By William Ferrall
Photography By Rob Loud/Getty Images, Terry Pommett and Katie Kaiser

Don’t expect Suzanne and Bob Wright to tread gently in their good cause.

At times angry, at times tearful and always passionate, they make no apologies in their insistent advocacy for autistic children and their families. “First you have autism, which is a terrible thing,” Suzanne Wright said a year ago,” Then you have to fight, and I mean fight, to get these kids educated.”

For the Wrights, their bout was on three years ago when their daughter Katies Wright learned that her only son, Christian, was Austistic. In the time since Chirstian’s diagnosis, the Wright’s have used their formidable influence and resources — he is the recently retired Chairman and CEO of NBC-Universal and still Vice Chairman of NBC parent company General Electric — to put public awareness of autism nearly on par with other high profile causes like Diabetes, HIV/AIDS and Cancer. Much of their focus has been on the organization they founded called Austism Speaks, whic in short time has become the leading advocacy group for autism. Both of the Wrights had been activists in the past for numerous social, civic and public welfare efforts, but this one struck home in a deeply personal way.

“It was the worst experience of our lives,” Suzanne Wright recalls. “we had this wonderful, bouncy little boy…within two and a half months we lost everything…little by little they retreat into their own world. He does not speak at all.”Bob and Suzanne Wright

Unfortunately, the Wrights’ experience has become increasingly prevelant. Today, according to most experts, at least one in 150 children is afflicted with Autism, a disorder in which the child often stops talking, radically alters or loses his ability to interact with others, often exhibits odd or abnormal repetitive acts and expresses pronounced irrational fears.

“The whole family’s going to be traumatize,” Katie says in the 45minute film “Autism Every Day,” an award-winning documentary produced by the Wrights that has been shown widely, including at the Sundance and Nantucket Film festivals.

Despite the personal trauma suffered by the Wright family, they have turned their distress outward into action in the public arena through Autism Speaks. Just last year, the group spearheaded an effort in the US Congress to pass into law a bill giving nearly $1 billion in federal funding to Autism research and support programs.

Austism Speaks has raised substantial money for its efforts from donations, walks and benefit concerts and sporting events. By th end of this year, Austism Speaks will have raised almost $55 million, of which $30 million has been awarded or committed to research.

“We’re trying to be a facilitator,” Bob Wright said of Autism Speaks’ latest focus, “a place where we can deal with the practicalities of services (that are) encouraging people to build community facilities, to evaluate particular forms of therapy…and to evaluate biomedical issues associated with Autism.”

The Wrights and many Austism experts underscore the stresses that the consition puts on families. Extreme financial distress — the cost of therapies and care often runs into the thusands of dollars monthly — and divorce are common in families with Autistic children.

Wherever scientists and other researchers finally land in determining the cause or causes of Autism, work in the field grows as prevelance of the condition increases. Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, have been among the leaders in the research into Austism. Children’s Hospital Boston has assembled what Bob Wright called a group of “first class” doctors and researchers who are investigating the genetic component of Autism.

In July, Nantucket homeowners Kay and Peter Bernon, whose son Charles was born with Williams Syndrome, a genetic cognitive disorder akin to Autism, invited more than 100 guests into their home on the island to meet Children’s Hospital doctors and to lear about their work. Dr. Leonard Rapapport, director of the CHildren’s Hospital Developmental Medicine Center and also a Nantucket hoeowner, talked about how genes and experience shape the developing brain, and what might go wrong to cause Autism.

A Mother’s Cause

Nearly ten years ago, Kay Bernon responded to her son’s condition by co-founding the Berkshire Hills Music Academy in western Massachusetts, the country’s only private, post secondary school for musically talented young adults with learning, cognitive or developmental disabilities.

Heather and Chris KennedyWith at least 14 of the Nantucket school system’s 1,300 students disgnosed with a condition somewhere on the Austism “spectrum,” other Nantucket families continue to cope 24-7 with the affliction. At a recent organizational meeting for the Nantucket Walk Now For Autism — the first such event held here, organized by Chris and Heather Kennedy and the Wrights with help from local supporters — Sydney Fee Barsanti spoke emotionally of the challenges in dealing with her seven-year-old Autistic son Rourke. For Rourke,” said Fee-Barsanti, “Austism doesn’t speak, it screams.”

