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April 01, 2004 CAPE COD Even a journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step. I took that first step March 26 at Herring Cove on Cape Cod, the start of our 3,600-mile trek across the U.S. One step down, 10 million to go (give or take 100,000 steps). Photographer Travis Lindhorst and I are on a coast-to-coast journey in search of the heartbeat of America as we travel the entire length of Route 6, a country road that stretches from Provincetown, Mass. to Long Beach, Cal. We'll travel this road together, you and I, meeting people, exploring places and learning what makes America tick at the start of a new century. Today, we'll talk about the first 100 miles, from P'town (that's what they call Provincetown) to the edge of New Bedford, once a whaling capital and still a city wedded to then ocean.
At the edge of the Provincetown business area, there's a curious shop whose small yard is awash with the owner's handiwork of metal art: wrought iron roosters, weather vanes, sailing ships and light houses, and a big, angry snapdragon with menacing teeth. Charles Kuralt would transform this dragon-making artist into a slice of America. Perhaps I could do the same. Alas, our artist wasn't there this chilly morning. Then again, almost no one is in Provincetown in March - certainly not at 10 in the morning. Walk along narrow Commercial Street and you'll find more workmen than residents. You'll see plumbers, carpenters, roofers, upholsterers, and electricians getting businesses ready for the tourist season. But you'll find few places open. In a few months this narrow, street will be overwhelmed with tourists, summer residents, gay couples and gawkers. You won't see Henry Bloch there in the summer. He's one of the few year-round residents on the beachfront in nearby North Truro. "In summer, this place is so crowded you don't go to town unless you have to," said Bloch, 77, who's been coming to Truro for decades and moved here year-round in 1990. For him, the lower cape (that's the outer end of this curled-arm shaped peninsula) is a slice of heaven in winter. You can walk over dunes, look out onto Cape Cod Bay and see the world as it was long ago: ducks swimming in green water with a lonely boat or two off in the distance. No people. On special days, the wind, waves and freezing temperatures combine to transform the water into a giant ice sculpture. "Some of them look like creatures with big teeth. It only happens a few times a year, but it's spectacular," Henry said. Henry cherishes his solitude, but he misses the one person who shared his years on the cape. There's a sadness in his voice and, I'm sure, in his heart when he talks of the years his deceased wife Jean spent on cape as a girl. She loved the cape even more than he does. But now he walks alone. Down the road a few miles, Albert Tinkham is a one-man celebration committee. Whether it's Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, St. Patrick's Day or Easter, At 73, you'd think Albert would let younger people do the work -- and there's a lot of work to this. But he likes it. Especially Halloween and Christmas, when kids prod their parents to drive by the display. "You hear the cars stop and the kids are shouting. They're happy. I like that," Albert said. "I had 240 kids here for trick or treat on Halloween." But it's not just for the kids. In Albert's living room you'll find more than 100 Easter bunnies he's collected over the years. They're everywhere: on the window sills, the counters, the stairs, the tables. Albert, 73, is a legend, of sorts, on the lower cape. Two towns away, in Eastham we met a family that always takes the Route 6A detour on their way to Provincetown, just so their kids can see what's at Albert's place. Albie, as they call him, is a Truro native who worked for years at the public works department. "This is the only place I've ever lived. I was born here and I'm going to die here," he said. But not before putting smiles on the faces of thousands of kids. Farther down on Route 6 we met Kris and Peter. They didn't want their full name in the paper but their tale is worth hearing. It's a love story between a man, a woman and their pets.
