Cape Cod Journal 2007, Part 3

Part 3

6/12/07 Tuesday

Cloudy with showers, but the breaks between showers are exceedingly well timed. In the morning we head north for Skaket and Nauset beaches wearing our swim suits—convinced that our luck from yesterday will hold and that the sun will burn off the clouds, but this isn’t quite what happens. As we drive it begins to rain and the clouds look disconcertingly thick and dark. When we arrive at Skaket the rain does stop, but that’s the extent of our good fortune weather-wise. It’s quite cold and there is a scouring wind – but somehow Skaket is still fun. We keep our suits on but bundle up in sweatshirts and windbreakers, ready to join the one or two lonely figures on the beach. We know from past experience that low tide is a particularly fun time to come here, since the beach becomes an immense tidal flat and you can wade far into the shallow water to arrive at various sandbar “islands.” So this is what we do, and the wind and chill prove invigorating, provoking much running and yelling as we feel ourselves blown about like kites (in fact, we pretend to be kites). We carry our pails and shovels, and set up our water wheel in various strategic locations, burying its base in the mud to keep it from blowing over. It spins furiously from the force of the wind alone, before we even pour water into it. And when we do try to pour our water, only about half makes it in, with the rest taken by the wind.

After about 45 minutes of this sort of bracing play, we return to the van feeling like we’ve been on an adventure – and very ready to get out of the wind and into some warm, dry, long pants.

~

There’s no point in trying Nauset, which would be even harsher, so we drive north to Wellfleet for a run to Herridge’s Bookstore that does not disappoint. The management has changed again since last time – back, apparently, to the “original” fellow from our first visit, after a two-year sublease. The dog is gone, but the book selection is still pleasing. Suzanne restricts herself with remarkable discipline (some might call it foolishness) to Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. I take a chance on a book and writer I haven’t heard of—The Last Days of Dogtown, by Anita Diamant. I know “Dogtown” from Charles Olson’s poetry, and from the day trips to Gloucester we used to like to make when we lived near Boston (though we never actually got to Dogtown itself)—so the gamble seems reasonable. I also get Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch (which is supposed to be a comically obsessive account of soccer fandom); Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle; William Godwin’s Caleb Williams; and Edmund Wilson’s The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties.

We also stop at the farm stand and a gift shop we like in Wellfleet, and then press on to Provincetown (located, as we explain to Nicholas, on the “hand” attached to “bare and bended arm” of the Cape). Bearing a couple of restaurant recommendations we got from the woman at the bookstore, we embark on what turns out to be an actual culinary adventure at Napi’s, a long-standing local establishment, its walls covered with various nautically themed scenes captured by P-town artists from over the years. We start with “Russian Oysters,” which are oysters on the half shell, each topped by a dollop of sour cream and another dollop of black caviar. As soon as I see these on the menu I know I have to try them, and they are indeed excellent. Ditto for my scallop-stuffed half lobster with garlic mash potatoes and sauteed veggies, and Suzanne’s scallops Provencale. For dessert Nicholas discovers the taste of gourmet vanilla ice cream topped with dark chocolate sauce, as Suzanne and I heroically resist eating more than a bite or two of his treat.

6/13/07 Wednesday

Cloudy, windy, & quite chilly again. After Skaket yesterday, we’re not feeling ready to make bold with the elements again, so we look for an indoor activity and settle on the Zooquarium in Yarmouth. N. is excited about this, and Suzanne and I remark that one of the good things about having a four year old, as opposed to say, a nine year old, is that it doesn’t take all that much to keep one entertained. Anyway, we see some more fish and turtles and snakes, and feed some cows and goats and llamas. Then we see a live show featuring Miss Pickles, the trained pig, and another involving an African an African pygmy hedgehog who was not introduced to us by name. Did you know that rats can go longer without water than camels can? That pigs are incapable of looking up at the sky? That kangaroos can’t walk backwards? Well, you do now.

~

We come home and cook some salmon in garlic, olive oil, and white wine, with salad and doggy-bagged restaurant linguini on the side. All in all, we have made it through another cold, cloudy vacation day pretty well. The problem is that the forecast continues to call for clouds up through our departure on Friday—and that’s definitely a drag. One thing that takes a little pressure off the “beach vacation” and its demand for good weather is that we have a pretty nice beach down the street from us back home. But even so, it would be really nice if the sun would peep out a bit before we leave.

~

The thing about a vacation week is that you have your schedule cleared, you’re away from other responsibilities, and you can actually focus on what you want to do—and to an extent, that makes anything you do yield a certain amount of fun. But on the other hand, there is undeniable pressure to make the most of the time, since this is the week you have been planning for, and are now paying for.