Now others are speaking up forcefully for Rourke and others with Austism. “People on Nantucket are isolated not only by being on an island, but by Autism as well,” Said Suzanne Wright.

That isolation could be diminished in the future. Organizers of the walk here hope that hundreds will participate and that $10,000 will be raised for local Autism services. Autism Speaks has begun to organize a huge database of families dealing with Autism that will allow them, if they choose, to connect with other families in similar situations. The group has launched concerted legal efforts to force school systems to provide programs in their districts for children with Autism.

“The Autism community is really so unified now that we finally have hope,” said Suzanne Wright.

Scenes from the film “Autism Every Day” and information on ordering the DVD can be found at www.autismspeaks.org.

By Sydney Fee Barsanti

I am walking to show gratitude and appreciation for my sons Rourke and Beck, who are my greatest teachers.

Rourke is seven. Beck is six. And they are both amazing and beautiful boys. We have learned over the last few years that Rourke is on the autism spectrum- thankfully the high functioning end of the spectrum-and within the last few months that he is also bipolar. Beck is developing typically, although having a brother with special needs makes life difficult.

The labels “autistic” and “bipolar” haven’t meant all that much to me. We like to see Rourke as we see Beck and other kids. He likes pizza and popsicles. He loves Super Mario Sunshine and Legos. He loves racing games. He loves the beach and he loves swinging. But he isn’t like other kids.

Were you to see him at the beach, he would be jumping for joy. He swims and splashes like any other boy on the beach. But, unlike the others, he is terrified of the slightest bits of debris or seaweed in the water. He will shriek in terror until it is whisked away. For Rourke, autism doesn’t speak, it screams.

Rourke’s world is more extreme than ours. His world contains terrors, threats and frustrations that push him back into the playroom of his mind. Seaweed, wet clothes, pizza bubbles, zippers, buttons and crowds threaten him as if they were lethal and the end of the world was approaching. Facing these terrors, he will run, lash out and scream. Free from those threats, he can be transcendentally gentle and kind, as if he were listening to what all of our better angels hope for us.
The first time Rourke saw a piñata at a friend’s birthday party he remarked, “But mom, we’re not supposed to hit anything. The poor piñata.” Or, “You want me to eat chicken? Why would I eat a chicken?”

Barsanti Free of his anxiety he is the most compassionate person I know. Free of the static in his head, Rourke has blessed us with humor, intelligence and peace. But he is so anxious in school and other social situations that he is having difficulty just getting by.

The peaceful soul Beck and I are blessed with at home is so different from the terrified boy who ventures into the world of seaweed everyday. Beck tries to protect his older brother.

Beck talks about Rourke’s “autistic brain” and asks if there is a way for them to switch brains, if only for a few days. Beck tries to remove all the seaweed from Rourke’s life, a tall order for a six-year-old-a tall order for anyone. I tell Beck that his only job is to play, but he knows his role is much larger than that.

When Rourke first went to school, we felt that he was quirky and eccentric, but that he still could make a fine defenseman and a member of the National Honor Society. As the terrors, the tantrums and the runaways increased, we hoped for improvement. Then one day a story arrived home in his backpack: “The Day There Was No Rourke.”

Rourke loves Calvin and Hobbes comics and here was a comic book he made about himself, with classmates shooting at him, with Rourke dying by decapitation and with his tombstone drawn on the last page. So now we just hope for his life and his happiness.

I want to help my son live in a world that does not terrify or frustrate him. I want the playroom of his mind to be a memory, not a place he’d rather be. I want to help him keep his great leaping joy while losing the dark rising fear. I want him to, someday, be able to walk in the same world that I live in, with crowds, noise and seaweed. I don’t want him to become a judge, or a surgeon, or a soccer player.

I just want him to be happy.

And that is why I’m walking.

By Lyndon Dupuis

The word “icon” might be one of the most hackneyed nouns in journalism today, but how else to describe the furniture designer Vladimir Kagan, who’s now crafting a masterful, modernist apartment building for lower Manhattan?

Known as Vladi to his friends, he and his charming English wife, the needlework superstar Erika Wilson, have long called Nantucket Vladimir Kaganhome for much of the year. Complex, eccentric, fun loving and hard working innovators, the duo have been major players in the American and international design arenas for more than six decades.

