Cape Cod Journal 2007, Part 4
6/14/07 Thursday
Coudy, windy, and chilly again. Which starts us all off in a grumbly mood. But we use the clouds to make a return visit to Isaiah Thomas, the great used bookstore we discovered last year. And memory really hadn’t done justice to just how marvelous this bookstore is. Or maybe I just felt the marvel more keenly since it has been longer since I have lived near such an establishment—the last was the Harvard Bookstore in Harvard Square (the store is not affiliated with the university). As it did last year, the kids’ room with the big stuffed dragon proves crucial to keeping Nicholas entertained, and he does pretty well for himself book-wise too—at a buck apiece we get a stack of installments in the Boxcar Children series, and barely manage to leave behind another stack from the Magic Treehouse series. We pass on the latter because Nicholas hasn’t fully established his enthusiasm for the series quite yet—but the ones we have taken out from the library have helped introduce N. to the idea of “mysteries” in general. We spend a lot of time these days identifying mysteries and following clues to solve them—like say the Mystery of the Yellow Kayak (unoccupied) on the beach today. Anyway, we also find him a nicely illustrated edition of Hans Christian Anderson stories.
I could easily get lost in this store and browse endlessly, but as time is limited I decide to focus just on the poetry section, since such sections are so hard to find anywhere these days. Everything I get is old--in the sense that the authors are long dead--but I do pretty well: Paul Valery: An Anthology, from Princeton UP; the Selected Writing of Paul Valery, from New Directions (can’t believe I’ve never gotten around to buying this before); the Richard Howard translation of Les Fleurs du Mal, from Godine; The Penguin Book of Bird Poetry (sometime I’ll tell you about my pet theory about the links between poetry and birdsong); Poems of New York (one of those handsome and relatively inexpensive little Everyman hardbacks, with the very civilized ribbon-style attached bookmark, and it even includes a poem by man George Oppen, whose work is certainly not anthologized often enough); Poems from the Sanskrit, from Penguin Classics; and Stephen Mitchell’s Gilgamesh (I’m an unapologetic fan of Mitchell’s Rilke translations, though some have criticized them for being too light and Americanized; I wouldn’t want to have only these translations, but they definitely have their charms, at least for me). The Essays section is right next to Poetry, so I sidle over and also end up with The Oxford Book of Essays (where else am I going to get Sir Thomas Brown’s “On Dreams” and Pauline Kael’s “Movies on Television” in the same volume?) and Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox (perhaps in a subconscious nod to the African pygmy hedgehog at the Zooquarium yesterday?) in the form of an original Mentor paperback from 1957 (original price 35 cents, current price $3.50). Then, as I’m watching Nicholas while Suzanne browses, we wander past the New England section, so I add Henry Kittredge’s Cape Cod: Its People and their History to the pile, along with a collection of “haunting, spine-chilling stories” called New England Ghosts (years ago I picked up a little collection of local legends and ghost stories when visiting New Brunswick on vacation, and ended up liking it a lot).
~
As the purchasing list above indicates, we have discovered on this trip something I’m sure all the local merchants count on: there is an inverse relation between the pleasantness of the weather and the amount of money one spends shopping on vacation. Shopping isn’t normally a particularly big vacation activity for us, but this week we do more of it than usual, since we’re not on the beach. After the bookstore, we vamp up the tourist bit and outfit ourselves with a pile of pretty nice Cape Cod sweatshirts from the Cuffy’s chain (Buy two at full price, and get three more free!). The shop is in Chatham, a town we haven’t visited before, and are determined to check out. As it happens, we don’t do much more than reconnoiter it for a future excursion, since by the time we get there we’re itching to find a beach—no matter what the weather. Driving through the quaint downtown we spot a railroad museum, a glassworks, and some interesting looking galleries, so the place definitely merits a return visit next year. But now we head straight back out of town until we hit Ridgevale beach, mentioned in our guide as having both a beach with waves and a protected area great for kids. It is, in fact, a very nice beach, and would probably be even more impressive on a day with sun and blue skies. As it is, the wind is howling, so we keep the long pants on and just stroll around, pondering The Mystery of the Yellow Kayak, and coming across a big pile of blue-crab shells (looks like someone must have had a feast). We make a big pile of claws (N. is particularly fascinated by these, with their impressive hinges and fierce-looking serrations), and count 27 of them. But there are no waves, despite the whipping wind, so we feel a mounting urge to head over to Orleans, and Nauset beach.
