Mary Bergman
Mary Bergman's title is "Contributor, A Cape Cod Notebook"Originally from Provincetown, Mary now lives on Nantucket. She is a writer and historian, working in historic preservation and writing a novel.
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In this week's Cape Cod Notebook, Mary Bergman talks about October on Nantucket -
In this week's episode of A Cape Cod Notebook, Mary Bergman shares how she finds light in the depth of winter. -
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We are past the solstice, and I am trying not to get too down about it. The fog that rolls in each night is a welcome break from the heat. -
Isn’t everything we make temporary in the grand scheme of things? My day to day work is to promote historic preservation on Nantucket. We talk about preserving things in perpetuity. But on an eroding pile of sand, perpetuity is a relative term. -
We are running out of space at the Nantucket landfill. I spent the winter driving by dumpsters, unable to stop myself from looking over the edge. -
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. -
My father stands in the doorway of Henry David Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond. Of course, there is no cabin anymore, instead the cabin’s footprint is marked with narrow granite stones, giving the whole place an unintended funerary feeling. -
After years of watching people leave Nantucket during the winter, I decided I wanted to be one of them. Not for the whole winter, just for a week -
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.