Cape Cod Journal 2007, Part 2

Part 2

6/10/07 Sunday

Gorgeous and sunny. Bright white beach light. We head to Wood Neck beach, the beautifuly little “local” hideaway beach on Buzzards Bay that we discovered last year. There are really two beaches here – one on the more exposed “oceany” side and then another, protected area full of tidal pools and streams. The more exposed beach has a marvelous view, and the very clear water takes on a Mediterranean green in the sandy shallows. But this side is also much windier, and the water is pretty cold. On the other side, the water is mellow (especially for New England) and the beach is sheltered from the wind by the grassy dunes.

Last year, we noticed all the kids gleefully exploring the pools with nets, and this year we remembered to bring our own. Nicholas is absolutely delighted to see that these pools really do have whole schools of little fish (pipefish, I think they’re called) swimming about in them, but they prove too quick and elusive for our efforts. However, this does not deter Nicholas from splashing along madly in an attempt to catch some. We do catch a couple of hermit crabs and another larger crab (about three or four inches across) that’s built just like a blue crab but with a sandy yellow color and some darker speckles. Nicholas spots the crabs with his sharp eyes, but I have to scoop them up since he’s a bit afraid of them. Later, on the open side, we also see a horseshoe crab gliding primordially through the shallows, and Suz tries out the grab-it-by-the-tail trick remembered from her youthful summers on Long Island Sound – but as soon as all those claws start to wave in the air it slips from her hand and lands back in the water.

All in all, a wonderfully satisfying beach day, even though we left the thoughtfully packed sandwiches back in the fridge and had to make an unexpected lunch run. By dinner, we’re ready for a break from restaurant fare, so I head to Roche’s and pick up a roasted chicken, along with some fresh green beans to sautee in olive oil and garlic, and some Annie’s Mac & Cheese (one of N’s staples) to microwave. It all hits the spot.

~

After dinner, Nicholas and I go outside with our velcro “mitts” and our gaily colored tennis ball and have a game of catch. We haven’t done this since last summer, but N really does have a pretty good arm. Before we come in, we work up to 44 successful catches in a row, though toward the end we are standing only about three feet apart, each aiming right for the velcro sweet spot of the other’s mitt. Then the bath, and more from The Voyage of Dr. Doolittle before bed. We’re more than 300 pages in, and nearing the end. The book has an unfortunate streak of colonialism throughout (much condescension to the ignorant and silly “natives”), but we try to edit as we go. And otherwise, the story has many charms and delights.

~

Just remembered that today after a couple of seagulls tried to steal his turkey sandwich, N said “I call seagulls ‘mischief birds’ because they’re always getting up to mischief. N himself, I might add, is quite interested in mischief himself these days.

~

Also remembered that we finished up our time at the beach with a little game of “detective.” Nicholas was quite intrigued by the “mystery” that some of the water had flooded into the parking lot as the tide had come in (several people even had to move their cars). We waded through the tidal pool looking for clues (like the water getting colder toward the source of the influx) until we found the channel through which the tide enters the flats. When N and I returned, he said to Suzanne “I will tell you the whole story” and then proceeded to explain all that we had found.

6/11/07 Monday

Intermittent sun and clouds today with a few sprinkles and then a brief shower in the early evening. In the morning we’re in the mood for a hike, so we drive to the headquarters of the Waquoit Nature Reserve, but at the Visitor’s Information Center we realize that most of their trails are actually not near the headquarters but down by South Cape beach. So we drive just a little ways down the road to the ________ River Reservation, which has a riverside trail, though the “river” turns out to be not much more than a trickle at present. Under the spell of Dr. Doolittle, who makes being a naturalist sound quite exciting and adventurous, Nicholas insists on bringing his net so we can catch butterflies. I don’t have high hopes for our prospects, but sure enough, we do catch butterflies. One is a sort of burnt orange color that blends right in with the dead leaves on the ground. Another is brown with a row of four “eyes” on its wings, each eye consisting of a dark center encircled by a bright yellow ring. Our most spectacular specimen is black and irridescent blue, but though we spot two of this type they are both too quick for us. We lunch by the side of the road and then hike back out, with Suzanne and I taking turns carrying a tired Nicholas on our backs. Eventually he revives enough actually to run a good bit of the last segment of trail—ah the recuperative powers of youth!

