All the travel chronicles that I have read of Nantucket They start with a recurring formula: write the words of Herman Melville in Moby Dick. Because from there the pequod came to the world, The most famous whaling ship in the world. Even myself, While in Nantucket, I bit the hook and wrote somewhere that “there was something beautiful and turbulent in everything related to that ancient and beautiful island, Something that attracted me extraordinarily ". End, had fallen into the trap. But I was saved a comfort: Nantucket had promoted me a fantasy.
The island, stuck in 50 kilometers away from Cape Cod, summarizes all the virtues that one imagined before coming. Therefore, When I approached on a close night on the ship that had left a couple of hours before since Hyannis, I sensed that place would not disappoint me. I descended through the steps and went into the dark streets, cold and cobbled from a small deserted city: It was November and Nantucket attracts tourists and residents in summer. The rest of the year, Between autumn and the first rays of sun, The population of this ancient Wampanoag is island is divided by five and the marsions and empty roads draw the Nantucket routine.
From there the pequod de Moby Dick came to the world, The most famous whaler in the world
I had decided to go long ago, without knowing it, when i read moby dick. I told myself: I want to live in Nantucket. I pictured little wooden houses with candles burning away as the wind rolled down narrow streets and fishermen, exhausted, heated around the fire. I wanted to check the first morning I spent, When I approached the port to which the ships loaded with ravings reached. By the hand of a fisherman, Michael, I threw the bicycle I had achieved to move on the island in the back of its truck to reach the fish market in which the owner told me what mollusks were quoted expensive in the best restaurants in Boston and New York.
But no trace of whales. Nor whale oil consuming. Nantucket is cataloged as National Historic Landmark District, Something that benefits aesthetics and harms the inhabitants - about 10.0000 - who live all year on the island. Housing prices are stratospheric: The wealthy classes have built their impeccable houses - pine wood that darkens time - in immense sand. Private parties, Painting exhibitions and other expressions of an aristocracy that feeds the local economy, contribute to creating C discomfort.
I had decided to go long ago, without knowing it, when i read moby dick. I told myself: I want to live in Nantucket
Like Erick's. He hosted me at home - pine wood, two floors full of fishing rods, Surf tables and a certain cozy disorder - and he earned a living as a carpenter working in that category of houses scratched by the sea breeze. It is not uncommon for Nantucket, which means "land away from the coast", Between the workshop every fall: The island is emptied and the operators make up the collection of houses that seem taken from a perfect model.
Nor trace of whales. Nor whale oil consuming
En nantucket hay 800 houses prior to the civil war. Some wood, other more robust, Architecture may sound oblivious to those who have not yet decorchanted Moby Dick. But to me, The journey to this island -which someone, In a conversation, He told me he was "remote"-, It took me for more literary vericuetos. Had gone to Oklahoma After the wake of John Steinbeck, a Alaska After the footprint of Jack London. Now I was in Nantucket after Ismael's trail, the protagonist that Herman Melville set up in the Pequod and sent - to an alter ego mode - to travel the southern seas after a bestial sperm wallet.
The state of Massachusetts It is the germ of the construction of the modern United States; Nantucket, An insignificant point in the ocean, The perfect combination of an indigenous past and a future and present too entertaining with money to continue living anchored in nostalgia.
