Firm against the wind

From the Register, By Glenn Ritt
Thursday, May 8, 2003
I went to Nantucket to view the wind farm controversy from a different direction.

The crossing was accompanied by a speeding front that converted summer visions to April reality. Fog - like an alchemist's stew- appeared across rising waves, and I imagined myself a lone mariner navigating among wind towers that spiraled hundreds of feet above a roaring tempest.

For the first time, I could understand a fisherman's incredulity that 21st century structures might rise someday from waters that so intimately inhabit an individual soul.

Hours later, in a Nantucket auditorium, a succession of similar souls was captured by a somber stenographer under the watchful eyes of Army engineers. One after another, these islanders wove a story of past, present and future that understated issues of global warming or energy independence, deferring instead to more modest dreams of preservation.

Maybe it was Nantucket's ode to isolation; its defiant cobblestone streets; its communal respect for night's darkness. But here, to the south and east of my Cape Cod home, I discovered how an islander's mind can defy the march of progress.

The battle for our waters will be waged with weapons far more powerful than the poetry of an islander. This wind farm war has escalated to distant shores occupied by congressmen and senators, governors and attorneys, General Electric and the president's own cabinet.

But amid the lobbying and propaganda, the fears of lost property values and tourist dollars, listen closely to murmurs of the heart.

At night, from the shores of Siasconset, the Milky Way caresses the moonless night. It's why generations secure their homes here and others join them from noisier places.

As they address developers from Long Island and engineers from Concord, each wonders aloud how wind tower lights, erected 400 feet above the waters of a winter's night, might obscure a coveted path toward the heavens.

A grizzled fisherman, his beard shaped to resemble Ahab's, is the last to testify. He wears a heavy, black leather jacket that extends nearly to his knees. His ramrod posture is betrayed ever so slightly by jittery fingers extending to the floor. His language is constructed by passion more than words.

The story, he suggests, is not about technology; it's about that most endangered of places - one still constructed of brick sidewalks and myth; one defined by veils of fog and the certainty of sunsets.

It isn't about resistance to change, either. Not here.

It is about reverence to custom and nature, an instinct constructed of generations, preserved by the permeable sea that instructs this island to stand firm against the wind.