A Cape Cod Notebook

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.

Whenever I have occasion to go to Boston and don’t need to rush home, I often avoid the divided highways and take a different route back to the Cape. One of my favorite alternatives is to take Route 58 south from Abington to Carver just before the Bourne Bridge.

That big, lemming-loving Arctic bird has finally been sighted again on Cape Cod. Just in from some tundra breeding ground in northern Canada or Alaska, this fierce and seldom-seen raptor of big, open areas is getting local birders excited for winter, with sightings of different birds in Dennis and Orleans.

Plymouth rock is an imposter. No way was this the first terra firma the Pilgrims planted foot upon in the “New World” – that was some vanished swath of sand in Provincetown Harbor.

Late Sunday afternoon — it isn’t all that late, but now that it’s dark at 4:30, late is all relative. Landmarks change in the winter light. The boarded-up Surfside snackbar where teenagers spent the summer scooping ice cream haunts the empty parking lot.

It looked old. It looked like something that was ready for retirement, though it still worked, still functioned.

I stopped by the other day to see my old friend Annie. Annie lives in a modest beach cottage which is fetchingly named “Off Plumb." I don’t know how old the cottage is, but its flooring is made of sections of an old bowling alley.

Cummiquid writer Susan Moeller talks about the thrill of trick or treating.

Seth Rolbein, a journalist living in Wellfleet, talks about an 1820 fire that had a major impact on the Cape’s 20th-century development boom.