This weeks essay is a personal one. I ask you to think creatively.

How do you suppose someone growing up on Nantucket is different from someone growing up on the mainland?

Think creatively. The main difference between the mainland and here involves travel. How does that limit change things out here.

For example, since the travel is so difficult, wages are artificially high out here. Almost noone works for minimum wage.

Further, since travel is so difficult, there are very few corporations based out here. As a result, most of the high paying

jobs do not involve college degrees.

After you have written the journal entry, structure the essay out.

Intro: Anecdote

Money

Familiarity

Safety and Mediocrity

Conclusion

You need to use some sort of comparison in your essay. It is easiest to use a simile. For example, you might say that

“Nantucketers are like sea gulls, bred to a harder life in the ocean.”

Or, you could use a metaphor.

“Nantucketers are the kings of the world, emperors of the oceans.”

For this essay, I suggest you tell a story that illustrates your main point. If you look at my essay, I start off with a story about Nantucketers. It illustrates my final point, but it doesn’t explain it.

The following essay assignment is due on Friday.

How do you suppose someone growing up on Nantucket is different from someone growing up on the mainland?

This essay must have the following elements.

Typed

One page

No egregious grammar or spelling errors

Structure

One simile/metaphor

One hyperbole

I will be grading this essay on these elements

Creative thinking

Specifics

Grace

The following is a model essay.

Now, we look out the school windows into the early September haze and wait for word on the first graduates to drop out of college. One by one, a group of them will pack up their dorm rooms and wait for their parents to pick them up and bring them back to the island. They seem to come back with a look of shame, but also a sigh of relief. They are back home.

Kids who grow up on Nantucket develop far differently from kids on the mainland. They are birds in a beautiful cage, kept from the torments and the treasures of outside life. The difference comes not so much from the weather or from all of the summer tourists as it comes from the simple island fact of distance; Nantucket is a long way from the rest of the island.

The distance brings a great blessing. Nantucketers can make far more money than any of their counterparts on the mainland. If you make subs or flip burgers in Randolph, you get paid 4.75 an hour. Out here, the same work will pay you 7-10 dollars per hour, plus tips. As a result, Nantucketers have more money in their pockets for clothes, cars, and everything else. On the other hand, kids grow up thinking that they could live all their lives as a mason’s helper, making twenty bucks an hour. Because they pay so much more, they are much more attractive.

Distance also prevents a lot of strange faces for most of the year. For nine months, islanders can count on seeing the same faces day after day. So, you trust everyone more because you know a great deal about them. Noone is likely to take the golf clubs out of my jeep because they know whose jeep it is. At the same time, that insulation makes people more tolerant of racism and prejudice. We are more likely to explain it by saying “That’s just Bill’s way” without blaming Bill for it.

So, if you combine the familiarity and the easy money, you get an island that is on one hand very safe, but on the other hand, mediocre. We are safe because we take care of our own out here and protect those we know and love. At our best, this means that we can help sick and lost kids go home. At our worst, this means we cover up drug deals. Because we are so safe, we don’t feel the pressure to extend ourselves. We don’t feel the need to be serious about off-island work, because we can always come back and sell t-shirts. We may never get rich that way, but we can count on being relatively happy.

With the rapid influx of big money in the last ten years, the safety of the island has changed. We are closer to the mainland thanks to ferries and flights. We can no longer count on fifty dollar an hour landscaping jobs to take us through the winter. The great travelling international workforce has found the high wages of Nantucket. Russians, Bulgarians, Mexicans, and Jamaicans are taking some of the low level jobs. Nantucketers in the next century will have to find a way to keep the cage gilded.