Kagan’s 80th birthday arrives in September, the same month he and Wilson plan to celebrate their 50th anniversary.

Being in the company of the Kagans is always fascinating. During a memorable visit to their lavish but quixotic Upper East Side Manhattn apartment on a chilly Sunday, I was among a small group of Kagan’s sailing cronies and friends who went to hear Bishop Desmond Tutu preach. We were all looking forward to a pleasurable lunch back at the apartment, but Vladi had another mission. He really, really wanted us to see the Shakespeare Garden, his favorite spot in Central Park. Dutifully, we scurried along cold and hungry to share in his passion. The septuagenarian talked non-stop, pointed out everything while sprinting about half a block ahead of the rest of us. Only afterward could we return for lunch, which became a work in progress with all hands on deck, so to speak. The man’s enthusiasm and energy were boundless.

I recently found myself again pitching in to help Vladi, Erica and Luce, their housekeeper, as we tugged and heaved a large, rather slippery piece of furniture from its crate while chatting with them at their Nantucket home. It all seemed perfectly natural and was also fortuitous. We had uncrated “Dune,” the woven resin daybed and matching ottoman designed for his new outdoor furniture collection manufactured by Barlow Tyrie. Its sinuous curves immediately suggest its eponymous title. “They’ve been taking orders for it, and I’m told it’s moving really fast,” he smiled. “You are seeing the first one!”

Kagan has a tireless muse and has been inspired by many things over the years as he worked to meet the needs of his clients. Many of his pieces, such as his famous serpentine sofa, Bilbao coffee table, wave chair, and the wooden bench he designed to camouflage unsightly skylights on his upstairs Nantucket deck, have similar undulating lines. One can easily infer that his love of the sea and constant “messing about with boats and ponds,” as he put it, inform many of his designs. Even his curvy “bone chair” was inspired by a bone picked up— where else—on the beach. “Yes, he really does like the curves,” said Erica Wilson as he jiggled his eyebrows up and down and flashed me a wolfish grin. The artist, a word that truly describes him, is all about organic forms, which he sculpts from wood, metal, plastic, iron and glass—just about any medium from which furnishings can be crafted. “Nature and the human anatomy have always been in the forefront of my mind,” he explained.

Long legacy

Kagan’s well-chronicled career got a jump start in 1947 when he was commissioned to design the cocktail lounges in the first United Nations headquarters at Lake Success, N.Y. The twenty-year-old had already gained a considerable reputation among certain “insiders” while working alongside his cabinet-maker and artist father, a Russian born refugee from Nazi ridden Germany. His family’s harrowing escape to New York allowed young Kagan to attend the High School of Industrial Arts and Columbia University, where he studied architecture—“My first love,” he emphasized—and engineering. His successful design for the U.N. brought him valuable contacts and commissions from General Electric and Monsanto among other large corporations.

Always deeply aware of the Zeitgeist, yet determinedly creating his own vision over subsequent decades, Kagan interpreted each era’s contemporary design. He stayed abreast of emerging technology, using it to break new ground in both designs and the manufacturing of furniture. Innovative technology has always been his friend, helping to fire his imagination through the design “isms” of cubism, minimalism, postmodernism, and deconstructivism. He was the first to recognize, for example, that acrylic carpet yarns could make fashioned into handsome vertical blinds. He designed contemporary sofas and beds that performed a multitude of functions other than sitting and sleeping. One of his 1970s design for a private client integrated a television and hi-fi equipment, tambour night tables that hid telephones and lift-up storage cabinets for files and papers.

Today, Kagan stands alone among the tastemaker-designers of mid-century modern in that, like the Energizer Bunny, he just keeps going and going. Affluent young adults have rediscovered furniture by the Europeans such as Mies van der Rohe, Charles Eames, Alvar Aalto, and Eero Sarinen. Their vintage pieces have always commanded impressive prices, as do Kagan’s. But nobody else from that era is still around, designing and appealing to this generation with both re-issued and new creations that many can actually afford. “Those who appreciate my work today are the children of my original clients’ children,” he said.” But my audience is the same: young, creative and forward thinking. Actually, I don’t really associate myself so much with the 1950s,” he mused.

