After all these years, finally an aerial photo once again. This year's peak season cover shot is thanks to George Riethof—pilot, appraiser, and hell of a photographer. You can see more of his work at overnantucket.com. But that's about the only news I have—no lighthouses threatened by erosion, lost Main Street touchstones, or abandoned cranberry bogs to perseverate over. And Mitchell's Book Corner is back after a rebuilding, with no more rickety stairs to the basement to petrify middle age men carrying forty-four pound cases of calendars. * * * About the pictures: people have given the new Sankaty lighthouse layout (January) a thumbs up. Walking up to its set-back location creates a sense of arrival and "place" that is quite satisfying. Good on the 'Sconset Trust for its efforts, even though the beam now shines more directly in my bedroom! April's daffodils sprout next door to 12 Cliff Road, a "lean-to half house" dating from before 1750. Like the Jethro Coffin Oldest House a few blocks away, this home faces south to catch the sun, with its sloping rear deflecting the winter winds on what was in those days a steppe-like landscape. Brick buildings like the Pacific Bank (October) mark the island's first boom, as they do the Great Fire of 1846, when much of a widened Main Street was lined with "fireproof" commercial structures, as seen in the May photo of the horse trough and Murray's Liquors. (Are there any other calendars that feature liquor stores, I wonder? This is at least the tenth time over the years, world's most attractive, I guess.) The photo of Front Street, 'Sconset is an honest December shot, with wreaths just out of picture. Now that the calendar is all-electronic, they could have been "photo-shopped" in, but you didn't want that, did you? What had to be photo-shopped out of several pictures were strange blemishes, which an old-time camera repair expert identified as the first mildew inside a lens that he had ever seen. Only on Nantucket. Dick Mackay |
