Free Time & Tide by Frank Conroy

is approaching ten thousand, and everything possible is being done to make the season start earlier and last longer.
    There has been a pattern in many of these efforts. Start with a local initiative, however small, expand it, and advertise it. A well-known force in the Garden Club, Mrs. MacAusland was perhaps inspired by Ladybird Johnson’s Beautify America campaign when she and her cohorts started planting daffodil bulbs at the edges of roads, in the rotary, along the bike paths and other strategic spots. They planted thousands and thousands of bulbs over the years, and the results were spectacular. From this emerged Daffodil Weekend in April, which attracts many visitors from America, including various off-island garden clubs, and those who simply need an excuse to come over for a visit. This despite the fact that April can be a cruel month on Nantucket. April 2002 was particularly so when a storm trapped a lot of visitors who wound up spending the night in the high school gymnasium. A celebratory mood prevailed, apparently.
    In May, there is the Wine Festival, started by Denis Toner, a local sommelier, more or less for his friends and colleagues. It grew beyond his imaginings, moving from his house to larger venues, most recently the White Elephant Hotel, a snazzy environment if there ever was one. Today famous chefs from New York, France, and other culinary centers fly up and guest-cook at local restaurants. Wine merchants, collectors, and aficionados come from the East Coast along with media people to cover the action. It has become a very big deal indeed.
    In June there is the film festival, started by a local brother and sister team, both young, which has grown in stature and importance every year. The first East Coast screening of
The Full Monty
occurred at the Nantucket Film Festival, along with other independently produced movies.
    There is the Island Jazz and Folk Festival, the Cranberry Festival, and the Nectar Fest, this last started by two young guys, Tom First and Tom Scott, who spent the winter of 1990 making and bottling fruit drinks, which they sold from a boat to the yachting crowd in the jam-packed harbor and marina the next summer. Their business, Nantucket Nectars, expanded, went national, and was worth $35 million by 1996, when they sold it to Ocean Spray. The Nectar Fest involves music, of course, and fund-raising for island causes.

    Snow on Main Street.
    A CLOSE LOOK AT THE annual Christmas Stroll reveals a good deal about the recent history of Nantucket.
    I remember the first Stroll, back in the seventies, when Maggie and I lived on the island year-round. We knew a number of people who worked in the shops, or ran them (paying high rent to Sherburne), who were concerned about locals going to the strip malls of Hyannis to do their Christmas shopping at the franchise retailers. The Nantucket markup was built so deeply into the system that even with the best will in the world, local retailers could not avoid it. So it began as a small-scale local initiative to encourage locals to buy on-island. Main Street was lined with miniature Christmas trees strung with lights and decorations. The shops stayed open late, doorways and windows spilling light, welcoming people inside for punch, canapés, and cookies, or shots and beers on the sly for special friends. (I found myself with a distinct buzz on before I was halfway up the street.) A nice, warm holiday party, in which one knew everybody in the shops and on the sidewalks. It was fun. A sense of community prevailed, and from a business point of view it made sense—some dollars stayed on the island that might otherwise have left.
    The goals changed gradually, as the Chamber of Commerce and the tourist industry advertised the Stroll, giving an old-fashioned small-town image, a kind of false nostalgic glow.
    It was marketed, in other words, in order to attract visitors. People began to fly in, or take the ferry (having arranged accommodations at a hotel