Nantucket

Winter Arrives on Nantucket

Winter got here yesterday. 

Or maybe it was the day before.  Can't say that we've got much to complain about so far though.  They say that the waters of Nantucket Sound insulate the island.  I guess this means that it's cooler in the summer than the real world and warmer in the winter.  Not sure if this factors in the windchill though.

I recall some winters from my younger days (ornery 'ol cuss that I am) that were simply God awful.  I remember '81 (or was it '83) when the water froze all the way to the mainland.  We were on the national news because they weren 't sure they could get a barge of heating oil into the harbor.  As it turns out they brought in a Coast Guard icebreaker and got the oil (and all the other boats) in here no problem.  There were a few 12 hour boat rides for people (I never was lucky enough to get on one of those), but other than that it was just COLD.  Back then there were only about 3,000 year-round residents.  I wonder how we'd fare these days with something closer to 15,000.

 So as it got cold I was thinking about . . . being warm. 

Thinking about chimneys 

Growing up I remember lots of nights in front of a warm fireplace.   We also had a woodstove in our basement and one of my jobs in my teens was to load the basement woodstove every night.  I was also tasked with cutting four (4) foot logs into three (3) sections (Dad was too cheap to buy cords of wood already cut) and loading them into the basement everytime the wood arrived.  Not sure what Dad was thinking in letting a 13 year-old run a 36" Stihl chainsaw for hours on end but I survived with all my digits and eyes intact.   So in thinking about fireplaces I began to think about chimneys on Nantucket.

Nantucket has lots of chimneys.  And they are all different.  Or at least they appear to be.  I walked around the core district (downtown) for about a half hour the other day and got a bunch of pictures of chimneys.  It's kind of funny how many different kinds there are and how you never really look up to see them.  When you do, it's quite interesting.  Makes me wonder about all the masons that have constructed chimneys on Nantucket over the years.

Some chimneys are big and fat.  Some are skinny.  Some are decorative.  Some are crooked.  Some are falling apart.  Some have "owls" on the top.  Some have caps.  Some are central chimneys.  Some are on the outside walls. 

I must've looked at about 50 chimneys in the 30 minutes I was walking around.   There's a lot of chimneys to look at if you just look up.  Interestingly, I didn't see smoke coming from any of them.  Maybe there's no one in these houses.   Kind of sad that there are so many empty fireplaces this time of year.