A few weekends ago, word got out that there was a shipwreck down on the South Shore. A man walking had posted a photo online, a few slanting poles in the sand the only indicator of exactly where on Nantucket’s 80 miles of coastline this shipwreck sat.
It was there all along, at least as long as any of us today have been alive. And probably more than a hundred years before that. Under our towels and beach umbrellas, under Coleman coolers, under dogs in winter and the silver bellies of seals, hauled out in the slanting sunlight. Under teenagers and beer bottles and summer cops on ATVs. Under our feet was a shipwreck, covered in sand.
Anybody who remembered the old wooden ship was there is gone now. They are probably also underground, in Prospect Hill Cemetery.
We stood on the strip in front of Young’s Bicycles, looking at the photo and checking the tides. It was the Saturday of Christmas Stroll, the wind surging. Dressed in fur coats, Santa hats, and ugly Christmas sweaters, hundreds of people poured off the first fast ferry of the day. I headed out in search for the wreck before I got swept away in a tidal wave of holiday cheer.
I called a friend on the Cape, who seemed unimpressed: “This sort of thing happens in Truro all the time.”
Over the next week, people flocked to the shipwreck the way you would a beached whale. The two are not dissimilar — hulking creatures from another time, things most of us have only read about in history books.
The last time I had been out this way was in early summer, the sand was warm but the air had a chill to it. You could walk along an old jeep trail from one beach to the next. Now, the path has been ripped open by the sea. In other words: you can’t get there from here.
The sand reclaimed the wreck quickly; in a week, it was already half-buried once again. Another fissure is beginning to form in the dune, helped along by onlookers visiting the wreck.
The ribs of the old ship arced across the beach, the timbers worn by sea and sand. You could immediately understand why the island, and the rest of the seaboard, was once dotted with life-saving stations and spartan life-saving huts. To a shipwrecked sailor, a dry wool blanket and a roof over his head must have seemed like divine intervention.
And speaking of stranded sailors, many of those Christmas strollers, who stared the day so merrily, found themselves stuck on Nantucket after the boats canceled around mid-day. The same wind and waves that had conspired to reveal the ancient shipwreck kept today’s ferries in port.
Our world today, even on Nantucket, is modern and convenient. All it takes is a couple of windy days to remind us that our past is never that far away.
