jonathan futrell

Nantucket Harbour

Nantucket’s Jared Coffin House isn’t as macabre as it sounds.

The red brick Georgian hotel, the oldest on the island, has white door columns and dark green louvered windows. It stands at the top of Broad Street, a reminder of the 19^th century Quaker endeavour that put this spec of land, 30 miles east of the USA mainland, on the world map – forever.

Inside there are oil paintings of whaling ships and stern men with thick sideburns, the air thick with the scent of furniture polish and warm scones.

Broad Street has barely changed since those whaling days; a cobbled avenue of merchants’ homes and dry goods stores with a wharf at the foot. There you’ll find sea captains, like James Genthner, who’ll charge £15 for a turn around Nantucket Sound, passing the lighthouse at Brand Point where good old boys use heavy lures to land strip bass. Nearby are ferries to Cape Cod and Hyannis Port

When oil from the luckless sperm whale fuelled this nascent nation the Coffin family enjoyed some influence out here in the teeth of the Atlantic. What is now a hotel was their home, and only those with some knowledge of whaling, and the fate of the whaler Essex, that included a young Owen Coffin among its crew, may have a different perspective.

But that was a long time ago. Today Nantucket is a living museum for an old money elite, and those politicians, Masters of the Universe, and celebrities, who eschew what they see as the over commercialisation of nearby Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod. This is an exclusive club for those who wish to preserve the island’s history, appearance, and biodiversity.  A ready escape from the pressures of Boston and New York, just a short and breathtaking flight across the eastern archipelago. Here a modest apartment can cost over $1 million and most homes come in at ten times that. The Heinz ketchup family, and the Frisbees who invented the flying disc  and designer Tommy Hilfiger have homes, and a raft of Democrats from the Kennedys to the current vice president, Joe Biden, come here for r&r. Actors Robert De Niro, Uma Thurman, Meg Ryan and Mark Wahlberg have been spotted too.  I know because there is a celebrity list pinned up inside the First Congregational Church’s tiered white spire. Five bucks for a view of the entire island.

The beaches are endless (five miles is common). There are few trees, and everywhere the squat homes are covered in cedar tiles turned slate grey by the winds that pummel Nantucket throughout winter. Weather that causes tourists and residents to flee to the mainland, reducing the population from 40,000 to 8000. It’s a palette shaped island with moorland rich in low growing pitch pine, bayberry and scrub oak. Salt marshes with shifting phragmite reeds and bean topped black grass, and peat bogs and ponds formed by sand dunes sustaining rare mosses, and tiny purple orchids. In the centre the red swathes of cranberry beds for the juice industry.

My first couple of nights are at the Wauwinet Hotel. A homey, isolated place, with a lawn dipping to the water’s edge, where you can imagine F Scott Fitzgerald pondering the social mores of east coast society.  Buttermilk walls, pictures of handsome sail boats, log fires, and lobster at every meal, and a snug sports bar where it gets rowdy when the Red Socks play Fenway Park.

from Wauwinet Hotel

The hotel takes its name from an Indian chief who once ruled here, and is located at the foot of a four mile sand spit. Only a pair of heron, some piper plovers, a shoal of 40 or more seals, and the Great Point Lighthouse at the tip. Think north Cornwall on a scale of the Grand Canyon.

To the east is Nantucket Harbour, about the size of Loch Ness, and beyond that Nantucket Sound where Ted Kennedy often sailed his 50’ schooner, MYA, and to the west the lumpy North Atlantic. My only company fishermen in puffa jackets and baseball caps with grim expressions surf casting for bluefish, and albacore, watched closely by roseate terns, their black forked tails silhouetted against the murky sky. By any stretch, it’s a magnificent spot. A place to clear the mind.  Deep and elemental.

Devoid of any significant gradients the best way to enjoy Nantucket is on bicycle. There are more hire shops than bars in Nantucket town. Nowhere is far, and there are cycle tracks to separate inexperienced peddle pushers from the handful of cars. I take the Polpis Road to Siasconset, a village of wide grass verges and modest homes, straight out of central casting: You couldn’t imagine a more perfect village, with an old oak tree and general stores at its centre. It’s where retired whaling captains came to live out the rest of their days in contemplation.

