A walk around the island, lodging at the summer house, keeping company with the birds, and keeping the sea on the right.

Location: Nantucket, MA

Type: East Coast/beach

Distance: 28 miles

Duration:3 days

Difficulty: Ranked as 3

Highlights:Spring/The Summer House

On a cloudless afternoon I landed at ACK.

Through the alchemy of tourism and group identity dynamics, “ACK,” the decidedly un-mellifluous three letter airport code printed on luggage tags bound for Nantucket has in recent years become a totem of sorts for the entire island. I say totem rather than nickname because few people actually refer to Nantucket as “ACK” in conversation; they display the brand instead on baseball caps, t-shirts, coffee cups and the like. Most of all, “ACK” appears on the bumpers of cars, on a small oval sticker made to look like a European country code. {WISroGIS map_id='61' ~}

There are stickers like this emanating from the Vineyard, too, that read “MV,” and they are annoying enough with their underlying message of “I’d rather be richer than you and I probably am.” But “ACK” goes even further: it seems to say “I’d rather be richer than you and I probably am. Plus, I know what ‘ACK’ means.”

I should say here that it’s quite possible the stickers on both islands are purely innocent expressions of pride of place, and that I had thought about them for too long. It’s possible I let my general distrust of stickers as form of personal expression carry me away. Walking a beach gives you time to think, and by the time I was thinking about the imbedded meanings of “ACK,” I had plodded through soft sand for more than three hours on my way from the airport to Siasconset. I had walked, in other words, long enough to be pondering relative obscurities. Which is to say not yet long enough to be released from the momentum of thought in general.

That release would come, though, I hoped. There were several specific things I wanted to see on this trip to Nantucket that I hadn’t seen before, like the base of Sankaty Head, and Altar Rock. But mostly, as it was undeniably spring, I went to the “far-away island”—the most seaward place in a seaward region—to walk until my feet and legs spoke to me at least as loudly as my brain. With that in mind, I stayed at “ACK,” the airport, only long enough to enter it into the memory of my little Global Positioning System and then struck out for the South Shore. When I reached the water I turned left.

Along most of the beach heading east the usual signs of erosion are obvious in the fifteen to twenty foot bluff where the sand stops and the remnant outwash plain begins. Once in a while a broken pipe or some other piece of human history sticks out of the exposed ledge. Elsewhere, wooden stairs built when the cliff was higher have been hauled back with its retreat, until now they rise eerily four or five feet above the top of the bluff. At the old military installation just past Forked Pond Valley, a pathetic layer of blacktop is crumbling over the edge; it looked like one of those charts of geological time that shows the entire span of human existence as a thin veneer sitting atop a massive accumulation of millennia.

But the usual signs of erosion can wear thin on a person; most of the time I kept my attention on the sea to my right. There were birds, usually terns working over what I imagined might be early bluefish. At one point a group of excited all-black ducks, some kind of scoter, swam along about forty yards off. The birds were surprisingly good company, and while they remained in the vicinity I found I didn’t think about how far I’d come or how far still to go before resting. Even better companions were a group of Semipalmated Sandpipers—“sand-peeps”—who ran along the surf line in front of me for quite a good distance, stopping occasionally to rest on one leg. Most of the time, though, I was alone.

‘Sconset finally appeared as I rounded the corner at Tom Nevers Head. The village was still high enough to catch the setting sun, though the beach was already growing chilly in the shade. With its perfectly preserved antique cottages huddled together on a bluff overlooking the entire North Atlantic, its tiny streets and climbing roses, its reliable fog, little ‘Sconset is in many ways as pretty and English as New England gets.

But from that distance it looked momentarily Moorish, gleaming white and flat like stucco between the two darkening blues of sea and sky. And thanks to the sudden wideness of Low Beach, I had the sensation that my steps were no longer bringing me appreciably closer to anything. Or further from anything. All the grains of sand were moving west with the wind, but me. I stumbled across a desert toward what was likely to turn out to be a mirage.

But it wasn’t. I spent the night at ‘Sconset’s delightful Summer House Inn from which I could hear the sea, and in the early morning walked up Baxter Road past the perfectly trimmed privets to the lighthouse and then back down around, to the base of the Sankaty Head cliffs under the lighthouse. There the high tide had recently been working on a small outcropping of vertical clay. Every six inches or so in its smooth black face a small washed pebble protruded, perfectly set and gleaming in the rising sun, like uncut gems in some immense ceremonial door.

I wonder now if the base of Sankaty was a place where during Nantucket’s century and a half long hey-day as the capital of the global whaling industry youths might have come to say good-bye before one or the other of them went off to sea, possibly forever. It's where I would go, I think. But on the morning I was there, I merely sat with my back to the jeweled wall and enjoyed the morning light at the leading edge of the day on land. Until I noticed that even the slight spring breeze was sending down onto me and into my granola a constant mist of grit and sand from the cliffs behind. Whereupon I left the beach and walked on dirt roads across the rolling; “moors” that used to constitute the collectively owned “middle pasture” and “north pasture.” I walked past the cranberry bogs, and the sand pits used to treat them. Past Altar Rock, which turns out to be a place with a great view but no rock worthy of such a name. Past a mother goose and six hatchlings who peeped and honked in a mighty fit of outrage until I was out of sight.