“I was certainly influenced by the ‘less is more’ credo of the Bauhaus movement, but I found my own pathway out of the excesses of 19th-century taste.” “Mid-century was a liberating time, an awakening of a more interesting aesthetic than the Bauhaus,” he continued. “My creativity is always sparked by my relationship with my clients, and my early clients happened to be collectors of huge paintings by Jackson Pollack, Rothko and the like. I had to take furnishings away from the walls and place them [in the room] for advantageous viewing.” Kagan said that one of his most famous pieces sprang from a particular habit of an earlier era.

“At Woodstock in the 1960s we would often go out and climb upon the large rocks, where we would sit at different levels and have good conversations. I thought that a very large sofa in a multi-level concept that could be assembled in different configurations could work,” he said.

It did and still does. Tom Ford ordered 360 of Kagan’s omnibus sofas for his international network of Gucci stores in the 1990, and the piece is available today. “I designed my big serpentine sofa because I wanted to avoid the ‘birds-ona wire’ syndrome and believed that a curved, large scale sofa bred a friendly atmosphere—more so than a small sofa and two chairs,” he said.

Luminaries and pop stars alike have embraced the Kagan aesthetic. His prize-winning designs are in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cooper-Hewitt and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. The list of private celebrity owners is lengthy.

Today, his designs can be seen in current catalogs from furniture companies including American Leather, Directions, Barlow Tyrie, Room & Board and his own Classic Collection and New York Collection through high-end interior designers.

Living with Kagan

In the introduction to Kagan’s wellwritten and lavishly photographed autobiography “The Complete Kagan: A Lifetime of Avant-Guard Design,” Tom Ford says, “With his best pieces, Kagan completely changes the landscape of a room. It’s as though he were an architect who’s just never made a building . . . ”

That is about to change. Kagan’s boyish enthusiasm for the planned new multi-use building he’s designing for The Bowery in New York—a project that has been in a holding pattern for three years—visibly dimmed as he explained that “complicated permitting processes and variances are hindering its completion,” but he exclaimed, “I want to be around to see the damn thing go up!”

In the meantime, forward-looking new buildings have recently sprung up in the city. The thought that these might shadow his own innovative design discomfits him as well. However, the light in his intense brown eyes returned as he displayed his drawings.

“The Ozymandias Group, who commissioned this [building], told me to create ‘a flower among the weeds,’” he said. When it finally sprouts on the Bowery, Kagan’s imagined waveform glass building, accented by bands of colorful ceramic tiles, is bound to create a buzz. Its spacious undulating balconies, spread over a curvaceous exterior, are aligned to shield each apartment from its neighbors.

“I think the problem with much urban residential architecture today is that so much attention is paid to the exterior that the interior spaces suffer,” noted Kagan. “I have worked hard to create practical, comfortable and handsome interiors.” Flow and usability are extremely important to him, as are the most up-to-date appliances and accoutrements. “These apartments are primarily for singles and dual career couples, but if they have a baby the space adapts easily to that too,” he continued.

They aren’t designed for families, though. “The Bowery really isn’t the place to raise a family,” Kagan laughed. The building site is the corner of Great Jones Street and The Bowery, where a bank will be the apartment building’s primary tenant on its ground floor. The well-traveled and talented Kagans concluded our conversation while lounging about in their “favorite place in the world,” their Nantucket house.

Only two pieces of Kagan’s avant-garde furniture reside there: a supremely comfortable raspberry red recliner by American Leather in his study and the new “Dune” chaise. The rest is a typical “old Nantucket” mélange of antiques, down-filled sofas, art and Erica Wilson’s exquisite needlework scattered everywhere. It’s the epitome for many of home. “We are actually extremely old fashioned,” Kagan said with an enigmatic grin.

By Peter Brace

Marina Finch is one of the nine scallopers challenging the Great Harbor Yacht Club’s plan to dredge 795 cubic yards of sand just off their wharf and install a 40-slip pier with floating docks. Finch and the other eight fishermen depend on their catch to supplement their annual income. Although the island’s second yacht club secured Conservation Commission approval for this work, these scallopers contend that Great Harbor’s dredging and subsequent pier and dock installation is going to destroy both scallops and the eelgrass those scallops need for survival, effectively removing the area from their fishing grounds.