Then I set out along the Milestone Road, bearing left to Surfside and Nobadeer Beach. It’s like that beach outside Diane Keaton’s home in Something’s Gotta Give. You got it; to die for!

The Nantucket Conservation Foundation owns a third of the island and is on a mission to stop virtually any new development, and preserve the natural environment. It doesn’t like chain stores or designer logos either. The only branded store is a Ralph Lauren, naturally.

Impregnable building regs, and the fact that most people keep themselves-to-themselves in fabulous holiday homes, means that hotels are thin on the ground. It’s why one of the most beguiling accommodation options are the 24 weather boarded self catering Cottages and Lofts on wooden piers, inches above the water in the Boat Basin; downtown Nantucket just moments away.  There’s a supermarket, and the world’s strangest off licence: Current Vintage, on Easy Street, combining classic wines with used clothes (wine tastings every Friday).  There’s also Murray’s Toggery Shop, the original Macy’s, specialising in Nantucket ‘reds’ – hats, pants and shirts the colour of Breton sails.

There’s a lot of sushi too, portions pumped up on steroids like most things in the US, at places like Lo La 41o and Pearl, the latter being one of those high roller joints where women with faces like Joan Rivers’ date boys like Ryan Gosling. Or you can do what I do and go local. Straight Wharf Fish Store does takeaway clam chowder, soft shell crab, and lobster rolls at sensible prices.

Best of all is the Whaling Museum, in a red brick building opposite the harbour, not dissimilar in style to the forminable Jared Coffin House.

Inside is an original whaling boat, the complete skeleton of a sperm whale, and cabinets of intricate and elaborate ‘scrimshaw’, carvings completed whalers upon the bones of their prey. And therein also resides the grim truth about young Owen Coffin and the sacrifice he made when the shipwrecked and starving crew of the Essex resorted to cannibalism. Memories of time when life for Nantucketers was much tougher than it is today.

It promises to make one heck of a film when Ron Howard’s film In The Heart Of The Sea – based on Nathaniel Philbrick’s book In The Heart Of The Sea – The Tragedy Of The Whaleship Essex – makes it to the cinema at some time towards the end of next year.

Recommended reading: In The Heart of the Sea – The tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick (Penguin US $15).

Nashville Skyline

Dear Sir Kev,

As a man profoundly wedded to the concept of wearing – wherever in the world – the appropriate garb (a guayabera in Cuba, a safari suit in Kenya, lots of brown in Norway) you can imagine my delight at finding myself in Nashville with the right stuff. After years at the back of the wardrobe, perhaps wondering if they would ever see the light of day again, I had a bona fide reason for pulling on my old cowboy boots.

They are black, Cuban heeled Justins, bought from a long since gone western wear store on Paris’ Rue St.Denis, and in remarkably good condition for their age. I didn’t have the courage to wear them on the flight out: I would  have felt a bit self conscious on the tube to Heathrow, and I was concerned that in a pressurised cabin, in which ones feet do expand, I would be unable to get them off to pass through airport security at Charlotte, the connection for the short onward leg to Music City.

Once in Nashville I have hardly taken them off, and am enjoying many favourable comments from Americans, unfamiliar with their ‘old school’ pointed toe cut; most cowboy boots now, well certainly in Nashville, have that blunt ‘chisel’ toe.

I don’t know if you have ever been here, but it is not really what I expected. Broadway, a half mile strip of honky tonk bars and western wear stores, is a big draw for tourists until the early hours. There are neon western signs, a high proportion of homeless beggars, and very loud country and western music ringing out every inch of the way. A lot of drinking is done here. The principal tipple Fireball whisky, a rather industrial, chilled and peppery spiced whisky, that comes out of tap and is served in plastic shot glasses. It isn’t a sophisticated drink, and I wasn’t impressed with my first one. But it does improve over time, and works well with the rowdy nature of the venues.

