A Cape Cod Notebook

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.

My chum, who these days walks the Outer Beach more often than I do, commented that “high tides are reaching further up the beach than they used to.”

The hound has gifted me a new image of hope. And it looks like an otter.

Where do you seek the soul of Cape Cod? The pounding surf on the Outer Cape? The stalwart beacon of Coast Guard Light? The broad stretch of the Great Marsh?

It’s August on Nantucket, and to find a place where you will be alone and undisturbed, you need one of two things. You either need a four-wheel drive or a boat. The other Saturday, thanks to a good friend and some borrowed kayaks, we set off from Barrett’s Pier and headed for the Madaket Ditch.

Among Cape Cod’s remarkable attributes is a way of surfacing when and where you least expect it – associations, affiliations, allusions, connections, a single degree of separation among strangers.

I spent my teenage years in Parkersburg, West Virginia, a small city on the banks of the Ohio River. There’s not much about the town that would strike a visitor – or a resident, for that matter – as noteworthy.

We all mark time in different ways. For me, it’s the dry cleaner.I have been dropping off clothes to the same dry cleaner in Hyannis since a week or so after I moved here fulltime in 1974 – that’s 50 years ago.

People say half-facetiously that we should accept reality and change the name of this sandspit to Cape Dog.

The air is so thick, there’s little difference between walking and swimming these days. High summer fog brings a certain relief to the island.