~

We decide to hit the beach next, but make a couple of false starts. After driving down to South Cape beach because it is so close we remember that it really isn’t one of the better beaches. Then, after a certain amount of indecision (so many beaches!) we head over to Buzzard’s Bay again to investigate Old Silver beach. We do this partly because Nicholas really wants to go back to Wood Neck beach to hunt for fish and crabs again. Old Silver beach is near enough to Wood Neck to give us two options. Either it will be enough like Wood Neck for us to convince Nicholas to stay or we can just leave and go to Wood Neck. After finding Old Silver, we can see without leaving the car that it is quite beautiful—but no moreso than Wood Neck. And it doesn’t have the same sort of network of tidal pools (at least not accessible to the public). So back to Wood Neck we go, and by then it’s past 3 o’clock and clouding up. As we set up our stuff it starts to sprinkle and for a moment all looks doomed—but we decide to persevere. Almost everyone else leaves and we have the beach just about entirely to ourselves. After a few minutes, the rain stops, the sun comes out, and we are suddenly blessed with fantastic beach weather. We collect fourteen hermit crabs, find part of a horeshoe crab, build a “drip castle” by one of the tidal pools, and generally groove on the peacefully gorgeous late afternoon. Blue sky, white, puffy clouds, and lots of birds singing and stirring in the marshland. It’s hard to leave, and by the time we do we’re hungry enough to stop for a soft-serve ice cream before dinner. Nicholas is very excited about this violation of the rules, and we kind of like it too. As parents, we are of course concerned that this means he won’t eat dinner—but a little later he chows down two pieces of pizza from Zoe’s anyway.

~

Thinking back on the day I remember that we also caught a dragon-fly and examined its needle-thin body, iridescent green toward the head, its two sets of wings, and its top-of-the-head eyes. And when we released our hermit crabs at the beach it was funny how they all headed in different directions, as if following the paths marked by radii extending from a central point. I guess each one is trying to put as much distance as possible between it and the nearest crabs, and that's the pattern that results.

~

Once we get home from hiking, a deer tick scare (we find one in the car) leads us to strip down and self-inspect, to shower carefully, and to throw all the day’s clothing into the washer and dryer. In retrospect I can say that this was all to no avail--at least in my case--since this is undoubtedly the day I got infected with Lyme disease. Oy.

Cape Cod Journal 2007, Part 1

Cape Cod Journal 2007

Introduction: For me anyway—and I think also for my handful of readers--my Cape Cod Journal from last summer was one of the highlights of last year’s blog. In those notes, I wrote about going to beaches and eating lobster but also tried to grapple at least a bit with the question of how, or if, one can have an “authentic,” even “elemental,” experience in the face of all the processing and packaging that goes along, for most of us, with the word “vacation.” This year, I have returned to the beaches and the seafood, but haven’t done a heck of a lot of grappling. Instead, I have just taken it for granted that Cape Cod is a deeply interesting and amusing place to which we very much like to go. One complication this year—and a major reason that I’m blogging the journal so long after our return from vacation—is that I gotten bitten by a tick after hiking on the Cape and came down with Lyme disease, which meant a really nasty week or so of headache, fever, and chills. Now I’m taking antibiotics and feeling better, and I’m not going to write too much about the whole Lyme disease thing—but I will say that I’ll be using insect repellent the next time I head into the New England woods (strange that I had to go to Cape Cod to get infected since the eponymous town of Lyme is right here in Connecticut, just about 30 miles north of where I live).

Part 1


Friday 6/8/07

I head into this week’s vacation not quite sure that I have the same drive and energy to get some writing done that I had last year—but here I am at 9pm on the first evening sitting down at almost the same table to do a little jotting. By “almost the same” I mean that we are staying not only at the same resort but in the same building as last year, in a unit with a nearly identical layout, though we’re on the first floor instead of the second. Next year we’ll have to see if we can get second-floor unit again (the deck is better than the patio, and you get more privacy), but this place is still quite nice.

~

We have a sunny day for our drive today rather than a rainy one (like we had last year), but it’s supposed to rain tomorrow, just as it did on Saturday a year ago. And Ben and Lisa are schedule to visit for that rainy day once again—only this year Lisa is almost eight months pregnant!

~

We arrived in time to have dinner on the Cape this year, so we head to Oysters Too, quite nearby and recommended by the resort staff. We started with oysters on the half shell, which where very good, and I ordered the Seafood Fra Diavolo, a concoction that is nearly impossible for me to resist whenever it’s on the menu. My dish is spicily excellent, but Suz’s lobster, shrimp, and scallops over penne pasta is not as good. The lobster tail is tough, and the butter sauce is too rich. Nicholas is pretty happy, as usual, with pasta marinara, especially since the waitress grates fresh parmesan on it right at the table with a special little grinder. The only trouble is that he’s done with his pasta by the time Suzanne and I are through with appetizer and salad, so in order to buy time for us to finish our entrees I have to bribe Nicholas for the rest of dinner with lavishly buttered bits of bread (“No gaps!” he commands). As a rule, we can’t let Nicholas butter his own bread for the simple reason that he will, if unchecked, stick his finger directly in the butter and lick it. That is, if he doesn’t try to eat whole chunks of it straight. At one point tonight he says, “I want butter on bread with no bread!” and is quite delighted with his little joke.

