At the end of December, one of the Cape’s newspapers ran a special nostalgia issue. On the front page was Joel Meyerowitz’s iconic photograph of one of the Days Cottages on Beach Point in North Truro. You’ve probably driven by this neat row of identical cottages — white siding with green trim and shutters, each named for a different flower. The only indication the photo was taken decades ago in 1976 (and not last summer) was the car, now a classic, parked in front.
Behind the cottage is a blue sky, a cluster of passing cotton candy clouds. The house is illuminated in brilliant pure light. That “Cape Light” as made famous by Meyerowitz’s photo book of the same name, remains unchanged today.
The point of the issue, as I understood it, was to interrogate the idea of nostalgia. Why do so many people on Cape Cod long for the past? Why, in general, do people yearn for a time they didn’t live through, and one that might not have existed at all? Why — besides those tantalizingly low real estate prices — would anyone want to go back in time?
I imagine nostalgia as a weather event, a thick fog that settles and only burns off on days when the sun is strong enough. After my six-year-old nephew asked me if I wanted to look at photos of the construction of the Cape Cod Canal with him, I started to wonder if one might not be genetically predisposed to nostalgia.
Those immune to this condition think nostalgics believe the past was inherently better. Not true. I think we are searching for ourselves in the past. Sometimes, literally. There’s a man in New Jersey who runs a popular social media page called Old Nantucket Slides where he purchases old slides on eBay and posts them online. Thousands of people comb through these vestiges of forgotten vacations. We try to identify which street that house is on, or who the woman with the blonde bob is who shows up in a series of images.
Most of these images were captured by tourists, people passing through our part of the world. Their slides ended up at thrift stores and estate sales in New England or further afield in land-locked parts of the country. The person entering the information onto eBay can’t tell MacMillian Wharf in Provincetown from Old North Wharf on Nantucket from Motif No 1 in Rockport, but we can.
Occasionally, there are people we do recognize — an old fisherman on the wharf, a basket maker sitting on a bench. Not only is a nostalgic view of the past, but it’s a vacationer’s view of the past. A double dose of nostalgia, as seen through the eyes of someone who might have only spent a day here, but hung onto those slides the rest of their lives.
It is not lost on me that so much of today’s nostalgia relies on the internet. The slides are purchased online, flea markets are few and far between these days. Then, they are posted to Instagram. We are gathered in a virtual living room, looking at someone else’s memories that might soon become our own. All that’s missing is the sound of the carousel advancing, the hum of the projector’s motor, and the sound of drinks being poured in the kitchen.
I guess you had to be there.
