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A Cape Cod Notebook

  • 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.
  • 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.