essay by Robert P. Barsanti
In the sweat of August, my Boon Companion and I retreat to the quiet places. For most of the year, he can run about unleashed in some of the most dog-friendly parks and play areas, but when the summer comes the existing rules are reposted, underlined, and enforced by the sad, angry, and afraid.
Now, as the proud partner of an eighty-pound yellow lab, I know how people react when he runs to them, barking and slobbering. The “Ambassador” is aggressively friendly, which I explain as best I can when I trot after Himself up the path. In the “R” months, most of the other dog people are familiar with my Boon Companion. But, as the boat fills and the days lie out on the sand, the pint-sized service animals find themselves nose-to-nose with the Big Dope. They all think one word: “snack.”
So, in order preserve everyone’s good feelings and keep the economy percolating, we spend an hour or so in the interior of the island, in the moors between Milestone and Polpis Road, a step out of time and two steps away from the tender and delicious little dogs.
Out here, the Big Dope can chase as many deer as he can catch. He can poke his nose into thickets, bushes, and brakes. I will walk along one of the two-lane “paths” while he disappears into something thick, sticky, and splashy. Then he will emerge, wet and muddy, shake or dry himself in the sand before darting back into the out-of-bounds bushes in search of something tasty and dead. Our path swings about and emerges into a burned over area, without those bushes. He lifts his head over the grass and races after the ghosts and will-o-the-wisps in the waving brown stalks
Now, one of the unacknowledged pleasures of my walks in the center of the island comes with a keen eye and the whisper of local knowledge. Free food is out here. In this hot and sunny summer, with the heavy spring rains, the berries have been weighing heavy across the island. This year, the raspberries, the blackberries, and even the black raspberries have been poking their prickers in all sorts of weedy and dark corners. I have seen them at the parking lots for the beaches, in the unmowed lawns and wildflowers off of Cliff Road, and along the second hole at Sconset Golf course.
My blueberry bushes are two turns away from the main path, deep enough into the cover to allow for comfortable privacy. Once under the bushy canopy, it can be hard to find your way, especially to a Treasure of Berries. The Boon Companion would be a great guide if there weren’t delicious trails to follow. History’s footsteps can be faint. But I found the bushes.
And no berries.
They hadn’t fallen to the ground, hadn’t hidden deep in the recesses, hadn’t dried up and shriveled into indigestible pellets. They were just gone.
It doesn’t really matter why the berries are gone. Even out here, a step out of time and in the bushy hush of the middle moors, any number of forces could have colluded to take MY blueberries. There was this burgundy Tahoe from Connecticut that I saw leaving when I drove in. The poor families of the island will find whatever free food they can get, be it in the ponds, oceans, or on the bushes. Or it might be those new birds from Florida that flew up on the winds of global warming and plucked away MY berries.
Either way, the berries are gone for this year. Perhaps they won’t be back next year, perhaps they will. In the middle of next July, I will try to come out earlier and get the jump on everyone else. Soon, it might be that my secret blueberry patch will become as crowded and confusing as the parking lot at the Meat & Fish. I might even have to put the Boon Companion on a leash.
Everything changes. At our best, we manage the change so that our children can go to the same beaches, catch the same fish, and eat the same blueberries as we do right now. But we are not always at our best, and we make many shortsighted and self-centered decisions wrapped in the cellophane of good intentions and excellent rationale. Let’s build a huge police station. Let’s build one more subdivision in the woods off of Old South Road. Let’s put a new parking lot downtown. Let me build this one more thing, and we can be done.
Nantucket gives off an aura of permanence. Main Street emerges from the elms and the fog and runs down into the twenty-first century. The Historic District Commission works on keeping the houses looking as if the Civil War soldiers will be able to find the old homestead when they return. You can have the same donuts you had twenty years ago, followed by the same submarine sandwiches and washed down by the same Watermelon Creams. The rest of America twists in a digital death spiral, while the fog wraps us in the eighteenth century and the horns whisper us to a damp sleep. We like to think we are different.
For everyone who moved here, the island was perfect on their first visit, be it a week, a decade, or a half century ago. When you first come here, Nantucket is every leash-less dream you ever wanted. Each return trip is an attempt to run and catch those days again. You remember the tastes, the smells, and the warm water on a southern shore, and that time comes flooding back so strong that you could almost believe that those free days haven’t disappeared. Almost.
The only thing certain is change. My blueberries may be there next year or they may not return. Baxter Road might be there for the hedge fund happy folk, or it might not. Even the Watermelon Creams might not return next spring. Yesterday is gone and tomorrow remains a hope for one more blueberry harvest.
