A Cape Cod Notebook

Striped bass have left Martha’s Vineyard waters, save for a few holdovers trapped in the great ponds. Deer and waterfowl hunting seasons are at an end. These are trying months for those who suffer from fishing-hunting seasonal affective disorder.

Some days, you can catch radio signals from Martha’s Vineyard, and TV from Rhode Island. Look out across Nantucket’s north shore towards Cape Cod at dusk, the horizon is speckled with blinking lights, navigational beacons and channel markers, lighthouses and radio towers. There are beacons everywhere, trying to tell us which way to go, trying to warn us of dangerous shoals.

Cape Cod is a place of small mysteries. Sometimes the mysteries are so obvious we don’t recognize them.  Take Merrick Island.

Merrick Island is one of a half dozen or so islands that line the western boundary of Wellfleet Harbor. Besides Merrick, these islands include Great Beach Hill, Great Island, Griffith, and Bound Brook.

This happened one day last November, a dark, damp day with a cold northeast wind blowing off the ocean. I had taken a walk across Duck Creek on Uncle Tim’s bridge and up onto Cannon Hill. Coming back around the south side of the island, I heard in the marsh off to my left a flopping noise, which could’ve been something, but I decided it was just the waves lapping against the marsh peat.

A path through the woods is a compromise between people and the natural world.  As long as you stay on the trail you are alright.  But if you dare to venture into the brush you will certainly come upon what will be the bane of your off-trail existence: cat briar or green briar or bull thorn (Smilax rotundifolia). 

I was starting to feel trapped. It happens sometimes, when the sky is an endless gray and the horizon line is hard to find. Winter’s cold brings things into focus, and you can really feel the ragged edges of this island. I heard the whistle of the last ferry as it came in around 10:30 at night and knew there was no getting off this island until morning. And even if you left, where would you go? 

It looked old.  It looked like something that was ready for retirement, though it still worked, still functioned. The oak handles, once varnished and glossy, had bleached into a permanent washed-out gray with deep cracks in them. The heavy steel tray had corroded, leaving a small, crescent-shaped hole at its front edge, but the rolled steel rim was still intact.

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. It affords a lovely walk along shaded dirt roads, beside marshes that turn gold in autumn, dark tidal creeks, and distant views of the harbor islands. There is a town landing at the end of the road, which, among other things, provides access to the rich oyster beds of Loagy Bay.

I love walking in the cemetery in the early morning. You know, before anyone wakes up.

Sorry, just some dumb cemetery humor.

I met a kindred spirit on my walk in the woods this morning.  I did not actually lay eyes on anybody, but I did encounter someone’s creation: a bright pink swing hanging from a branch in a clearing. 

I think we need a fifth season on Nantucket: winter, spring, summer, fall, and wind. Ever since the ferries rounded Brant Point with the last of the summer folks, the wind has been relentless. Nearly each week we’ve encountered at least one day where the boats don’t run, when we are woken up at three in the morning by the howling wind. Trees bend to the point of snapping, and hair tangles on even the shortest walk.

On Monday afternoon I went out to Newcomb Hollow, where an enormous amount of sand had been removed from the beach by the new moon tides and easterly winds of the past couple of days. The beach erosion revealed a horizontal floor of blue clay that ran along the base of the cliffs for at least 200 feet in a band 20 to 30 feet wide. These wide, horizontal ledges were a mixture of solid-blue and yellow-reddish clay feathered with thin exfoliations of rust-colored iron oxide. The impression was that of walking over a slick and fragile tessellated marble floor.

We live, literally, a stone’s throw from the town dump. I know, I know-“dump” is not the proper name for what is currently an officially known as the town transfer station. Nevertheless, most people in town still refer to it as the town dump.

Scallopers are hard at work on the Tisbury side of Lagoon Pond. This is cause for some celebration in my town.

After several poor years, commercial fishermen are earning several hundred dollars a day and recreational scallopers are enjoying one of the delicacies of Island waters — and stocking their freezers too.

I’m trying to love November, or at the very least make peace with it. Each year, I mourn the end of Daylight Savings Time, and grumble about the painfully early sunsets. Only the heartiest few roses remain in the gardens in town, the sidewalks slippery with fallen leaves. Plenty of people have cleared out in search of someplace warmer. But I have nowhere else to go.