Pretty soon, the word “place” may have nothing left to refer to. Corporate hegemony and the shrinking world of the internet and other forces of homogenization are making “place” an endangered phenomenon.
What does it mean, “place”? It has always seemed too commonplace to need defining. (“You know: place, just a spot on earth, a location. Whatever.”) But now that something that has traditionally been contained in that term–placiness– is in increasingly limited supply it’s worth considering just what that is. Or was.
We here in the Outer Cape are still enough of a place to worry that we aren’t as much of one as we once were. Is Wellfleet isn’t as Wellfleety as it used to be? Is the placiness—what makes this place what it is, as distinct from all other places– of Wellfleet becoming diluted? How much placiness of the Wellfleet sort do we still have?
I know long term residents who have left Wellfleet for good claiming that some little town in Maine has more of some essential Wellfleet quality than we do. Others of course, move here all the time claiming that it has that je ne sais quoi they crave.
A question worth asking: what is it that dilutes the placiness of a place?
Even though the proposed site for a big StopnShop was several miles away, a reason many Wellfleetians joined in the fight against it several years ago, was a sense that it would that have diluted our placiness. That sense seems also to have motivated our zoning bylaw banning franchises.
The bypassing of Wellfleet’s downtown 65 years ago must at the time have seemed a dramatic change and perhaps a dilution of our placiness, even if the thought of today’s Route 6 traffic cramming through town would itself seem a dilution.
The advent over 50 years ago of the National Seashore, which by a stroke of the pen transformed two-thirds of a traditional American small town into a “national treasure,” was a dramatic dilution. Yet most now think of the Park as if anything our most typical and desirable feature.
Regionalization, the big thing these days for many practical reasons, would seem by definition to dilute the placiness of all the places sharing basic functions.
The secondhome phenomenon seems definitely to have diluted local life, in turning us into a semi ghost town, with two-thirds of our houses empty two-thirds of the year.
Increasing pressure from secondhome owners to play a role in government, so that people who live here only part of the year would be helping to run the town would constitute a very definite dilution.
Two new Wellfleet festivals have sprung up recently, piggy-backing on the original, very successful Oyster Fest. Is there a way in which the self-promotional festivalization of this p lace, in celebrating this town actually dilutes whatever it is we’re celebrating, our placiness (of which a certain modesty has always been a feature)?
The recent hiring of a local for Town Administrator seems a reversal of the dilution of what in recent years has seemed an unspoken policy of hiring only those from elsewhere, not trusting one of our own to run our own affairs.
Of course the counter-argument is that these changes are only changes; not about more or less placiness, just different. And hopefully new and improved.
But as we here now make decisions that will determine what sort of place we will hand over to those of the future (and incidentally about the future of “place” in general) Wellfleet’s placiness, will I believe act as a powerful baseline.
No Comments