Off Broadway there are two Nashvilles. Close to Broadway is a new, shiny, glass and steel one, with very tall  coroporate HQs, upscale hotels, and possibly the world’s biggest convention centre; it takes up six blocks and has a road running through it. Beyond these  are the groovy gentrified suburbs of Hillsboro Village, East Nashville and Belmont 12 South, where the young men sport beards like the Founding Fathers, are often heavily tattooed, and wear designer workwear. You got it – they look and feel like Hoxton and Peckham, except the burgers are bigger and the bars regularly offer more that three dozen draught ales. Good places for vintage clothes, bikes, antiques and vinyl.

My hotel, the Omni, is one of the shiny new tower blocks and wouldn’t be exceptional were it not quite literally joined at the hip to the Country Music Hall of Fame. Shaped like a piano keyboard this is the history of country music under one roof, from the fiddle playing European settlers to the present day. It is already my favourite museum on the planet. Just standing in front of one of Gram Parson’s Nudie suits, with one of Elvis’ Cadillacs over there, and Kris Kristofferson’s original draft of Help Me Make It Through The Night was enough to bring me to tears. Dear Sir Kev, you have to get yourself out here. Around the corner is a Johnny Cash museum where they’ve got his first guitar (he bought it in a secondhand shop in Germany when he was in the army).

There is a lot of gentrification going on, especially in Belmont 12 South.  On one day alone I had brunch in a former car wash, bought a gift for Kim across the road in what used to be a car workshop, and that evening had another Fireball in a former laundry.

I went to Jack White’s shop Third Man Records, in my boots. It’s in an area called The Gulch that is also undergoing something of a revival. Small apartment blocks are going up fast, much like those in London, and former warehouses and industrial workshops are being reinvented as cafes, and reclamation and antique stores. The White Stripe man’s store – decorated in black and yellow – is a bit touristy, and they probably sell more t-shirts than vinyl albums. But I did like the little portable record players on sale. If I didn’t already have two record decks I might have treated myself.

shame you can’t see the boots

I wore my Justins for the tour of the Grand Ole Opry, just off Broadway. It’s one of the few places here you can hear fiddles and accordions . For ten bucks you can hop on stage and have your photo taken. I know.

I am here with a press trip: A mixed bag of journalists from the UK, Ireland, the US and Germany. Among them is Patrick Humphries, whom I worked with some years ago on the Evening Standard’s Ad Lib pop column. Patrick is a walking encyclopedia of music (he’s written a book about Lonnie Donegan) and the only man I know to get even more emotional than me at many of the musical mementos. I thought he was going to collapse when the effusive guide at the Musician’s Hall of Fame handed him one of Jimi Hendrix’s Fender Stratocasters. I declined to hold it fearing a similar reaction, and being reluctant to appear minutes later on You Tube.

It hasn’t all been plain sailing. When Patrick offered to buy me a Jack Daniels, perhaps to stabilise our nerves, the young waitress asked to see our photo IDs. I drew her gaze toward my Justins but she insisted all the same. The legal age from drinking alcohol in Tennessee is 21.

“There was a time when I’d be flattered by that,” said the women at the next table.

Bloody annoying if you ask me Sir Kev.

sunset over Downtown Nashville

It’s not every day you get to walk up a volcano, especially an active one. So I am determined that a drop of rain, fog, and gale force winds aren’t going to put the mockers on my hike to the top of La Soufriere, St.Vincent’s highest point. This is the Caribbean after all, where storms come and go faster than rum punches.

Sailor isn’t so sure. He regularly guides holiday makers to the caldera, and knows that sometimes, where a volcano is concerned, things can go wrong.

“I had to carry a man on my back last week,” he says from behind the wheel of his minibus. “It’s damp up there, and he slipped. It took me an hour and half to get him back.”

I assure him I won’t be any trouble, insisting we stop and buy a quart of Mount Gay. If things go awry on the trail, I say, he has my permission to leave me, and the bottle, behind.