“I think the whole harbor plan is great. So much work has gone into it and it’s well thought out,” said Finch. “It’s too bad that its wasn’t finished sooner, because it would have been much more difficult for
Great Harbor Yacht Club to develop to the extent they’re going to had a harbor plan been in place. By that, r harbors I’m talking about the impact on eelgrass by dredging. That’s essential habitat.”

Back in 1993, after five years of meetings and many drafts, a large, widely represented group of harbor stakeholders, town officials, consultants from the University of Rhode Island and Massachusetts Coastal Zone Management produced the 1993 “Nantucket and Madaket Harbors Action Plan.” Eleven years later, in 2004, Town Meeting voters resoundingly shot down an article that would have enabled the town to take Great Harbor’s boatyard property onWashington Street Extension by eminent domain. After that defeat, advocates for harbor preservation stepped forward to push for updating Nantucket’s harbor plan.

“There’s been so many additional pressures on the harbor in the last fifteen years that it was time to reevaluate what has gone on, what hasn’t gotten done from the ’93 plan and what needs to get done in the immediate future,” said Nantucket’s Harbormaster and Marine Superintendent, Dave Fronzuto, who has been the prime mover behind an effort to extensively revise the 1993 Harbor Action Plan.

Unless you know Finch, Smith, Herr, Ken Kelley, Rhys Bender, Erik Bender, Bruce Beebe, David Coombs and Steve Bender, or other Nantucket scallopers, they are hard to spot among the 50,000 to 60,000 people on island during the summer. Their boats, however, are easier to pick out from the mega-yachts and sailboats, since many of them are modified pleasure craft with wooden and fiberglass culling boards spanning their width gunwale to gunwale and usually with dried eelgrass plastered on every surface.

They were here first, the island’s fishermen. Whalers and cod fishermen. Scallopers, eelers, oyster, quahog and soft-shell clam diggers. The Nantucket Boat Basin—formerly long wharves and piers jutting into the harbor before developer Walter Beinecke, Jr. made his upgrades to it—belonged to commercial fishermen and the shipping industry as recently as the early 1960s.

Today’s cluttered waterfront of ferries, pleasure craft and charter boats affords space to kayakers, wind surfers, swimmers and yacht clubs. Nantucket’s commercial fishermen have little hope of recovering any of their lost ground, which they and many others consider a sad commentary on the passing of Nantucket’s once deeply rooted fishing industry.

Yet, most consumers who love seafood still eagerly anticipate Nantucket’s bay scallops hitting fish markets in the fall, with seafood aficionados and tony mainland restaurants willing to pay whatever the cost to get a hold of them. But most survivors in Nantucket’s dwindling commercial fishing community believe that many of those who pine for this uniquely sweet and savory shellfish fail to see the connection between the high prices they pay and the elevated lifestyles they desire on Nantucket. That, among myriad other reasons, is why they urged the town to revise its existing harbor plan into the “2007 Nantucket and Madaket Harbors Action Plan.”

“The first plan was truly an action plan,” said Fronzuto. “A lot of the waterside stuff did get done, but we’ve grown so fast and so much in the last 15 years that it was time to re-evaluate: Are we in a good position? Have we done more harm than good? How do we manage the growth that we’ve had?”

A stocky, balding ex-Coast Guard warrant officer with a bushy lip, who alternates between lighting, smoking and chewing the worn stub of a cigar, Fronzuto could be the busiest man on the water, 24-7 year-round, especially in the summer. And it is from this vantage point that over the last 14 years he has watched harbor uses swell like a high moon tide lapping the planks of the finger piers on Old North Wharf.

Since the 1993 plan came into being, competing commercial uses in the harbors have exploded, with two fast ferries and a third passenger ferry service from Harwichport increasing ferry travel between the island to more than 30 a day including those made by the Steamship Authority’s passenger and freight vessels. Add to that the six to eight freight barge trips per week and cruise ships during the summer.

Those ferries share the harbor at peak season with 3,400 boats moored or docked in the harbor. As their size and number have increased so has the potential for more pollution, with the Marine Department and the Nantucket Boat Basin now pumping up to 120,000 gallons of sewage and gray water from boat holding tanks annually.

These staggering increases in the use of Nantucket’s harbors are compounded by the island’s exploding real estate market, which over the last decade has put many more houses on the shorelines within the Harbor Watershed Overlay District. And town officials are finding a direct link between declining harbor water quality, excessive lawn fertilizer use and faulty septic systems— some of the likely leading causes for poor scallop harvests.

