I think we are through the thick of it, the high point of summer out here on Nantucket. Most people regard the second Saturday in August, the day the Boston Pops play the Island, as the busiest weekend of the year.
There are still places to slip away to, where few people go, if you know where to look. We were looking for a certain pine tree, twisted by the wind. Snow fencing, a golf ball. And I was looking for the fox grapes I will come back and pick in September.
I can’t slow down, it seems. This summer, I feel like I have been in near constant motion, usually on my bike and sometimes kayak, trying to stay a few steps ahead of the usual racing thoughts. This has worked, somewhat, and helps quell a certain kind of restlessness. There is something about traveling under your own power, your mechanized legs like pistons, the smell of sweet pepperbush and sweat, and the electric chorus of cicadas at dusk, which comes earlier now.
I am trying not to worry about what it will be like in a few months when the sun slips behind the peaked roofs of the sea captain’s houses on Orange Street before four thirty in the afternoon. It is a crime to waste any of this daylight worrying about winter. So, I push the ghosts of old whalers, the ones taken down by a line, the ones who stayed in Tahiti—how could you blame them, we agree, when this island was so grey and buttoned up—and I just keep riding.
At the abandoned naval base, we walk the bunker beach. Old septic systems are splattered along the shoreline, spilled out and half-buried by the ever-eroding bluff. Twisted concrete foundations are rendered sculptural in the stark sunlight, a slight orange tinge from the Canadian wildfires adds to the post-apocalyptic feel. This is a beach they do not direct tourists to. This is a beach that's dreamed up by a Brutalist.
I spent my first winter back here in Tom Nevers, isolated and alone, knowing almost no one. Now I cannot walk through town without getting cornered by at least a few people. There is virtually no anonymity for me here anymore.
What captivates me about the navy base, more so than the man-made infrastructure slipping away into the sea, is that this might have been the only neighborhood on the island where a couple hundred people could keep a secret. The vague sounding Naval Facility’s cover story was that it was a place of oceanographic research, when in reality it was a listening station where signals from underwater microphones were interpreted to provide locations on enemy submarines during the Cold War. Submarines became too quiet to listen to; those same hydrophones pick up whale song now.
This is an island where it is nearly impossible to keep a secret for long. Gossip here travels on gull wings. Soon all the summer visitors will be gone, and it will just be us who are twisted up in a spider’s web. Turns out, a little mystery is a good thing.
These days, the old Navy base is sort of an attractive nuisance. On this hot Saturday, teenagers take shelter in the gatehouse, out of range of cell phones and parent’s watchful eyes. Photographers traipse around. A few locals are fishing.
I am listening. Everybody tells me I am a good listener.
