Many storefronts on Nantucket’s Main Street are now home to real estate offices. There’s no digital signage on our tightly regulated island, instead agencies hang framed photos of houses currently on the market. Each morning, when I walk past these picture windows papered with listings, I imagine what the builders of these houses, some dead more than two hundred years now, would think if they knew something they’d knocked together had an asking price in the double-digit millions.
There’s a lot I’d like to ask the people who used to live in this place.
Things have eased up a bit on the island such that I was able to get away to Provincetown, my hometown and one a few places worth the hassle of leaving Nantucket, towards the end of September. Ever since I moved back this way, I’ve tried to stay in interesting places I wondered about as a child. This time, it was Captain Jack’s Wharf in Provincetown’s west end. Only the uniform Days’ Cottages on Beach Point might be more photographed than this rambling cluster of cottages and rooms that stretch out along a 200-foot wharf jutting into Provincetown Harbor.
Long ago, there was a real Captain Jack, Jackson Williams. A fisherman, Jack built the wharf in 1897 and later rented out the cabins to tourists and members of the summer artist’s colony. Perhaps the most famous seasonal resident was Tennessee Williams, who spent time on the wharf in the 1940s.
Growing up, I lived on Mechanic Street, a quarter mile from Captain Jack’s Wharf. In the winter, when that wharf and much of the west end was boarded up for the season, I’d wander around, the bright green cottages in brilliant contrast to the endless expanse of gray sky and sea.
There are many parts of Cape Cod I don’t recognize anymore. There are even parts of Nantucket that have changed, seemingly overnight. But Captain Jack’s Wharf, like the horseshoe crabs who troll under it, has stayed roughly the same. Even the new pilings underneath are sistered to old wood. I slept there, not on the water’s edge, but instead, suspended above it.
I wondered, how long before the present becomes the past? The tide changes every six hours. I have been alive for more than 26,000 tides.
The water was cold, but I was determined to jump off the dock at the end of the wharf, as I had seen so many people do summer after summer. I swam around the wharf, to the West End Racing Club, an unassuming building along the waterfront where I learned to sail along with all the other kids in town.
The world looks different from the water. The street noise quiets; there is more light spilling down than there is along the narrow canyon of Commercial Street. I felt stronger in the cold water than I do on Nantucket; the Gulf Stream is thinning my blood. Memory is a stronger current, one that can pull you down to the depths.
At night, I could hear the low, warbling cries of seals out near Long Point. Gulielmo Marconi, the inventor of the wireless telegraph, and namesake of the nearby beach in Wellfleet, came to believe late in his life that no sound ever really dies. It just becomes harder for the human ear to hear. With a powerful enough machine, he believed you could hear all the lost sounds. If you listened back far enough, you could hear the the staccato sound of a hammer constructing one of those ancient Nantucket homes, or the snap of a whaleship’s sails as it got underway. Of course, he turned out to be wrong.
I fell asleep to the sound of the wind, obliterating all other memories.
