I have been thinking about driving across the country, wanting to see big skies and deserts. Maybe it’s a little paradoxical for someone who has built their life in a town that fits on a postage stamp to be drawn to vastness. We’re all on top of each other out here on Nantucket, lives overlapping and entangling, except in the ocean. Diving into the water, being completely engulfed in another element is as close as I can come to traveling to an alien planet. I have oriented my life around this feeling. I suppose there are crazier things to devote yourself to than salt water.
My beach these days is a beautiful ghost town. There are no tumbleweeds, just herring gulls grown fat from a steady diet of French fries and sandwiches plucked right out of hands too slick with sunscreen to hold on tight.
The sun is still warm, but slipping earlier, and we turn to face it, wanting to catch each fading ray.
I don’t notice the shift in the light until it is too late in the season. Not that I could stop it. Not that I can stop anything. The night coming earlier means more bonfires dotting the coastline, makeshift cowboys gathered closer to the glow, the last embers of summer still firing.
Nantucket is feeling bigger these days. On the Tuesday after Labor Day, I was the only person in the water off Surfside. Planes departed, so many I wondered how they all fit on the runway, each puncturing the silence with their jet engines as they soared far away from here. I waved, and if anybody was looking out the right-hand cabin windows, that was my hand extended above the endless stretch of blue green.
Later that day, town was eerily quiet, golden sunlight falling in shafts. A friend declared it the last beautiful day of the summer, which I thought was premature. I’m going to squeeze every last drop out of these warm days. It’ll be dark soon. But there are bonfires and blankets and brilliant stars speckled across the sky. And the roar of jets will be replaced with the buzz of Cessnas. The gulls will get lean. No matter what I do, I will be woken up by the ferry whistle at 6:30 in the morning, and pull the covers over my head. Just five more minutes. Don’t leave yet.
