A Cape Cod Notebook

I had a pretty happy childhood, all things considered.  Actually, most children growing up in America in the early 1950s experienced a general sense of well-being – that is, if you were white and not poor.

For the past several days I’ve been mapping a small area of woods in the southern part of our town known informally as “The Maze.” The area is about a half square mile in extent, or something over 300 acres. 

It was now 1:05, and still no sign of the Flex bus to Orleans.  I stood in front of the Eastham Superette talking with the man in the electric wheelchair, onto which he seemed to have packed and tied all his worldly possessions. 

I seldom ride the Flex bus, which, for those of you not familiar with it, is that part of the Cape Cod Regional Transit Authority that serves passengers from Harwich to Provincetown.  Despite being a strong believer in public mass transport, I have tended to view the Flex bus more as a well-intentioned gesture rather than something that fulfills a real need. 

Today I want to talk a bit about the “wrack line,” that more or less continuous line of debris left on the beach by the previous high tide. The content of the wrack line can be meager and ordinary – just a few bits of seaweed – or overwhelming and dramatic, like the 40-foot carcass of a dead humpback whale that washed up at Newcomb Hollow several years ago. But if we only investigate the content of the wrack line, big or small, I think we miss the bigger question. 

One of the things that holds the fabric of a community together, especially in a small town like mine, is what I like to call Public Gathering Places, or PGPs. These are places where we can have informal contact and conversation with people we might otherwise never meet. With the rise of social networking, which allows us increasingly to isolate ourselves with a wall of digital connections, such public gathering places have become even more important.  

The other day my dog Sam and I went for a walk along a stretch of the old railroad bed in South Wellfleet. At one point Sam went snuffling through the brush that bordered the bed and drew my attention to a pile of feathers there. 

I am standing in a cold, bleak place under a leaden sky. A raw northeast wind cuts through my windbreaker and brings the smell of saltwater with it. This is not some remote beach or heath.  In fact, I’m only a few yards from the unending roar of traffic on Route 6.

The other day I visited a friend who has several old apple and pear trees in his yard. As is true for most older fruit trees on the Cape, these have numerous regular rows or rings of small holes drilled around their trunks, as if someone had taken target practice at them with a miniature machine gun.

Last week I began to describe a walk I recently took on the pedestrian sidewalk that runs the length of Route 6 in Eastham – the only Cape town that has such a continuous walkway.  What struck me most, for the first couple of miles, was the prevalence of old houses on both sides of the highway. Most were Greek Revivals and old Capes, with one or two Federal era structures. I must have passed dozens of them, some hidden or screened by fences or vegetation, but most quite visible.

Here’s a Cape Cod factoid that you can use at parties during the holiday season: “What is the only town on Cape Cod that has a pedestrian sidewalk running continuously from one end of the town to the other? Think about that for a moment or two. Got an answer?

Sometimes the history of a place speaks to us in indirect, or hidden ways. Yesterday afternoon I took a walk up Lombard Hollow, one of half a dozen or so glacial valleys that run roughly parallel from east to west along the Wellfleet-Truro line. I don’t remember walking up this hollow before in December. It is a different place now, so open and bare, like a room with the walls removed. Its contours seem alive, active. As you walk up the nearly flat, fairly straight road, the ridges on either side loom high and level.

One night last week, about 3:30 a.m., I was woken out of a deep sleep by a sound – a sound at once familiar, infuriating, and implacable. I knew instantly what it was, and what I would have to do, and I was already sorry.

On a sunny and breezy day last month, Kathy and I walked out into the dunes to pick some wild cranberries that grow in the wet bogs there. I’m always newly surprised at the extent, the sweep of the dunes, the expanse of ridges and valleys they contain.

Late one afternoon a few weeks ago, I took a walk along a Wellfleet beach facing Cape Cod Bay. At its start, this beach is backed by a low line of dunes, but after a few hundred feet, the dunes rise to become a low glacial bluff, a mix of sand and clay perhaps 20 feet high. 

Some of you may recall—or perhaps may have seen—the dramatic geological event that occurred last summer at the Cahoon Hollow parking lot in Wellfleet. On the morning of August 19, after receiving six to seven inches of rain the day before, a large portion of the parking lot collapsed, creating a steep gully or ravine about 25 feet wide and 40 feet long, opening down onto the beach.

It’s become something of a cliché to hear members of my generation go on about how much Halloween has changed since we were kids. The main difference, we always seem to say, is how much freedom we were allowed on that one night of the year when mischief-making and self-disguise were not only approved but actually encouraged.

I remember the first time Kathy and I spent a couple of days in Euphoria, one of the dune shacks in the Provincelands managed by the Peaked Hill Trust. It was the last weekend in October and we arrived just at sunset. All the way out the light grew more and more intense, igniting the dune crests. A gibbous moon hung in the southern sky. The wind was stiff out of the northwest and growing stiffer. We dug the key out of its hiding-place and went inside.

Last week, talking about the Clay Pounds, I mentioned that, despite their dramatic appearance and the significant part they played in the Cape’s maritime history, relatively few people visit the Clay Pounds today.  The problem is one of access. 

The Clay Pounds are one of the few geological features on Cape Cod’s Outer Beach that have endured long enough to have acquired a name. Located just north of Highland Light in north Truro, the Clay Pounds comprise a 40-foot thick band of nearly pure blue clay. Nowhere else on the Cape does anything approach these massive sedimentary deposits.

Paradise Valley is a glacial hollow set on the Wellfleet-Truro line. During the late 19th century it was a thriving community of a dozen or more houses, but when Wellfleet’s Herring River dike was built around 1908, the valley was cut off from navigable waters. The community gradually atrophied and was eventually abandoned by the 1920s.

Sixteen years ago this fall, a month after the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers, my wife Kathy and I bought an old house in Squid Tickle, Newfoundland – a tiny village on the northeast coast of that rocky island. Since then we’ve spent most summers there, far from the raucous noise, pressing crowds, and increasingly scary traffic of Cape Cod’s high season.

The other day I stopped for a dip cone at P.J.’s on Route 6 in Wellfleet. As is my habit, I took the cone and walked across the road up into the Duck Creek Cemetery, the old Congregational graveyard where most of the headstones are from the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Memory can play funny tricks.          

This year, for instance, is the centennial of my high school in Parkersburg, West Virginia. There were celebrations over Labor Day weekend, featuring, among other events, a concert by past and present members of the Parkersburg High School marching band.

March, 1981. A large blue dragger, The Little Infant, is moored nearby on my side of the Harbor, which is deepest just inside the curve of the spit. The entire crew of seven or eight are standing in a line on her port side, shucking sea scallops and throwing the gurry over the rail to the raucous delight of the gulls swarming below on the surface of the water.