by coastal winds than by cars; the fox grapes have replaced the lavender, and the wildflower-embroidered beaches are solitary.

The population plummets from about 80,000 people in the summertime to about 14,000 yearrounders. Most of those people appear to have convened at Cisco: It’s bustling with vacationing New Yorkers (and their dogs), festively slurping oysters, adrift on golden seas of Whale’s Tale pale ale.

The next day, I embark on a walking tour, courtesy of the Whaling Museum. The town’s warren of gaslight-lined streetlets are still busy — wedding season stretches on — but not packed as they are in summer, when everyone and their yachts and Range Rovers and pigs and ducks are here.

I’m being literal about the pigs and ducks, by the way. The White Elephant, among the island’s chicest properties, was opened in the 1920s by Nantucket socialite Elizabeth T. Ludwig. Now a study in coastalgrandmother chic, it’s all wicker and haute-rustic beadboard and enough seashell-filled vases to setdress a Nancy Meyers rom-com. If the Elephant started as a pet project, it remains pet-friendly: There are families who come yearly, booking the harbourside cottages for their pigs and ducks and cats and dogs. You can spot repeat guest Pearl the pig (she wears a string of pearls), promenading the wharf on a leash, the sound of her trotters clipping on cobblestones.

As a tour guide escorts us past carefully preserved pre-Civil Warera buildings (more than 800 still stand), sunshine filtering through the pitch pines and 100-year-old Dutch elms, I feel an exotic feeling come over me. Well-being? Peace?

The literal quiet of the streets is matched by an esthetic quiet. There is no visual dissonance here — the whole place a sort of resort for the eyes and psyche. There are no chain stores or parking fees, and a 184page zoning document by the island’s Historic District Commission stringently governs architectural and design codes.

Even the palette is policed here; only 11 colours are allowed to decorate doors and trim. The only bold hues on island come from the flowers, beach parasols and bird plumage. And if the past few years have not exactly been defined by calm, this nostalgic orderliness feels like a balm.

Philosophically, I don’t subscribe to the idea of circumscribing creative expression. I’m all for freedom over conformity. But Nantucket is what happens when beauty is not only preserved but privileged, when nostalgia is legislated. And insofar as change is loss, there is something deeply consoling about changelessness, offering a vacation from reality.

There’s no real way to rope off change forever: The beaches and bluffs are eroding due to climate change, which threatens to disappear the entire island in a couple of centuries. But I’d rather not think about that today. Yesterday, it turns out, is the snuggest harbour of all.