~

This year we were able to leave Branford by 1 o’clock, instead of 2:30, and though we had all the usual sorts of last-minute details to sort out the departure was more mellow than last year’s too—and that’s progress. On the way out of town we stopped for a drive-thru Dunkin Donuts lunch of egg & cheese bagel sandwiches and one chocolate munchkin apiece. This is a favorite lunch for weekend day trips, and is really just about the only time we go to a fast food chain. As these things go, it’s not that bad for you, and it’s pretty tasty. The earlier departure means we miss the rush hour crunch at Providence and get here by 4pm, giving us time after dinner to hit Roche Brothers grocery store (already pre-approved from last year) to stock up for the week. We also go to a nice wine shop right next to Roche Bros., which was either mysteriously unnoticed or absent last year. Checking in to the resort earlier, I had noticed brochures for two different Cape wineries, so I ask the guy at store about them. I have been wondering if you can get away with taking a four year old to a vineyard, but the guy says it pretty much a “grown-ups only” scene. As for the wines, he says they are “interesting,” but difficult to compare to anything more familiar because of the distinctive soil and climate on the Cape. Instead of the vineyard route, he recommends going to in-store tastings like the ones he does from 4-7pm every Friday and Saturday. That leaves me only tomorrow as a possibility before we leave—we’ll see if I make it.

~

The Winnie the Pooh bed we used for the first time last year has been a great favorite on all our trips since then, but is nearly outgrown, since Nicholas is shooting up like a beanstalk these days. I see from last year’s journal that he was so excited the first night on the Cape that he didn’t get to sleep until 10 o’clock. This year he still seems restless when I check on him at 9:24, but by about 9:26 he’s down for the count—storing up energy for tomorrow!

Saturday 6/9/07

Cloudy, and it turns out that Ben and Lisa can’t come today since Lisa isn’t feeling so hot--for the usual advanced-pregnancy reasons. Nicholas is quite sad that he won’t be seeing Ben, but a trip to the resort’s indoor pool cheers him up considerably (he just had his first swim lessons this spring, so now he gets to try out his moves). We drive down to Wood’s Hole to visit the aquarium at the Oceanographic Institute (yet another of Thomas Jefferson’s inspirations it turns out), and the aquarium exhibit is small but very well curated. We see local fish like cod, salmon, and halibut that I’m used to seeing only down at our local fish shop, laid out on a bed of ice. Also a hermaphroditic lobster that is half red and half blue and a really big lobster that is all blue. Perusing these exhibits we learn about the phenomenon of “color morphs” in lobsters—something I had never heard of. It’s mostly a matter of genetic mutation, but lobsters can also turn blue if they don’t get enough shells in their diet. We see other cool stuff too, like those creepy Remora Suckers that like to ride on the backs of sharks. The only sharks, though, were little “dogfish,” but this display was fascinating to N. because you could see tiny fetal dogfish hanging about in egg sacs.

In a brilliant stroke, they let you walk around behind the tanks, so you can see the “working” side of the aquarium, with pipes and drains to circulate the water, etc. etc.

~

After the aquarium we head out of Wood’s Hole and along the coast toward Surf Ride Beach, but end up at a little unmarked beach with a small dirt parking lot (we followed a car turning down a likely looking road). This beach has a nice Charleston-like marsh alongside, with a little stream of warm water running through it. Nicholas sets up his water wheel, which—with a little help from our shovels—promptly carves out a small channel down through the soft, sandy bank and into the stream (the sand was fine and soft by the stream but coarse and rocky on the main beach). After a while, we get back in the car and drive a bit further down the road to what must be Surf Ride Beach (though we never saw a sign). There we act the part of “aquarium-keepers” with our nets and pails. Nicholas is determined that we’re going to gather some fish to keep in our aquarium/pail, but ultimately he settles for periwinkles plucked from the rocks of the jetty. We agree that we will study them tonight and make some notes, then release them back into “open water” tomorrow. Come to think of it, though, our aquarium is still in the back of the van as I write this.

~

We make our way back to Wood’s Hole for dinner, fully intending to try the Fishmonger’s Cafe. But we are ravenous by 5:15 and FC doesn’t open until 5:30, so we end up at Shucker’s for lobster boil, just like last year. Somehow it just isn’t as good this time. Part of the problem is that the lobster isn’t hot enough—but it may also have something to do with the fact that we didn’t get the Thursday Night Special price (as we did last year) and we didn’t stumble on the restaurant just as we got an unexpected late break of sun after a day of rain (like last year). Anway, the mussels are scraggly, the steamers are gritty (well, like they are most places), and the corn is pretty mediocre. All in all, it just isn’t the sort of experience that makes you go “Ahhh, lobster!” That leaves us with a goal to reach before the week is out.