As soon as we get to Nauset we can see monster waves crashing ahead of us as we drive down the beach road to the parking lot. The air temp is about 57 degrees (average for this time of year is about 71), and the wind is blasting, but we decide that when a thing has to be done it has to be done. Our eyes wide with the prospect that lies before us, we change into our swim suits (still wearing sweatshirts and jackets) and charge the beach. The waves are thrashing, and once again we are about the only ones braving the weather, but we walk into the surf and stand there letting the waves pound us. The water is icy cold, and I have to keep a tight grip on Nicholas’s hand so he won’t be flattened by the incoming breakers, but he yells with delight and so do I. Suzanne bravely stands in the surf taking pictures, and gets taken unawares by a sly wave or two. Then I take over the camera and Suzanne keeps hold of Nicholas. The finisher comes when three waves converge and break at once, knocking Nicholas clean off his feet, though Suzanne manages to keep him mostly out of the water. After that we break for the van—still yelling our heads off—and change into dry clothes. My feet are still icily numb as we leave the parking lot, and I have the feeling that we’ve earned our lobsters for the night. Once we get to the Lobster Claw the “Ah, lobster!” moment we’ve been waiting for all week finally comes.
The visit to Nauset, brief and frigid though it was, ends up feeling like a kind of pilgrimage. It seems as though our stay at the Cape would have been somehow incomplete if we hadn’t gone.
Coudy, windy, and chilly again. Which starts us all off in a grumbly mood. But we use the clouds to make a return visit to Isaiah Thomas, the great used bookstore we discovered last year. And memory really hadn’t done justice to just how marvelous this bookstore is. Or maybe I just felt the marvel more keenly since it has been longer since I have lived near such an establishment—the last was the Harvard Bookstore in Harvard Square (the store is not affiliated with the university). As it did last year, the kids’ room with the big stuffed dragon proves crucial to keeping Nicholas entertained, and he does pretty well for himself book-wise too—at a buck apiece we get a stack of installments in the Boxcar Children series, and barely manage to leave behind another stack from the Magic Treehouse series. We pass on the latter because Nicholas hasn’t fully established his enthusiasm for the series quite yet—but the ones we have taken out from the library have helped introduce N. to the idea of “mysteries” in general. We spend a lot of time these days identifying mysteries and following clues to solve them—like say the Mystery of the Yellow Kayak (unoccupied) on the beach today. Anyway, we also find him a nicely illustrated edition of Hans Christian Anderson stories.
