I was leading a tour out in ’Sconset the Thursday before Labor Day when a local eyed us warily and said, “Summer’s over, it’s time for you people to leave.” Ouch! Now Labor Day has come and gone, the curtain falling on summer.
For the last five years, Labor Day has marked an annual camping trip to Dunes’ Edge Campground in Provincetown. (The old-fashioned campground reminds me of Yogi Bear’s Jellystone National Park.) A small group of my college friends meets up year after year. Many of my friends live on Martha’s Vineyard and I am embarrassed to say that we see each other more on Cape Cod than we do on either island. There is an inter-island ferry that runs in the summertime, but we can never find the time in the high season to make it happen.
This year, we finally got our act together to head out on a whale watch. When I was a kid growing up in Provincetown, annual whale watching trips aboard the Portuguese Princess or the Dolphin Fleet heralded the arrival of spring and signaled that school was coming to an end. It was strange to be heading out to see the whales with a chill in the air.
We got lucky and Dennis Minsky, another Cape Cod Notebook contributor, was our naturalist guide for our trip aboard the Dolphin X. Dennis is a keen observer, as his writings about the intersection of nature and human nature show.
The weather was cooperating, and we didn’t have to go very far at all to find the whales. I have been on some whale watches where you are out motoring for hours all in search of one distant fin. (There was one rocky whale watch I went on six years ago where I very nearly kissed the pilings of MacMillan Pier upon my return.) I spend so much of my life on two hour and fifteen minute ferry boat rides to and from the mainland, it was novel to be a on a boat just for the fun of it.
As we rounded the backshore of Provincetown, past Race Point light, the whales came around almost immediately. Or, maybe it wasn’t the whales that came around but us. Two whale watch boats and about a dozen little sportfishing boats were gathered. (Some better behaved than others.) With the dunes of the Peaked Hill Bars in the foreground, and the Pilgrim Monument in the distance, it was the kind of day tourism boards dream about.
The anticipation of one hundred and fifty people scanning the horizon, searching for a whale spout was almost as interesting to me as the actual whales. Despite the rumble of the Dolphin X’s engine, there was a profound silence as people waited. Few looked at their phones. Strangers happily squished in next to one another like sardines, all to get a better look as the whales dove down.
We saw fifteen humpback whales, all identified by the onboard naturalists. One whale, Nile, was as old as I am. This fact moved me unexpectedly, to think this whale and I had been swimming in the same waters for the same length of time.
Whales are such a huge part of the iconography of the Cape and Islands. Whales are all over Nantucket—on our town seal, embroidered on Nantucket red pants, on Whale’s Tail pale ale beer cans. But to actually see these whales in the water is mind blowing. A whale watch should be a mandatory end-of-season trip for all overworked Cape Codders and Islanders.
As we headed back towards homeport, I thought about Nile and the rest of the humpbacks. Were they glad to see us leave? Is there a word in whalesong that means tourists? Maybe to them, we were the tourists, interrupting their lunch.