I walked into Nantucket town, by a route I later figured to be around thirteen miles, where I had lunch and bought more water, and then walked out again. I took the north shore this time, under Nantucket Cliffs and along Dionis Beach. I clambered over a series of rock beach reinforcements, and past the rotting ribs of one good sized old vessel. At the end of Eel Point, in late afternoon, I took out my GPS. The isle of Tuckernuck lay across a stretch of shallows and flats like some promised land. I thought I could even see Cape Poge on the Vineyard; two tiny hummocks of green so far off to the northwest that they appeared to levitate on a thin cushion of white haze. I wondered, as I often have, about kayaking from there to here, and squatted down to look from the paddler’s eye view. When I did, the levitating hummocks disappeared altogether.

Which was why I took out the GPS. I wanted to know how far it was to Cape Poge, which I had long ago “saved” in the computer’s memory. I was also curious how far it was back to Sankaty Head, from which I had come that morning. And finally I wanted to store the coordinates of Eel Point for future reference. But I must have pushed the wrong button, for I erased them all.

It wasn’t simple. The machine gave me some kind of warning, and then asked for confirmation. But I didn’t read it closely enough. I looked down and they were all gone: Home, Cedar Tree Neck, Cape Higgon, the Brickyard, Menemsha, the Herring Creek, Gay Head, Squibby, Stonewall, the opening, Norton Point, Wasque, the Narrows, Cape Poge, the Gut, Edgartown Light, East Chop, West Chop, Paul Point, the Steamship Authority in Vineyard Haven and Woods Hole, the Steamship Authority in Hyannis and Nantucket, Tarpaulin, Naushon, Quick’s Hole, Robinson’s Hole, Pasque, Cuttyhunk, Penikese, Uncatena, Quissett, Woods Hole, Nobska Light, Chatham Light, Nauset Light, Highland Light, Race Point Light, Wood End Light, Long Point Light, the mouth of the Pamet River, Truro Post Office, First Encounter Beach, Scorton Creek, Blish Point, the Nantucket Airport. There were, I think, more than a hundred and twenty waypoints altogether, and they were all gone. Except for one, Eel Point, where I stood, surrounded on three sides by water. I put the machine away.

The next morning at dawn, I walked east along the south shore from Smith Point. It was one of those days when long parabolic rollers rise out of an otherwise glass flat sea. Not big waves, but flawless nonetheless. For what was probably an hour I watched as I walked to see if I could tell where a wave began and where it ended. The crash, of course, seems like some kind of measurable waypoint in the life of a wave, as does the place where the water reaches its highest elevation on the sand and turns back toward the base of the next big ripple in line. But even then, a wave is not finished rolling things back down the beach. And the next merely carries what its predecessors have loosened and lifted. There are waves within waves, only some of them discernable. Even the tide, says marine geologist Orin Pilkey, Jr., is best thought of as a great wave “whose length is half the circumference of the earth.”

The day warmed. I removed my shoes. I began to see a few people. It was a Saturday in May. A woman threw a stick for a dog. A balding, wet suited surfer paddled his board up and down the beach to keep his midriff in line even though were no waves big enough to ride. A man stood beside a bicycle. Another held a child.

My feet by now were finding their voice, my head running out of things to say. My brain piped up only once that I remember during that entire clarion morning on Nantucket’s South Shore. A cold wave slipped further up the shore than those that preceded it, up over my ankles and cold enough to constrict the veins and send the synapses firing up my calves to my head with the message that “there is a dull, aching, pain down here.”

And my brain replied to my feet by saying that houses and swing sets lost over eroding cliffs are not the only intersection between human history and natural history. There is also this moment, this irreplaceable instant, it said. This animal moment.

I moved closer to the water until every wave washed over my feet. Then even a little closer to the sea. Onward I sloshed with no fixed bearings until at last I got back to where I had started two and a half days earlier. Back to ACK.

-- All photographs courtesy Cary Hazlegrove

Sleep/Eat/Do

Sleep: The Summer House, Siasconset. Beach roses, sea air, dinner on the porch, drinks at the piano bar.
www.thesummerhouse.com

The Union Street Inn, www.unioninn.com classic shingled in- town Nantucket Inn, four-poster beds.

Eat: The Chanticleer, Siasconset. Sublime French, lush gardens. www.thechanticleer.net

Plan: www.Nantucketonline.com

Nantucket in April: Annual Nantucket Daffodil Festival, April 23-25, 2010. www.nantucketchamber.org

Best time for walkers: Spring and Fall

Read: Nantucket (Turner Publishing, 2010), the 13th book by preeminent island photographer Cary Hazlegrove www.hazlegrove.com with introduction by David Michaelis.

Best quote of the trip: “Are you sure you want to delete all waypoints?”
Gear report: What I wore on my feet: Keens
What I carried on my back: Small waterproof knapsack by Quicksilver. Excellent and reliable.

Paul Schneider is the author of four books, including Bonnie and Clyde, the Lives Behind the Legend, (Henry Holt) and The Enduring Shore, A History of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket (Henry Holt.) More about his books can be found at www.schneiderbooks.com. He is the co-founder of WeekendWalk.com and walked to school every single day of his childhood in Western Massachusetts, except when he rode his bike. His dream walk , he says, is to walk his dog from Sarasota to Cape Cod, up the entire east coast. “No, seriously,” he said. “I want to do that. Can someone help me plan it?” (send help to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and please put “Help Paul and Thunder walk the East Coast" in the subject line of the message.