I could easily get lost in this store and browse endlessly, but as time is limited I decide to focus just on the poetry section, since such sections are so hard to find anywhere these days. Everything I get is old--in the sense that the authors are long dead--but I do pretty well: Paul Valery: An Anthology, from Princeton UP; the Selected Writing of Paul Valery, from New Directions (can’t believe I’ve never gotten around to buying this before); the Richard Howard translation of Les Fleurs du Mal, from Godine; The Penguin Book of Bird Poetry (sometime I’ll tell you about my pet theory about the links between poetry and birdsong); Poems of New York (one of those handsome and relatively inexpensive little Everyman hardbacks, with the very civilized ribbon-style attached bookmark, and it even includes a poem by man George Oppen, whose work is certainly not anthologized often enough); Poems from the Sanskrit, from Penguin Classics; and Stephen Mitchell’s Gilgamesh (I’m an unapologetic fan of Mitchell’s Rilke translations, though some have criticized them for being too light and Americanized; I wouldn’t want to have only these translations, but they definitely have their charms, at least for me). The Essays section is right next to Poetry, so I sidle over and also end up with The Oxford Book of Essays (where else am I going to get Sir Thomas Brown’s “On Dreams” and Pauline Kael’s “Movies on Television” in the same volume?) and Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox (perhaps in a subconscious nod to the African pygmy hedgehog at the Zooquarium yesterday?) in the form of an original Mentor paperback from 1957 (original price 35 cents, current price $3.50). Then, as I’m watching Nicholas while Suzanne browses, we wander past the New England section, so I add Henry Kittredge’s Cape Cod: Its People and their History to the pile, along with a collection of “haunting, spine-chilling stories” called New England Ghosts (years ago I picked up a little collection of local legends and ghost stories when visiting New Brunswick on vacation, and ended up liking it a lot).
~
As the purchasing list above indicates, we have discovered on this trip something I’m sure all the local merchants count on: there is an inverse relation between the pleasantness of the weather and the amount of money one spends shopping on vacation. Shopping isn’t normally a particularly big vacation activity for us, but this week we do more of it than usual, since we’re not on the beach. After the bookstore, we vamp up the tourist bit and outfit ourselves with a pile of pretty nice Cape Cod sweatshirts from the Cuffy’s chain (Buy two at full price, and get three more free!). The shop is in Chatham, a town we haven’t visited before, and are determined to check out. As it happens, we don’t do much more than reconnoiter it for a future excursion, since by the time we get there we’re itching to find a beach—no matter what the weather. Driving through the quaint downtown we spot a railroad museum, a glassworks, and some interesting looking galleries, so the place definitely merits a return visit next year. But now we head straight back out of town until we hit Ridgevale beach, mentioned in our guide as having both a beach with waves and a protected area great for kids. It is, in fact, a very nice beach, and would probably be even more impressive on a day with sun and blue skies. As it is, the wind is howling, so we keep the long pants on and just stroll around, pondering The Mystery of the Yellow Kayak, and coming across a big pile of blue-crab shells (looks like someone must have had a feast). We make a big pile of claws (N. is particularly fascinated by these, with their impressive hinges and fierce-looking serrations), and count 27 of them. But there are no waves, despite the whipping wind, so we feel a mounting urge to head over to Orleans, and Nauset beach.
As soon as we get to Nauset we can see monster waves crashing ahead of us as we drive down the beach road to the parking lot. The air temp is about 57 degrees (average for this time of year is about 71), and the wind is blasting, but we decide that when a thing has to be done it has to be done. Our eyes wide with the prospect that lies before us, we change into our swim suits (still wearing sweatshirts and jackets) and charge the beach. The waves are thrashing, and once again we are about the only ones braving the weather, but we walk into the surf and stand there letting the waves pound us. The water is icy cold, and I have to keep a tight grip on Nicholas’s hand so he won’t be flattened by the incoming breakers, but he yells with delight and so do I. Suzanne bravely stands in the surf taking pictures, and gets taken unawares by a sly wave or two. Then I take over the camera and Suzanne keeps hold of Nicholas. The finisher comes when three waves converge and break at once, knocking Nicholas clean off his feet, though Suzanne manages to keep him mostly out of the water. After that we break for the van—still yelling our heads off—and change into dry clothes. My feet are still icily numb as we leave the parking lot, and I have the feeling that we’ve earned our lobsters for the night. Once we get to the Lobster Claw the “Ah, lobster!” moment we’ve been waiting for all week finally comes.
The visit to Nauset, brief and frigid though it was, ends up feeling like a kind of pilgrimage. It seems as though our stay at the Cape would have been somehow incomplete if we hadn’t gone.
posted by Steve Shoemaker at 5:47 PM
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