A Cape Cod Notebook

I’ve often thought that writers in general make poor candidates for psychiatric therapy. This isn’t primarily because most writers I know are skeptical, but rather because the goals of writers and therapists are diametrically opposed.

A few weeks ago, I had the occasion to visit my daughter and her family in Portland, Maine. I decided to go by train and booked a seat on Amtrak’s “Downeaster,” from Boston to Portland.

Not included in the blockbuster J. Robert Oppenheimer movie is how a Cape Cod connection played a crucial role in Oppenheimer’s early life, including his eventual move to Los Alamos to build a bomb that can destroy the world.

Beginning a new year in the middle of winter has always seemed ridiculous to me. But then no one asked me. I know, I know: it was Caesar’s doing, 4,000 years ago, to honor Janus, the god of new beginnings.

At the end of December, one of the Cape’s newspapers ran a special nostalgia issue. On the front page was Joel Meyerowitz’s iconic photograph of one of the Days Cottages on Beach Point in North Truro.

During the winter of 1962, when I was nineteen, I lived in Provincetown, where I worked as a reporter for The New Beacon, a small local weekly newspaper. It was during late October of that year, when the Cuban Missile Crisis raised its apocalyptic head, that I first became aware of the now-defunct North Truro Air Force Base.

I went out to Newcomb Hollow two days after the powerful windstorm that raked the Cape on December 18. Since it had been given no official name, I baptized it the Advent Storm.

Cummiquid writer Susan Moeller knows what gifts she bought as far back as 1978.

I was walking along Nantucket’s north shore, the calmer waters of Nantucket Sound stretching out nearly thirty miles to the mainland. In the summer, this part of the island is busy with people: dog walkers and joggers in the early hours, families swim in the shallows in the late afternoon.

One of the most beautiful spots in Wellfleet, or for that matter, on the entire Lower Cape, is Old Wharf Road. It is one of those headlands that, along with Indian Neck and Lieutenant’s Island, thrust out into greater Wellfleet Harbor.