Who has not seen the video? First one, then two shingled fishing shacks lift up as the sea hugs them, cradles them, then slowly, gently pulls them into the rolling waters. Who?

The watching crowd aches. In hushed tones they murmur; they gasp. A few swear words fall. Comfort comes with thoughts of rebuilding. In a flash, $3,000 is raised. More is promised. Plans blossom.

But, of course, in these partisan times, such a simple notion is magical thinking. “Let them go,” one Press Herald reader writes, “Move on,” another comments. Nostalgia. This is what the critics see. And, private or not, nostalgia is a waste of money.

Still. Yet.

While it is true that the fishing shacks represent a nostalgic nod to a former way of life (how could they not?), their meaning runs far deeper to those of us who have lived in South Portland over the decades. When I arrived here in 1988, Willard Beach was undergoing a slow but surefooted gentrification. Year by year, the beachscape inched away from the 19th century as snug cottages and bungalows succumbed to a more homogenized array of squares and rectangles.

Down went the doll-house maker’s house. Down went the perfumed wisteria that covered the walls of the tiny house on the oversized green pasture — oops, lot. Down, too, went the cross-hatched windows, swallowed up more recently, by the post-COVID wave of excited “discovery” and impassioned renovation.

Whatever divisions this created in the community, they were quickly forgotten once you slipped down the narrow, sandy pathways where fat rosa rugosa bridged pavement and beach. Here, development stopped. The partisanship of life seemed smaller, humbled somehow by the vastness of sky and sea.

Kindness unlaced with your shoes.

At low tide, the beach was endless, one of the finest soft stretches along the Maine coast. Looking north, islands floated like diamonds in Casco Bay. Families picnicked. Heads bobbed in the cold water. It was like swimming in a landscape painting.

But no matter where you looked, you were always aware of the three fishing shacks that stood on the high ledges to the east. Like the storm-tossed lighthouses along the Maine coast, the shacks sent out a flash of permanence and endurability. These shacks were survivors.

Things happened here, once. And the shacks made you think about that. They opened up the imagination, not just to the life of those who went before, but to the future still in the making. Who could not wonder about the fishermen of Simonton Cove, whose lives depended upon impossible skill and capricious luck, but also of the wives and daughters who combed the shores for eider down feathers or mended the nets that hung in a fisherman’s shack and the socks that warmed his feet. They made you think about people who worked with their hands and how hard work and extraordinary effort was once enough to house a community on a water’s edge rather than in tents under a bridge. Who could not wonder what happened?

For those of us “from away,” the shacks oriented things. They offered direction and certainty in a rapidly shifting world. Like Dorothy at the rainbow’s edge, we knew at a glance that we were not in Kansas anymore. If change marked our busy lives, the shacks reminded us that this is a place where place still matters. Like friendly sentinels, they protected an image of what the good life could be and how we can still work together to make it so.

Perhaps this is a form of nostalgia. The word, after all, comes from the Greek nostos, a longing for return, which Homer immortalized in his epic poem “The Odyssey.” But to return does not mean to go back. As Odysseus discovered, returning is a process that requires numerous and difficult choices that do not always end well.

But without nostos, how do we see the choices we have? How do we even dream them up without the kinds of longing the old shacks conjure? Restoring the shacks to Willard Beach may be an act of nostalgia, but it is also an expression of our longing to be inspired. To find common ground. And, in the end, to find in the relics of the past a way to imagine a future we would all be proud to leave behind.

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