Time and Tide
I just finished 
Frank Conroy’s Time and Tide, which I am a little embarrassed about, not because I read the book, but because at 140 pages it is a thin thing that took me nearly two weeks to finish. Realizing this, more than once I wished for insomnia so that, rest be damned, I could spend my evenings up late, reading. But after three pages on most nights, I’m out.
Time and Tide is a love letter to Nantucket Island, a wistful book which current events have given an air of foreboding to. Conroy describes how he discovered the island while in college in the 1960s and moved there, becoming a year-rounder and cherishing the simplicity of island life, most of the time poor or very nearly so. That once upon a time a man could be poor on Nantucket is the point: Every other page Conroy laments how increases in property values have driven old friends and longtime Nantucket natives off the island, how Nantucket’s unique wildlife and plant species are being overrun by Ford Expeditions, how the island he cares so much for is little more than a playground to people who take up acres upon acres for no reason other than to fly in for the weekend. Conroy chalks the change up to the passage of time—a little sad, a lot inevitable, illustrating it with two juxtaposed anecdotes. The first comes in the preface, and he says it is his earliest memory:
I was perhaps three years old, being held by someone so I could look over the railing of the huge ferryboat on which we were passengers, to see the wharf, the water below, and the boys from town diving for coins thrown down by the people around us….
A flashing coin is thrown, three or four boys dive, almost simultaneously, into the green water and disappear for a while. Almost simultaneously they emerge, one of them holding the coin aloft before slipping it in his cheek and looking up for the next nickel or dime.
The second:
Two summers ago Julia, my daughter-in-law, was walking on the ‘Sconset beach. The water was calm and she took off her shoes to wade. After a while she felt something on her ankle, reached down and retrieved a one-hundred-dollar bill. She spotted another one close by, drifting like seaweed, and kept searching for a while until it was clear there weren’t any more. Probably someone had gone swimming with the money in his bathing suit with the pocket unbuttoned.
It is the man who could lose $200 without blinking who Conroy serves up for scrutiny (though his scrutiny is subtle, accomplished in furtive glances). For Conroy, that man is the sort who would abandon his family cat on the Nantucket moor so as not to miss his ferry, who would abandon common courtesy by shoving his way through a line at the store. He is also, it turns out, a financier, which means that, given the time frame of Time and Tide, trading mortgage securities made him rich. And that is what makes the book foreboding: I know—though Conroy didn’t (and never would, mercifully)—it was Nantucket’s weekending financiers who bear a large part of the responsibility for the recession of 2007–2009. The exponential growth of wealth for the super rich is one of the central stories of turn-of-the-century American society, and Time and Tide tells another version of that story—but it is a nicely affecting version, anyway.
