Goodbye to All That

For our family, owning a cottage at eastern end of Nantucket was an emotional investment. It was about making a summer home in a place that we loved for all the things that it wasn’t.  It wasn’t the Hamptons. It wasn’t fancy or formal or famous.  It wasn’t pretentious or ostentatious.  It wasn’t exclusive or exotic. It wasn’t easy to get to. It was never easy to leave.

 Surrounded by the Atlantic, it was a place brimming with simple joys.  It was a place where people named their houses and a lighthouse beam flashing in your window at night, didn’t keep you awake.   It was a place where we learned that honeysuckle does taste like honey, deer don’t eat daffodils, and laughing gulls really do laugh. It was a place where the bird feeder stayed full much longer as there were no squirrels and we could daily watch the sun and the moon rise out of the sea.  Here we learned that it’s easier to take a bike than a car and how much more you can see when you walk on the shore and leave your jeep behind.   At night, with the window open, the salty air was scented with rosa rugosa and you could hear the waves breaking on the shore. Fireflies sparkled in the privet.  If you turned off the porch light you could see the whole Milky Way.

 We predicted the weather like mariners. Red sky at night sailor’s delight, red sky at morning, sailors take warning. The southeast breezes were warm and fair, and the northeast winds meant three days of foul weather gear.  Blankets of fog came in at the end of the day and kept us covered through the night.  At dusk the cottontails would emerge to nibble the clover, the deer would browse the day lilies, and the old squaw made their daily trip from the open ocean to the harbor. Fields filled with daisies bloomed all the summer long and we made endless bouquets and crowns from them. We gathered blueberries for pies, beach plums for jelly, rose hips for tea and hydrangea blossoms for confetti.  We would rake at low tide for scallops or steamers and collect surf clam shells for soap dishes and ashtrays. We watched for red tail hawks and harriers hunting and blue herons roosting at the edges of the ponds.  Snapping turtles’ heads poked out of the water like periscopes and watched us as we crabbed from the bridges.  We would cast for bluefish in the surf and lie on our backs watching for shooting stars after sunset. Some nights we would skinny dip in the ocean’s effervescence.

It was a place where your neighbors knew you and everyone in your family.   It was a place where many had lived for most of their lives, some for generations. It was a place where I found I could feel happy again, orphaned at the age of ten, in the care of my stepmother’s family.  A city child, I found solace and safety with the sand between my toes, as the island seemed to change and remain the same.  As a young naïve bride I gave my spouse a sundial for our garden that was inscribed “Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be.” Then, I could only imagine that we would always spend our summers there, passing on to our children the legacy of living in wonder by the sea.

Now we have seen that waves of affluence can cause more erosion to an island community than any hundred-year storm ever could.  The morning call of the bobwhite and the evensong of the surf have been replaced by a cacophony of power equipment.  The beaches and moors are littered with the remains of bonfires and parties. The narrow lanes and even the shorelines have been overwhelmed by vehicular traffic. The ponds and harbors have been polluted by fertilizer run off and seeping septic systems while private jet engines roar day and night overhead.

It has been a slow and painful loss, like the Alzheimer’s disease that wore away my stepmother’s memory.  For a while we anchored against the current, hoping the tide would change, before we realized that we would drown in sorrow if we stayed. I don’t know how you can encourage people to be stewards, to love a place without loving it to death.  Sometimes I wish I had never fallen in love with Nantucket, even though I know it is always better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all.   

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