“I don’t think there’s too much room for additional growth,” warned Fronzuto. “Reviews from consultants has borne out that we literally are at capacity. Now it becomes an issue of managing competing uses of those who pine for this uniquely sweet and savory shellfish fail to see the connection between the high prices they pay and the elevated lifestyles they desire on Nantucket. That, among myriad other reasons, is why they urged the town to revise its existing harbor plan into the “2007 Nantucket and Madaket Harbors Action Plan.”

Call to action

Those educational materials would also be made available to property owners to inform them about “environmentally suitable fertilizer application rates, organic fertilizers, natural plantings, and other landscaping practices that would help protect the harbors and harbor watersheds.”

Key to these efforts is the inspection of more than 600 septic systems within the Nantucket Harbor Watershed District and nearly 700 systems in the Madaket Harbor Watershed District. Faulty systems must be replaced. Future sewage pollution could also be regulated once the Massachusetts Estuaries Project determines Nantucket’s “total daily maximum load.”

The TMDL number is the total amount of nutrients a harbor can absorb before decomposing algae blooms begins to suck up the oxygen. This number, through a certain formula, can be used by the town to limit the number of bedrooms in new houses in both watersheds and, consequently, the amount of sewage produced. Yet another recommendation calls for dredging the main channels in Nantucket, Madaket and Polpis harbors as an aid to both navigation and improved water quality. Dredging the sand-clogged channels helps increase circulation in the harbors and could, along with a recommendation to build up Nantucket Harbor’s jetties, help give the harbor a twice daily flushing to clean out lawn fertilizer and pollution from failed septic systems.

Doing it now

Also already in motion are several actions designed to protect the integrity of Nantucket’s current waterfront character. Chief among those is a proposed “harbor overlay district” encompassing Nantucket’s waterfront from the former Breakers Hotel south to the Great Harbor Yacht Club and the northwest side of Hither Creek in Madaket.

If adopted at a Town Meeting—the relevant articles were tabled at this year’s annual Town Meeting for further tweaking—those who now own property within the zone would be restricted to new residential uses on second floors only, on non-piling-based structures and only beyond 25 feet of the mean high-water mark. Buildings for new non-water-dependent uses could not be built within 25 feet of the mean highwater mark or cover more than 50% of the lot.

No new non-water-dependent uses or renovations to existing ones could replace or disturb existing waterdependent uses, nor could they exclude water-dependent use or impede public access to the harbor. Island voters already made permanent a moratorium on docks, piers and wharves in center town districts that was to expire last April. The new harbor plan, though, would allow Tuckernuck property owners, working in cooperation with the Tuckernuck Island Landowners Association, the town and the Department of Environmental Protection to build a public pier and dock for their uses. Fronzuto engineered this loophole because last fall, DEP had found Tuckernuck’s existing piers to be illegal under current state regulations.

Local control

To accomplish the massive task of revising the harbor plan, Urban Harbors’ Nantucket’s specialty Nantucket often appears to operate in crisis mode or on the belief that if ain’t
broke don’t fix it. Put out the fires when they flare up and ignore the little sparks. But the harbor plan—taking into consideration the water surrounding the island as our lifeblood through commerce, transportation, fishing and tourism— can achieve one of its loftiest goals.

Perhaps as important as the recommendation for a water quality management plan, the harbor plan stresses the need for shellfish management. Rarely has the trite phrase “time is of the essence” made more sense.

Nantucket’s scallop harvest has dropped recipitously over the last three seasons, dropping from 32,000 bushels three years ago to 5,500 bushels in 2005-2006 and then to only 3,850 bushels last season.
“As far as the shellfish management plan, you can read any fisheries-indecline- story worldwide and you just substitute the words ‘bay scallop,’” said Fronzuto. “We’ve been told by very learned people that it’s very difficult to have a viable commercial fishing enterprise and a very concentrated recreational use harbor. If you’re on Nantucket or anywhere else, it’s just very difficult to have those competing uses work.”

Rather than commercial fishing again owning Nantucket’s waterfront as it did when whaling fueled the island’s economy, the shellfish management plan calls for scallopers and other shellfishermen to find compromise with other uses in the island’s harbors.

