The other day I took some old friends up to Great Point. The weather wasn’t particularly good — Nantucket in March, we kept grumbling. I don’t think they’d mind me saying old friends, as it’s true. Both are older than me by a mile, and they don’t get around as easily as they once did. The sky threatened rain and the clouds were blocking any favorable afternoon light. The heat in my truck works intermittently, often flickering off only when we really need it. Still, we scrambled into the green machine and headed out for sandier pastures.
As the truck bounced over the sand, Everybody Knows This is Nowhere playing over the sound system, I thought about all the other times I’d been out over the Coskata-Coatue refuge. Years ago, nobody I knew had the money for a reliable vehicle, let alone a truck that could go over the sand. Instead, I tried walking to Great Point a handful of times. Each attempt was thwarted by mosquitoes. I wrote about one of those attempts and Scott Leonard who used to run the Marine Mammal Alliance heard the essay and invited me out with the crew to check on stranded seals.
I have always been captivated by Coskata-Coatue, as it is the landscape that reminds me the most of Provincetown, my hometown. I suppose Great Point is also as close as you can get to Cape Cod, only 11 miles from the tip of Monomoy Island in Chatham.
There have been many other trips out to Coatue and Great Point, mostly in the beat-up old trucks of my friend’s fathers, old Nantucketers who have been kind enough to loan out their workhorses for a few hours on the weekend and didn’t seem to mind that the vehicle returned with more pinstripes than it had when we set out.
So it feels particularly meaningful to be in a position where I can take people out to Great Point. My passengers that day were an island photographer and one of our best birders. I kept marveling at how great their eyesight was.
“Two Oystercatchers,” he said, pointing along the shoreline. And, lo and behold, there was a pair of Oystercatchers, their bright orange beaks popping against the endless haze along the water. One carried some kind of mollusk — a quahog, maybe? — in its beak. We all agreed it looked like a good lunch. As we continued our quest, the birder pointed out, rapid fire, every bird that came our way.
As always on these winter excursions across the sand, every plastic bag caught in the scrub got our hopes up that it might be a snowy owl. (It never was.)
Heading up across the Galls, the photographer spotted a lighted bell buoy tossed ashore on the harbor side.
“See it?” she asked, gesturing towards the inside of the hook that forms Nantucket Harbor.
I didn’t, and had to strain my eyes to find the little green dot on the horizon. The birder raised his binoculars and read off the bell buoy’s identification: 21A. We looked on our phones to see, where, exactly, this floating light tower had drifted in from. Was it that their vision was so much better than mine, or that that they just knew what to look for? Another older friend told me recently that one of the most important lessons she’d learned in life was that when things felt impossible, directionless, you should just keep looking.
We didn’t actually get to the Great Point Lighthouse. Like so many trips out there, wind and tide conspired against us, and the Trustees had closed off the last turn that would take you to the lighthouse. We lamented our luck. I tried to turn around, but, without much clearance, very nearly got stuck. We’d all been worried about getting stuck, because I would be the only one could could dig us out. In fact, most of the stories we told on the ride up all involved getting stuck out here, harrowing rescues, and incoming tides. I was starting to think we’d brought this on by speaking it into existence.
The photographer and the birder talked me through it. Line your wheels up straight if you have to back up at all. We (me) can always jump out and let out more air.
“Above all else,” the birder told me, “don’t give in to panic.”
And so, I didn’t. Give in to panic, that is. This time. We got through some pillowy soft sand, found our way back to the inside track, and, eventually, back to the pavement.
I followed the Polpis Road towards town, limping along on 15 PSI, and I thought of all that’s out there that I still can’t quite see.
