A Massachusetts trip as sure as the tide
“Massachusetts,” my 4-yearold said, articulating every syllable as we crossed the state line. The word rolled off his tongue with familiarity, because the state, indeed, has been part of him for as long as he has been alive. Since the pandemic, we have been back to my hometown of Newburyport, Massachusetts, only twice: once when case numbers plummeted last fall and again this July, just as I’ve done for every July of my son’s life, for every July of his younger brother’s life. My sons know the landscape the way that most of us know the lineage of our parents. At some point, our stories became one.
Newburyport is a seacoast city of about 18,000 that practically abuts the New Hampshire border. Known for its pristine, dune-flecked beaches, and also for its historic potency, the city is home to abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who published the Liberator newspaper, and is also said to be the birthplace of the Coast Guard. In this sense, Newburyport remains tethered to its past.
It is also connected to the future. Multiple highways and a commuter rail — added in the late 1990s — have made the city accessible to more and more people. And the arrival of high-end restaurants and retail outposts, as well as points of interest, such as the Clipper City Rail Trail (the nearly fourmile-long walking path traces former railroad tracks), has encouraged visitors and new residents alike to spend more time in the area that locals affectionately refer to as the Port.
I moved to Newburyport in 1988, when I was 7, attended the public high school and even tended bar at one of the city’s most revered pubs. But each July, for my pilgrimage north, I stay at a cottage at Blue Inn on the Beach, on the barrier land connected to my hometown via causeway. Plum Island, it’s called, named for its native beach plums. The 11-mile-long strip, split between the city of Newburyport and the towns of Newbury, Rowley and Ipswich, also hosts the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge. (The island’s southern half is part of the refuge’s 4,700 acres of protected land.)
In Newburyport, I am an expat, but on Plum Island, I am just another tourist, digging my heels into the sand at the tiny hotel — 13 rooms and only a handful of cottages — and
holding my breath in anticipation of the sunset over the basin. “Except for a few midweek, one-night stays, we’re booked through summer,” one of the hotel managers reported when I inquired. “We really can’t complain.”
The island, it turns out, is attracting a steady stream of locals and tourists.
Chasing the sunset is practically a rite of passage on Plum Island. One night, my sons and I walked down to the tidal basin, where an orange orb hung like a faceless jack-o’lantern. Later, as the haze from Western wildfires blew across the Northeast, the sun turned an ominous red, spectacular above the swaying marsh grass.
We established, too, a nightly ritual of walking to the Cottage, a market hawking Richardson’s ice cream from a window. On a rainy Sunday, we perused the stalls at the Newburyport Farmers’ Market, which operates from the Tannery Marketplace — a retail center built in a restored mill. At night, we snagged the last outdoor table at a restaurant in the same complex, the Joy Nest, a Thaiinspired restaurant that opened in February. My sons pulled springy noodles from a bowl and slurped them up, one by one, while I chipped away at a dish of gravy-soaked rad na noodles.
Returning to a hometown for vacation is the slowest of travel, a meandering trip through memory. I took my sons to the places I continue to love the most, such as the convenience store in town, Richdale, which sells penny candy by the pound and sweatshirts made in my high school’s colors of maroon and gold. I drove them to the neighboring town of Merrimac, well before dusk, for smash burgers and curly fries at Skip’s Snack Bar, which has served this same menu every summer since 1947; there, I ordered my burger the way I have for nearly 40 years: extra pickles, plenty of onion.
On the drive to Sandy Point the next morning — the beach at the southern tip of Plum Island — I told my boys to watch for birds. The flat and dusty road that tracks the reservation provides an unobstructed view of the Parker River estuary, where migrating birds regularly cross overhead.
A moody gray sky developed, and a wind kicked up from the ocean, but we withstood rain for a chance to visit the area’s nicest beach. Sandy Point, with its minuscule parking lot, is sprawling at low tide, a spit of sand that extends nearly as far as the eye can see.
Before nightfall, we walked down to the dunesteep beach across the street from our cottage. There, we sat overlooking the navy water, until my sons ran down to dip their toes in, back and forth along the shore like puppies. They deposited shells at my feet. “Can we keep them?” they wanted to know. At home, weeks later, I unloaded a beach bag filled with these collectibles: oysters and clams, tiny bits of sea glass, the ephemera of our vacation that they have taken with us as memory’s foothold.