Nantucket VI

I just finished Chapter 7 in The Consulting Bible, it’s 8 am, and there’s a strong breeze coming at me across the bay. The U.S. and marine flags, on the pole of the private property adjoining the inn, look like billboards, stiff in the breeze.

There isn’t a cloud in sight, the sky is baby blue with a crisp horizon against the cerulean sea. All I hear is the creaking of the bobbing boats down by the water, and the wind riffling through the vegetation—not a motor, not a voice.

On the way to dinner last night at Sfoglia, which was wonderful, rich Italian with, of course, a Bulgarian waiter out of central casting who’s going to Barcelona after the season, we impulsively ducked down a side road out near the inn. The two-lane asphalt turned into two-lane dirt, and then a single lane where the vegetation brushed the car, which was simply following two tire tracks. (This had to be the only Bentley ever to take the route.)

We were rewarded at the cul-de-sac with a beach that jutted like Jay Leno’s chin into the bay, where a single brown labrador romped in the water with a couple lounging in chairs watching him. On the other side, five fisherman were trying their luck from the beach. In 15 years we had never found this spot. (I remember once taking our SL down a dirt track in Martha’s Vineyard, to find 40 parking spots—39 SUVs and us—at the finest beach on that island.)

No seals yesterday, but small shore birds, larger than sandpipers but smaller than gulls, dove vertically 20 yards off shore, for all the world like Stukas, apparently after large schools of fish. They hit the water so hard I was sured they’d be stunned, but they only thing they were was fed.

Off to breakfast and the beach. This is our last full day here. It’s wonderful to visit places where your dreams are faithfully reproduced.

© Alan Weiss 2010. All rights reserved.