St.Vincent is ‘mainland’ among The Grenadines’ 32 islands. Once prosperous from arrowroot, bananas and sugar, with black sand beaches (that don’t fit into many people’s idea of a picture postcard island holiday), it now finds itself on the back-foot, reeling from the global downturn.

What St.Vincent does have, in truckloads, is an incomparable natural world. There are rain forests, huge waterfalls feeding into tropical lagoons. There are nature trails, and botanical gardens, and salt ponds. There’s the Mesopotamia Valley (itself an ancient caldera), known as the breadbasket of St.Vincent, with soil so mineral rich the crops grow themselves, and of course, there is the big daddy of them all, La Soufriere, the 4000 ft volcano, that last erupted in 1902.

St.Vincent is 11 miles wide and 18 miles from north to south. With my hotel, Young Island – 100 yards off shore and very James Bond circa 70s –  and most of the other  hotels clustered around the south coast, close to the airport and capital Kingstown, and nearly all of the headline natural resources in the north, days out need to start early. With the centre of the island mountainous and impenetrable, the fast roads – ie those with the least potholes and jay walking goats – follow the coast.

Sailor and I set off after breakfast. The drive to the trailhead is expected to take 90 minutes from my hotel in the south. From the clearing, with toilets and a cafe four miles inland at 900 ft, it could take up to two hours to hike to the 1.6 km wide caldera, depending on my fitness level. That’s 3000 ft of hiking, the trail steepening the higher it goes.

“I had this guy the other week, he was over 300lbs,” says Sailor. “I looked at him and told him the trail gets tough and I wouldn’t recommend he attempt it. He got cross and insisted. He gave up after 10 minutes. “If you’re not into hiking and steady walking it’s not for you.”

Our drive passes Argyle where the groundwork has been laid for a proposed international airport – if they can raise the capital to complete the job, and a string of black beaches populated by  egrets. There are stalls selling root crops, dasheen, eddoes and yams, and calalou used in soups, and men holding up bags of tiny fish called tritri. Compared to the west coast road, a serpentine track through countless villages, this one is fast. We pass Black Point, one of the locations used in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, where Sailor’s trips sometimes stop for a picnic.  Minutes later we pull over outside Ferdies Bar, in Georgetown, and while Sailor arranges for our packed lunches I drink a glass of iced Mauby, a dry, taupe coloured infusion made from tree bark. Georgetown was the capital under British rule and the buildings have something of a stout, satanic, 19th century colliery town about them.

Close to the turn off inland Sailor shakes his head. When the wide Rabacca River here is this swollen it’s a sign the volcano trail is impassable. He purses his lips and looks to the darkness of the mountains  directly ahead. This is Carib country, the part of St.Vincent inhabited by South American indians who migrated to the Grenadines nearly 1000 years ago.

The trail turns out to be  tougher than I’d expected. After a mulchy walk along a forested ridge the gradient tightens with flights of slippery wooden steps cut into the side of the volcano. I’ve heard there are dreads up here cultivating marijuana. Right now, already tired, and the caldera shrouded in fog, the last thing I need is to be confronted by a whacked out stoned mountain men with a mistrust of outsiders. Every sound makes me twitch and I’m glad Sailor is with me.

We’ve been walking for 40 minutes, and making good time, when I see three hooded shapes emerging from the mist, each carrying a heavy load. Their heads are down and I can’t see their faces. “I wouldn’t go any further,” says a voice.

It belongs to Robert Watts, an English  volcanologist, based in Trinidad. He and his team had been attempting to install sensors – volcano detectors – in the  river bed, further up the trail. But the weather had proved to much, even for them, and they are turning back.

“Other volcanos let you know in advance when they’re about to go,”says Watts. “But this one – it  might only give a month’s warning.”

The team tarry while Watts explains the difference between volcanos that explode and those that ooze; it all depends on how fast the gas escapes, and without sensors there’s no way of knowing. The next minute they’re gone, leaving Sailor and I to ruminate on what might have been.

We return to the trailhead, with frigate birds circling overhead, and enjoy our lunch from the comfort of the picnic area, La Soufriere drifting in and out of the clouds.