Nantucket islanders are a different breed, and they know it

NANTUCKET, Mass. — Brian Borgeson, a giant, red-haired, freckled charter boat captain, says that you may have to be a billionaire to live on this island nowadays.

"Look at the kids in town. You don’t see any Celtics tank tops like you would on Martha’s Vineyard," he says. "Here it’s just little sailor suits and $400 shoes. It’s hilarious and wonderful. Being on the island at all is like being in an exclusive club. It’s 25 miles out here in the middle of the ocean. You can’t even get here if you’re not wealthy."

For my first visit to Nantucket, I take the Grey Lady, the high-speed catamaran from Hyannis. I sit on the top deck drinking beer and soaking up the salt spray as the ship hurtles across the sound. Then there it is, flat and beach-bound Nantucket, a 47-square-mile pile of sand, scrubby trees, and rose-covered shingled everything.

The ferry docks at Straight Wharf. The village looks like the centerpiece of a living history museum or the campus of a small New England liberal arts college on parents weekend. Everything is scrubbed and blooming and preserved in the glory days of pre-traffic lights and pre-asphalt and pre-chain stores. And there are shops, not for necessities, unless what you need is a $700 fishing reel, or an oil painting of dunes and breaking waves.

Passengers from the boat head their separate ways. They walk to their inns or are picked up in hotel vans or by sun-bleached girlfriends in beach buggies toting surfboards and surfcasting rods. I look for the scooter rental shop. Walking through town, it is unnerving to see two police officers on every block. And then I realize that they are unarmed.

I rent a scooter and ride up and down the cobblestone streets. The stones were ballast on ships that delivered whale oil to England and the Pacific. Many of the streets are one way, and I head south out of town and chug along to Surfside and the Hostelling International-Nantucket, also known as the Star of the Sea Hostel.

The hostel, originally the Surfside Lifesaving Station (built in 1873) is at the end of a dead-end sandy road overlooking the dunes. Starting at $32 a night, it is by far the least expensive lodging on the island. It’s wonderfully out of the way and architecturally interesting and very nice if you don’t mind sharing a buggy second-story dorm room with dozens of teenage bike trippers and their groovy trip leaders.

I drop off my stuff and ride back into town. The people that I see look alike (tall and tan and blond and lovely) and are dressed similarly in a sort of preppy Nantucket uniform.

For dinner I wander into LoLa Burger, the techno-music-pumping, tile-lined, fancy new burger stand. I sit on the dock watching the squid squirt around the harbor, and I eat slowly: slender french fries and a big greasy cheeseburger with mustard, ketchup, mayonnaise, and pickles.

Later, on the scratchy sheets and twin bed of the hostel dorm, I fall asleep to the sound of the surf and the private planes flying overhead.

The bicycling boys have strange voices changing from child to man. I hear them until late in the evening, killing moths with wet towels.

In the morning I scoot into town and head to the docks to meet Borgeson, whom everybody calls "Boomer" or "Boombastic." He’s about to head out on his boat, the Absolute, with a group of guys from New York — a cop, an actor and a Mercedes dealer. He invites me along.

Borgeson guides the boat out of the harbor, past the yachts and the sunbathers on the yacht decks, and cruises by the "old-school cottages" on Great Point where he says people come to watch the sun rise and set, and to grill fish, and to eat outside.

He cruises along the island’s southeast shore, Siasconset, or Sconset as it is known, where $10 million houses with big views may fall into the ocean because the cliffs are eroding. The homeowners want to spend millions of their own money to dredge millions of cubic yards of sand from a few miles offshore and pump it onto a 3-plus-mile stretch of beach. Borgeson and the other fishermen have fought them because they say the dredging would ruin the best spot for striped bass fishing on the rare cobble bottom just offshore.

Borgeson stops the boat and on the fish finder we can see the structure, the bumps and boulders, and on the surface the bluefish are swirling, and so the lines go in. The bluefish bite, and the New Yorkers reel them in.

And then Borgeson heads offshore to the outer rips where the depth drops and there are standing waves and 6 knots of current, and before long they are reeling in 30-pound stripers that spin and snap 80-pound leaders. "You can feel the energy here," Borgeson says. "It’s like being in Times Square."

Back on the dock Borgeson unloads the fish, and his mate cleans them. Jamaican women, seasonal workers most of them, come out of nowhere and clamor for the fish to make soup or escabeche.

An hour later I’m eating supper at Straight Wharf Restaurant and then board the ferry for home. Weekenders switch their cellphones back on to check messages. Children finger string bracelets and temporary tattoos.

One last Bloody Mary and the sun sets over the sound.