A Cape Cod Notebook

One day earlier this month, I took a walk out to the Marconi Station Site in South Wellfleet by way of Wireless Road. It was along this road that Guglielmo Marconi brought the materials to build his radio towers on the ocean bluff, the site from which he sent the first transatlantic wireless message to England on January 18, 1903.

Wild turkeys are a study in absurd elegance. Their body plumage resembles the overlapping scales of an armadillo — bronzed, metallic, armor-like.

We drive down Hummock Pond Road, where a concrete Jersey barrier marks the end of the asphalt and the beginning of the sea. It’s a shorter drive from town than all the way out to Madaket, and besides, there isn’t really a parking lot at Madaket Beach anymore, the erosion has taken big bites out of the pavement.

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.

Naturalist Dennis Minsky of Provincetown is thinking about birds.

February 10th marked the 25th anniversary of the great fire at Whaler’s Wharf in Provincetown.

Back in late December, on Christmas Eve to be exact, the Cape and Islands were pummeled by a massive transcontinental storm that had plowed across the Great Plains from Minnesota to Texas, bringing freezing gales and blizzard conditions to much of the Northeast.

Last December, I hired a local tree company to take down some pines on the north side of our house. On the face of it, cutting down trees doesn’t seem to be the thing to do in this era of climate change, since trees are excellent “carbon sinks,” storing vast amounts of carbon dioxide.