Growing up in Provincetown, I used to hear people talk about coming down with a case of “August-itus.” This wasn’t a stomach flu or a respiratory infection, but rather a name for the exhaustion that accompanies our region’s busiest month of the year. The great writer and labor activist Mary Heaton Vorce was, best I can tell, the first to define “Augustitus” in print in her 1942 work Time and the Town: A Provincetown Chronicle.
Vorce wrote: “The town is alive, moving in a deep stream which sometimes overflows. The mixture of summer people and town gets too strong and goes off in a roar. People get a disease called Augustitus when the mixture gets too rich. There comes a time when the combination of sea and the sweeping color of the dunes—the exciting and excited people who get together on the beach and the heady salt air of Provincetown—all combine to give one a special sort of intoxication.”
Mary was writing about Provincetown, but all of us on the Cape and Islands have found ourselves fighting a bout of Augustitus at one time or another. I’ve been thinking about Mary’s words as I dodge tourists and cars on my bike as we find ourselves in the thick of another overpopulated August.
I return to Mary Heaton Vorce’s Time and The Town every summer because every complaint I have ever had about a place becoming too commercialized, too overbuilt, too scrubbed up, too ironed out, well, Mary had back in 1942.
The first two weeks of August are Nantucket’s busiest weeks, so they say, when year-rounders are outnumbered by tourists approximately 2-to-1. I’m working for myself this summer, the first summer in 25 years I have not had to report daily to somebody else. It has been a bit of an adjustment, and has given me more time to observe the vacationers and their ways.
Nantucket’s been in the national news lately for a little dustup between a local antique shop and an influencer—which is not a word I ever thought I’d say on CAI airwaves. I’ll spare you the details, but ultimately the question was one of who has the right to profit from Nantucket. Folks out here have spent decades cultivating and protecting our largest non-renewable resource, our sense of place. In the summer, many of us are relegated to little more than stagehands in the production of somebody else’s perfect vacation.
Mary Heaton Vorce described Augustitus as a “special sort of intoxication.” People are tired, they are overwhelmed, but they are also enthralled by the “exciting and excited people.” “The town is alive,” she wrote, and we are, too. This is it, the moment we have been rehearsing for all winter. The stage lights are on, and they are bright enough to blind.
I do love when the island is alive like this. I feel it in every moonrise, every jellyfish sting, and every time I get on my bicycle and sail down the hill, feeling, for a moment, as free as I ever have been. We might be outnumbered 2-to-1, but I bet we’ll be just a little sad in a few weeks when the final curtain falls on another island summer.
