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A Cape Cod Notebook

A Cape Cod Notebook can be heard every Tuesday morning at 8:45am and afternoon at 5:45pm.

It's commentary on the unique people, wildlife, and environment of our coastal region.

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A Cape Cod Notebook commentators include:

Robert Finch, a nature writer living in Wellfleet who created, 'A Cape Cod Notebook.' It won the 2006 New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing. He has lived on and written about Cape Cod for forty years. He is the author of six collections of essays, including "The Iambics of Newfoundland" (Counterpoint Press), and co-editor of "The Norton Book of Nature Writing." His new book, "The Outer Beach: A Thousand-Mile Walk Along Cape Cod’s Atlantic Shore."

Mary Bergman, originally from Provincetown, now lives on Nantucket. She is a writer and historian, working in historic preservation and writing a novel.

Seth Rolbein began his journalistic career on Cape Cod in the 1970s, then joined WGBH-TV as a writer, reporter and documentary filmmaker. He has written for many regional and national publications. His magazine and book-length fiction and non-fiction has spanned continents, and documentaries on National Public Television have won multiple national awards. Throughout, the Cape has been his home. He became editor-in-chief of the region’s weekly newspaper chain before starting The Cape Cod Voice; a weekly emailed column of the same name continues that effort.

Susan Moeller is a freelance writer and editor who was a reporter and editor with the Boston Herald and Cape Cod Times. She’s lived on the Cape for 45 years and when not working, swims, plays handbells, pretends to garden, and walks her dog, Dug. She lives in Cummaquid.

Dennis Minsky's career as a field biologist began in 1974, at Cape Cod National Seashore, protecting nesting terns and plovers. A Provincetown resident since 1968, he returned full time in 2005. He is involved in many local conservation projects, works as a naturalist on the Dolphin Fleet Whale Watch, and tries to write.

  • 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.