Here’s a piece that was on WCAI last week I wrote and recorded about my week on Beach Point.

http://www.capeandislands.org/post/october-days-and-slowing-down

If you are a WGBH or WCAI member, you’ll see me in the November Explore guide that should already be in your mailboxes. I’ll post it here when it goes online.

Is anyone else already planning their 2019 vacations? I am.

 

 

 

Here in Truro until Saturday. Losing my mind over Beach Point. More photos to come.

In the mean time, be sure to click over to WCAI to listen to my newest Cape Cod Notebook: http://www.capeandislands.org/post/golden-hour-madaket.

I’m late in posting my essay for A Cape Cod Notebook than ran on 11 September 18, but if you missed it, click over to listen. I’m particularly fond of this one, and it was this trip to Long Point that inspired the project I’m working on now.

Listen/read here: http://www.capeandislands.org/post/all-washes-ashore.

September 19th is Talk Like a Pirate Day, so what better day to read my article from this summer’s Provincetown Arts Magazine about pirates, puritans, and what they have to do with Provincetown. (Everything!)

 

Click here to read!

Hi Pals! There’s another one of my essays over on WCAI this week. If you missed A Cape Cod Notebook on-air (8:45 AM & 5:45 PM, Tuesdays), you can always subscribe the podcast, or listen online here: http://www.capeandislands.org/post/slowing-down-blackberries.

I’m having a lot of fun writing and recording these pieces, and hope you like listening to them!

 

Today on A Cape Cod Notebook, you can hear from me! Click over to WCAI to read or better yet, to listen: http://www.capeandislands.org/post/rare-moment-weightlessness

 

 

Recently, I got it into my head that what I needed to do was hike out to Great Point from the Wauwinet gatehouse out here on Nantucket. Great Point is the northernmost tip of the island and I’ve never been there. The closest I’ve gotten to the lighthouse is seeing it from the boat on winter days when the seas are particularly choppy and the HyLine captain travels in close, sheltered by the curve of sand.

I spent the last week getting ready for my walk out to Great Point, thinking how lovely it would be to escape the summer crowds and find some peace and solitude. On Sunday, I set off early around 7:00 AM, after waiting a few hours for the fog to burn off. It didn’t.

Armed with water, sunscreen, a notebook, and good shoes, I was feeling great. Everyone else in the world was still sleeping, and I was going to hike the 8-mile round trip trek. No phone, no music, just me and the waves.

Well, that was the plan. But you know what they say about plans.

After about thirty minutes of walking, almost out to the last house, I could not ignore the fact that I was being eaten alive by mosquitoes. I turned my head to look back and see just how many were biting me. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw. What had to be thirty mosquitoes were feasting on my legs, arms, back…they were probably in my hair, too. I ran down the path to the harborside, where there were very few bugs.

I had bug spray in the car. I could do this. All I needed to do was get back to the car, get the spray, and I could set out on my walk again. By the time I did all this, an hour had passed. The fog had not burned off yet. Did I mention it rained for the last three days?

Completely saturated in DEET, I figured I would be fine. But the mosquitoes did not subside. I got up as far as where the Jeep trail begins in the soft sand, and still the bugs came after me. I started running, and ran to the oceanside, thinking that there must not be any bugs near the ocean. If I could make it to the eastern coast, I could walk up along to Great Point.

But the bugs, dear reader, were worse on the ocean side. I felt like i was riding a motorcycle headlong into a cloud of mosquitoes. I swallowed at least two. I ran from the ocean side to the bay side, up the face of a dune, with a towel over my head in an attempt to keep the bugs away like some crazed Lawrence of Arabia.

I learned I cannot outrun a mosquito, let alone a whole swarm of them. Maybe I was asking too much of nature, to provide me with quiet and solace on such a busy August day, when I had nothing to give in return.

At least now I have given quite a bit of blood to the Wauwinet mosquitoes.

Hi !

I’m Mary Bergman, a writer and historian living on Nantucket. I’m also the literary chair of the Nantucket Book Festival, held annually on the third weekend in June.

I am fascinated by the people, places, and landscapes that make up Cape Cod and the Islands. I have dedicated my work to helping to document the unique people and places here at the edge of the world.

You can hear me the third Tuesday of the month on A Cape Cod Notebook, a weekly nature/natural world radio essay program on WCAI, the Cape and Islands NPR Station. My work has also appeared in Literary Hub, The Common, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Provincetown Arts, and other places.

I’m working on a novel or two.

It occurs to me that all you really need to know about my writing is that it is driven by the acute realization that all of Cape Cod and the Islands will be gone much sooner than I would like.

I feel like I am trying to document the last days of a civilization that will be one day wiped completely off the map.

 

Every Sunday since early January, I have met with a friend at my favorite coffee shop. (On Nantucket, we lack in many things, but coffee is not one of them. I try to split my time and my money between a few.)

We talk a bit about the week, and then write until we can’t anymore, or until the coffee shop girls start turning down the lights and start scrubbing the floor with disinfectant. The smell of bleach is not as inviting as the smell of coffee beans. We take the hint.

This has been a good practice, because as much as I try to write every day, there are always a couple of days where something comes up, or I have to put a paid writing job at the top of my priority list instead of working on my (second? third? fourth? how do you count? do you only count the good ones? if we are only counting the good ones, it’s the second) novel. Then there are the short stories, poems, essays…

…and this blog.

Writing with someone, even just sitting across the table, in silence, with only the sound of fingers flying across the keys, feels different than writing alone.

Sometimes, when I am particular stuck and trying to unravel a long thread, or find the right words, or just words in general, I think about running. In particular, how running was something I never thought I could do. It took time and practice, and is still difficult. But in the years since I started, I’ve run farther than I’ve ever dreamed I could.

Then, when I am running (usually about…uh…right away) I have to remind myself of all the words I have written. Remember when you couldn’t write a story longer than 6,000 words? You’ve written things 10 times that! Get it in gear!

I keep exercising–running, indoor cycling, whatever–because it helps my unravel my writing thoughts. It reminds me that  I can do more now than I could in the past.

The thing about writing and running is, it’s easier to keep going if there’s someone to help you set the pace.