essay by Robert P. Barsanti
So far, in the middle of July, my best beach day featured a hooded sweatshirt, a makeshift wind block, and more than one tumble in a storm-driven surf. Everyone locked into traffic on I-84 would happily trade places with me, but this is not the climate that I, or our visitors, had been hoping for when we looked at the calendar pictures in February.
So, I am hoping for a better few weeks. Let the wind shift, the seals and the sharks continue to play tag up near Great Point and, perhaps, a couple good sand bars growing on the south shore. Then, the toes can find their way back into the sand, and August can be August.
For all of the wonders of Nantucket, from the hydrangea to the houses, the beaches separate us from the rest of the world. That One Big Beach lets you walk the waves from Madaket to Cisco to Ladies to Surfside, to Nobadeer to Madaquecham and points east. Even in the crowd and heat of August, you can find your own space of sand. It is a lot easier to get to an empty beach in August than it is to get to the airport.
Out here, our “Third Place” has sand and seaweed. According to the sociologists, a happy life is divided into three sorts of places. Your tooth paste and toilet paper hang out in your First Place: home. You have the privacy of four walls to disappoint and fail all of those people who love you best in the world. Then, your paycheck comes from your Second Place: work. Your dreams of making this world more fair and more just, get subverted and ground down into the petty dust of invoices, memos, and misunderstanding. In July, work has moved from the kitchen table into the passenger seat of the truck as you creep along Old South Road while the coffee cools and the phone vibrates.
But the beach is the Cheer’s bar, where everybody knows your name. The “Third Place” builds over the summer, as the house and work becomes more fraught. In a “Third Place,” you can connect, you can befriend, you can get a corkscrew if you need one. Third Places don’t keep anyone out, and Third Places don’t collect a cover charge. In America, we like beers and wings, so our Third Places tend to have those things. In the rest of the world, those places might be libraries, might be parks, or might be churches. Out here, all three meet at the edge of the water.
If you drive out to Fortieth Pole on a Sunday (and get there early!!), you can meet the community of Nantucket. It is parked as if the beach is on the infield at Daytona—truck after jeep after pickup. You empty the back of all of the towels, chairs, and coolers, plop down onto the sand, and watch the boats go back to the Cape.
Without phones, you can find the people who know you by your true name. They are reading, or playing cards, or napping, or bearing witness to the miracle that is the Nantucket summer. No one is buying anything, selling anything, processing anything, or networking with the stakeholders. The water is warm enough for the timid, shallow enough for standing, and watched enough to prevent misadventure.
Every community bears its blights and its blindspots. You do need a four-wheel drive vehicle to get there, as well as a job that lets you take Sunday off. Your life is easier if you can have a conversation with your shirtless fifth grade teacher and you have patience for music outside of your algorithm, but the first rule of community is tolerance. Doja Cat is a lot easier to take with toes in the water and a beer in your hand.
Now, Town Meeting (the one that doesn’t occur on the beach) declared swim suits optional on Nantucket beaches. For as much as I am in full-throated support of this rule, I have yet to see too many people at Fortieth risking sunburn in their delicate places. But I expect it to happen soon. Everyone is showing everything at the beach already, and we all know where we should be looking. Third Places build community, and community is cemented by tolerance. You may need to let your tolerance bond you to the naked thirtyyear- old sunbather, the Guatemalans enjoying herb, or a waving Trump flag, but you, the island, and the world will be better for it. If the rest of the beach can see my hairy self in my old shorts, I can bear to see a Blue Lives Matter flag.
When the shouty people on the internet start echoing through my head, I try to place myself back at Fortieth. Islanders, Americans, and Humans in general are a lot more tolerant than they pretend to be. One of the most remarkable changes of the last ten years has been the comforting emergence on transsexuals. Men and women, in the wrong bodies, have lived in pain and shame for lifetimes. Now, we have entered a world where the bits and bobs can be exchanged for bobs and bits. Once the plumbing is changed, then the rest of us have to adjust to the new and happier reality. For some, that can be difficult at home (First Place) and at work (Second Place), but it should be easier on the beach. If any place on-island is built on a foundation of tolerance, it was built under Fortieth Pole.
Like all island institutions, Fortieth is threatened. Obviously, local land owners would prefer to have their multimillion dollar love nest free of 1992 Toyota Tacomas, never mind three hundred of them parked cheek by jowl. The ocean and the climate creep up, with new sandbars, more powerful currents, and strong winds. On one local weekend, the lifeguards had almost thirty water rescues. Those inflatable ducks can fly a long way, even with a seventy-pound child clinging to the neck. Finally, you need to still be on Nantucket in order to get out to Fortieth. If work and the economy has pushed you off to Mashpee, you won’t make it to the beach this Sunday.
As long as the beach exists, there is enough island left for islanders like me.