According to Town Biologist Keith Conant, such a plan should impose limits on the numbers of the people fishing, where they fish and where they bring their catch ashore. Conant strongly believes Nantucket is at a crucial stage in the existence of its fishing industry, at a time when its shellfish bylaws and management tactics desperately need a comprehensive revision because the biomass is so critically low right now.

“I think we’re going to need something with some stricter enforcement and some stricter management such that it makes it easier to monitor the fishing,” said Conant. “Right now, fishermen can land their catch anywhere. We may need to cut back on the number of bushels landed, new licenses sold, so there’s not so much stress on a limited fishery. We need to do some sanctuaries and some sanctuary rotation. We may try to do sector management so some areas are open just to divers [others to scallopers]. Really, there’s a whole list of things that can be done without changing bylaws and going through the selectmen’s office.”

Marina Finch, a member of SHAB who is always smiling, always full of positive energy and ideas on how to keep this island tradition from succumbing to the mounting pressures on it, is a poster child for the Nantucket scalloping industry. She would likely embrace Conant’s doctrine if it would boost Nantucket’s declining scallop populations.

When not scalloping, she also works on Bill Blount’s fishing vessel, the Ruthie B., the last commercial dragger based in Nantucket Harbor. During the summer, she caters and offers her smile from behind the counter of the ‘Sconset - Bookstore. She knows well how many Nantucketers who rely on the scallop industry are struggling to survive here.

“I think you have to remember that there’s a lot of Nantucketers who benefit from scalloping,” she said.“There’s the people who open [scallops] and the fish dealers and the restaurants. It’s sort of a trademark industry for Nantucket; it’s high-end specialty seafood. I think it’s a huge part of the culture for Nantucket and I think it would be very sad to lose that.”

—Peter B. Brace is the environmental, and growth and development writer for The Nantucket Independent. His articles can be found at www.acknews.com.

By Evan Williams
Photography By Terry Pommett

Like many Nantucketers and others, you might have never visited Tuckernuck, which at 1.4 square miles is the second in size of the three islands—Nantucket is the largest and Muskeget is the smallest —that make up this small archipelago 30 miles from Cape Cod.

Home in the 1800s to several families, and with a schoolhouse to educate their children, the island has had a sometimes colorful past. Tuckernuck

In the early 19th century an all-male group of Harvard-educated intellectuals retreated there without women and practiced nudism. But most of those who lived on Tuckernuck in earlier times found their livelihood from the sea, through fishing or as rescue staff for a lifesaving outpost that once existed on nearby Muskeget.

The last true year-rounder disappeared two decades ago fromTuckernuck, although many homeowners visit all year long. Most homes there now rely on solar power or generators for modern conveniences including pumping water, but others still use kerosene lanterns, candles and gas-powered appliances. A few outhouses— like the one pictured here—still provide the resting spot for some of life’s daily duties.

And Tuckernuckers like it that way. Those who do visit the island, located just a few minutes’ boat ride from Madaket, often keep to the spit of sandbar on Tuckernuck’s eastern edge, where ownership of the property remains in dispute. In fact, during our recent visit there, we were asked to not photograph neighboring properties—‘no trespassing’ signs are placed prominently on most of the 68 land parcels with three-dozen or so homes—and instead limit photos to the landing beach and our hosts’ homestead.

“If you don’t own land on Tuckernuck or have permission of the landowner to be on his property or beach, then stay off or you are trespassing, which is against the law,” a Tuckernuck resident reminded readers of Nantucket Independent last year. “How much more simple can that be?”

Simple indeed. For a festive outdoor dinner earlier this summer, Tuckernuck homeowner Doug Foregger and his wife Emily—along with their toddler children Lassiter Island Foregger and Thatcher Lightening Foregger—welcomed a dozen friends to enjoy their bucolic property.

Foregger acquired their five-bedroom house three years ago by sealing the deal in an occurrence that might happen only here. While crossing the sound from Madaket to visit Tuckernuck in dense fog—“the thickest I’ve ever seen it,” according to Foregger—he passed by chance within a few feet of the owner of the home he was about to purchase.

Tuckernuck“We tied up in the middle of the sound, and I made him a better offer,” Foregger recalled. “He accepted, so we untied and continued on.”

