I spent many years as an objective observer of this place. An academic, a historian, a researcher. On my better days, an anthropologist or some kind of gonzo documentarian, snapping pictures and recording my observations on the yellow legal pads I took everywhere, even the beach. Nantucket was a place I could understand as long as I kept everything at an arm’s length. Better to stay involved with the history of a place than the goings on of today. I carried that history like armor to protect against the present. If I could memorize everyone else’s story, I wouldn’t have to think much about my own.
Well, I was on the phone with an architectural historian who has studied Nantucket for decades. He asked how I’d been and I told him the truth: I’d recently bought a pickup truck, which I’d been thinking was the sign of an early-onset midlife crisis.
“Oh, Mary!” he exclaimed, “You’re not having a midlife crisis. You’ve just gone native.”
Indeed. Took me ten years but I think I have done it. Beside the 2013 Tacoma I’m now a proud second owner of, I’ve wandered the moors and made my way out without getting too deeply lost. Gone native is a phrase used to describe ethnographers who get too entrenched in the culture they’re studying. People on Nantucket still use the word native to describe those born here, fiercely so. You see the bumper stickers that proudly tout “Nantucket Natives on Board!” (I’ve threatened to buy that one and stick it on said truck, as I drive so many natives around these days.) Or, the more cutting: Nantucket Native: Endangered Species.
According to my birth certificate, I am a native of Scituate, Massachusetts. I know nothing about the place, except it shows up on the Boston news channels whenever there’s a particularly bad storm. We moved to Provincetown when I was three, and that is the place I say I am from because it is the place that sunk its claws into me and shaped me the most into who I am, the place I lived the longest. Nantucket is now running a close second.
In both Provincetown and Nantucket, people are very prideful of being natives. Though, most people are not born in Provincetown anymore, as they are born in Hyannis at Cape Cod Hospital. Washashore is a funny word, one that still cuts me deep depending on who hurls it in my direction. It is the sort of word one washashore can say to another, but if somebody born on this island lets it slip in regards to me, I recoil a bit.
Then again, plenty of fascinating things wash ashore out here. Seaglass: rare and tumbled smooth. Ships, wrecked asunder on sandbars provided lumber for many Nantucket homes. In 1997, the island’s beaches were spotted with wrapped candies after a Polish container ship lost its cargo in high winds. People tell me about the 1980s, when 300 pounds of a controlled substance—now perfectly legal in Massachusetts—washed ashore. (Save the bales, the t-shirts read.)
I can’t explain why I feel this strong pull to belong to a place, to be accepted, to be seen as somebody indispensable. I keep working at it. And now I have a pickup truck, one that passed inspection, and one that takes me over the sand, all the way to Great Point. I haven’t gotten stuck in the sand yet, but there’s still plenty of time.