I grew up on an island. 30 miles out to sea for the first 18 years of my life, I rarely saw the need to leave unless it was to go shopping for school clothes, or to visit family for brief periods of time. When I left to attend UMass, I hadn't yet grasped the notion that life is different outside of the Never-Never Land that Nantucket has always been to me. The year-round locals call leaving going to "America," as if we aren't a real part of the country at all. If you ever spend a year there, you'll know what they mean.
Home, for me, is the smell of brine. It is gray shingles and steely ocean waves. It is cobblestones and roads that lead only to the coast. No further.
I love school now, but my freshman year was brutal. For the first time in years, I felt the kind of panic a child feels when they know they are lost in a department store. Like I would never find my home again. Gradually, I realized that there was more to the world than 98 square miles of sand, and that it was livable, and exciting. It was freeing to be able to get into a car and drive and drive and drive and not hit a wall of water. I broke a barrier that year. I cut the umbilical cord that had connected me to Nantucket for so long the day I got on the ferry to leave, to start my life away from home. It was liberating and terrifying and there are many people I know who have never been able to do that. There are a few older people on the island who have never left, not once, and never will.
I realize how strange that is. I also know that it is the same for small towns all across America. I suppose I've always felt differently about my hometown, not only because it is mine, but because of it's identity as the furthest eastern point of the country. Alone out there, surrounded by the ocean, a busy little community completely detached from the mainland. Almost independent of it.
There is something romantic and eerie about it, and I know that I will never feel about any other place the way I do about that island. Living away from home, aside from the four insane summer months, I've been able to shake that mindset. I feel a bittersweet pang of nostalgia though, everytime I leave, when I remember my childhood years, and how I felt so physically and emotionally attached to a part of the earth. How it was alive to me, and how I loved it, as if it were family.
do you ever wish you were like one of those older people who have never left the island and never will? does nantucket play into your future life goals at all? wait, do they have airports on nantucket? do you all live in boats? just kidding. but nantucket seems like such an unusual place to grow up, and you do a good job of writing about your experiences and detaching yourself from them in "america". over and out
ReplyDeleteReally nice metaphor: "I felt the kind of panic a child feels when they know they are lost in a department store."
ReplyDeleteI like the non-traditional way you tackled this first-person piece. Engaging and well executed, Sarah.