Thankfully, no fog shrouded Tuckernuck’s ethereal landscape from the midsummer sun at the Foregger’s party, and in spite of the home’s rustic facilities, the Foreggers and their guests made an elegant evening of it. The party arrived in small groups transported from Madaket in the superb Hinckley Picnic Boat from Barton & Gray Mariners Club. Each member of the party donned chic and dapper clothes, many from Beth English’s new Current Vintage collection of gently used designer clothing.

Chef David Daniels, from Topper’s at the Wauwinet Inn, with help from his assistant Matt Kenah, relied on a trustworthy Vermont Castings outdoor grill and dishes made of fresh produce to sate the dinner guests. Chilled oyster hors d’ oeuvres washed down with Veuve Clicquot champagne eased everyone into the evening.

After the dinner, a hand-cranked Victrola emitted dulcet tones from a bygone era, with diners dancing as the light slipped away and kerosene lamps began to glow like giant fireflies.
The Tuckernuck guests included John Arena, Cheryl Fudge, Heather Duvall, Maeve Markey, Gene Mahon, Paula Maloney, Bruce Percelay, Al Coffin and Radmila Sakalova, Beth English and Mark Donato, Joe Ferrigno and Donna Salvo, Tess Connors and Hudson Hinckley. Trent Hickman of Topper’s assisted with service.

By Jeanette Garneau & Evan Williams
Photography by Nathan Coe

Step inside ‘Sconset’s Summer House Restaurant after dark and you’ll see why it draws the glitterati along with the adoring hoi polloi.

The Summer House feels like a cozy home cum private club. In two large rooms aglow with dimly lit sconces and candles, visitors recline on deeply cushioned sofas and chairs, or sit at intimate dining tables with some tucked away into cozy corners. At one end of the room a snug vintage bar seats just a small group of patrons for quiet talks. A fireplace beckons those who want to kick back and relax. Dulcet piano tones drift through the air.Summer House

Little wonder that the Piano Man himself, Billy Joel, once played on the elegant black grand Yamaha. Or that Katie Couric recently wooed her paramour from behind its keyboard. Even extreme rocker Steven Tyler of Aerosmith has mellowed out here.

Outside the restaurant you’ll still pass the quaint, antique rose-covered guest cottages that draw couples in search of romance, or those who appreciate their old fashioned charm. Beds of herbs and perennials still send up aromatic clouds over the plush Summer House lawn and along stair steps leading down to the Summer House Beachside Bistro.

At the bistro, a patio dining area and a large swimming pool afford sweeping views of the Atlantic Ocean a few hundred feet away. None of that has changed since we once wrote “You could languish here for days and not regret it.”

Nor has the quality of food and drink from the Summer House kitchen been altered or lost. It still seduces your taste buds and lingers in your memory. Begin your arousaI with the flavors of a late summer salad of fresh lobster, thinly sliced red onion and roasted sweet corn, or a lump crab cake that falls apart gently on your fork. Follow that with grilled Alaskan salmon with zucchini chips or free-range chicken with Moroccan spices or roasted lamp dressed up with a minted garlic sauce. End with a rich, bitter chocolate torte and sweet fresh fruit to complete the seduction.

That outcome would certainly please current chef Freddy Vega. “Simple food does not take too much,“ said Vega. “Good food is fun, passionate. You don’t have to do a lot to make beautiful simple food.” Summer House

That Summer House practice of ‘beautiful simplicity” has grown in recent years to include what its owners call a “collection of luxury inns and restaurants” on Nantucket. The Karlson family now counts the Pineapple Inn, The Summer House Fair Street, The Summer House India Street and the historic 29 Fair Street Inn & Restaurant among its holdings. Peter and Danielle Debenedictis Karlson, along with their daughter Francesca and son Chris oversee the hospitality. “This can be a hard business but I love it, averred Peter Karlson, “I love the wine, the menu and most of all I love my customers.”

Although each of the Summer House’s in-town lodgings offers its own charms, the ‘Sconset location remains the favorite of many. “I think that people are very romantically attached to the restaurant,” said Danielle Debenedictis, co-owner with her husband Peter and son Chris. “It is the spontaneity of the place that is magical, people becoming friends around the piano. It is authentic, quintessential Nantucket.”

Dinner guests included Summer House fans Meryl and Michael Bralower, Betsy and Bill Delphos and Rita and Don Mignosa.