As a resident of Nantucket and the husband of a native, I read Mr. Shutkinπs Op-Ed with great interest. While he laments the Nantucket that has disappeared, I am not sure if he is familiar with the one still off the south-east coast. Perhaps he should visit the island more often.

The ≥Cheaper by the Dozen≤ Nantucket has indeed washed away into history, but the Island mentality he decries is not one practiced by most islanders. Out here, nature and the economy never let us forget that we are our own little commonwealth. Our connection to the mainland remains troubled, but our connection to each other is vital and vibrant. We find housing for each other, we buy and sell to one another, we listen to each otherπs concerns, and then we argue like seagulls.

As to his three points, Mr. Shutkin could have profited from a few more winter weekends. First, Nantucket will never have affordable housing the way that Wakefield has affordable housing. For every young couple who wants to buy a starter home out here, there are five from Connecticut who want a summer place. Further 40B developments are pure money grabs for the developers. They will build 5 affordable houses if they can build and sell 20 for more than a million. Nantucket has started several radical ideas for affordable housing, including Senate Bill 2006, the enabling legislation for the Nantucket Housing Needs Covenant.

Second, the Wind Farm has been a staple of coffee shop and Internet chatter with the conversation evenly split between supporters of corporate power and opponents of land giveaways. Noone, however, has suggested that the Wind Farm will produce energy just for the Cape and the Islands. Instead, it will be sold off on the National Grid. Windmills on Horseshoe Shoal will power air conditioners in Houston. But if someone else can produce electricity more cheaply (like a coal or nuclear plant) those windmills will become an aquatic Stonehenge. Glen Canyon Dam is a similar man-made bauble.

Finally, the SUVπs of Nantucket do indeed hog the roads and the beaches of the island. Many of them, Shutkin will note, do not carry Massachusettsπ plates. However, many islanders do have four-wheel drive cars and need them. This spring, many of our paved roads flooded, buckled and washed away. This winter, we picked up the same snow everyone else in Massachusetts got, but with one or two functioning plows. That rusty jeep might not make it out of a few potholes. A pickup in Cambridge may never go into four-wheel drive, but my car spent a month in it.

Nantucket has more than its share of problems, brought on by burgeoning growth, 34 miles of ocean, and limited land, but among the winter population at least, lack of community isnπt one of them. True, it is an argumentative, impolite, loud community, but it is our community. We fight about housing, cars, the Steamship, the beaches, the dump, the hospital, and the superintendent, but every one of us very much cares about the island and the community. We care so much that we yell ourselves hoarse. However, Nantucket remains a place where, if you lost your wallet on Main Street, you could pick it up unmolested at the police station.

Ahabπs mad pursuit was not to right wrongs but to prove that man had dominion over nature. It was, after all, the ≥inscrutable thing≤ that Ahab hated. The rest of the Pequod, however, knew that they were bound together in their boats by whale line and subject to its whims. Todayπs Nantucketers do better by learning from the crew than by mimicking the Captain.