Every group of people, every place, has it own economy of belonging, and in each new place, in order to show you’re not dangerous, you have to spend the local currency. Otherwise the locals may murder you, or refuse to feed you, or somehow shun you according to their custom. Every summer for about five summers, my younger brother worked at a hotel on an island off the New Hampshire coast, which you get to by taking a ferry from Portsmouth 10 miles out until the mainland appears as a sliver of land. Then, just as you think you’re headed for open ocean, the great white bulk of the island and its assorted clapboard outbuildings suddenly rise up, stretched across the rock of the island and its primrose thickets.

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