Kris is free of the cancer now and the spinning wheel helped change her life. Kris and Peter now raise rabbits, sheep, goats and five llamas (not to mention two dogs, a cat and two sons) - all providing wool for Kris' new passion. Knitting. "It just mushroomed," she said referring to the menagerie in her back yard. "And it happened because Peter was patient, kind and willing to help out with the work, even though he's plenty busy as contractor." You should see the things Kris knits. The colors are fantastic. I was very tempted to try on a purple sweater and "forget" to take it off before I left. Though Kris and Peter don't want their full names in the paper, you're more than welcome to learn everything you want to know about them at their website: fieldhavenfarm.com. Most of our cape journey was on Route 6A, the quiet side of the cape: winding roads with antique shops around every bend, grassy fields and bogs of rust-red cranberries, salt ponds rivulets, villages and historic districts. Actually, 6A is a 40-mile historic district stretching most of the way along the Cape Cod Bay side of the cape. "It's the longest historic district in the country," said Ken Traugot, owner of the Beechwood Inn in Barnstable village, the subdued neighbor of bustling Hyannis, the cape's biggest city. |
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On the quiet side, I spotted a trail to the Nobscussett Indians burial ground. I stopped to pay respect to the people who nurtured this land centuries ago. The burial area was a small triangle of land overlooking a lake. Feathers, pinecones and shells formed a small memorial at the entrance.
"Do you know the lake's name," I asked. "Young man, I know everything there is to know about this town," said Dick, who admitted to being "somewhat over 60." And with that, he offered to take me on a brief tour of his beloved hometown, Dennis. Hey, I'll go anywhere with someone who calls me young man. We started with the lake: Lake Scargo, named for a mythical Nobscussett princess. According to legend, the tribe scooped out the soil with clamshells to create a lake for Scargo's fish. They piled the soil next to the lake creating the highest hill on he cape. "From the top of that hill you can see virtually all of the cape," Dick said. "And if you look down on the lake, you'll see that it's shaped like a fish." Somewhere in the lake is a Chevrolet Corvette, stolen by teens nearly a half-century ago. They drove the Chevy onto the frozen lake, had their fun, then sent it off onto the thin ice - where it sank. Dick said he's scoured the lake but never found the car. But he knows it's there because he was living in Dennis when the whole affair happened. Dick drove me to the site of the former Shiverick Shipyard, where the company made clipper ships, the fastest vessels of their day. Along the way he told me the history of each house we passed. But one place made his blood boil. It was a mansion overlooking the ocean. To Dick, the house is a symbol of the loss of human values on the cape: an ostentatious showplace where there was once just a simple home. "They spent a million dollars just to bring in sand so the new house would be higher," he said, estimating the house cost upwards of $7 million. "Not long ago anyone could walk through the surrounding land but the new owners don't want trespassers." "You think we like that?" Dick asked. Dick isn't the only native who resents newcomers and summer folk. In fact it's a theme. "We're called wash-ashores," said Debra Traugot, Ken's wife, who moved to the cape a mere decade ago. "If you were born and raised here, I can see how you'd be resistant to change. But the growth has brought in a lot of renewal." "The Beechwood Inn was decaying until it was transformed into a bed & breakfast in the 1980s," she said. "Summer residents and tourists help pay the taxes and keep the communities alive." And there are more wash-ashores every year. Just ask veteran ferryboat captain Brian O'Malley who's been commuting to the mid-cape for decades. "Crossing the Bourne and Sagamore bridges in summer is a nightmare, but the winter traffic is no longer a picnic, either." "That's been one of the biggest changes over the years. Obviously, the number of people has increased and it's not just the tourists," he said. O'Malley is the senior captain on the Steamship Authority's cargo ferry Gay Head, named for the hills on Martha's Vineyard Island. "It's a great job," he said, "but you're constantly on your toes." "Everything that happens on this boat is my responsibility. It doesn't matter if the weather changes on a dime, if the pleasure boaters have no clue of how long it takes to maneuver a heavy ferry." "There are times when the ferry just inches along in thick ice, even with a Coast Guard boat clearing the way. It freezes over again very quickly," O'Malley said. Seeing the crowds and the multimillion-dollar homes, it's hard to believe the Pilgrims snubbed Cape Cod. Their first stop on the new continent was near Provincetown. They went ashore, gathered provisions and stayed a short while. But they couldn't maneuver the Mayflower close to land and they had to wade to and from the ship. At least one Pilgrim drowned making the commute. Eventually, they sailed north to what is now Plymouth. If you want big waves try the area near the Nauset Coast Guard station at the end of the national seashore. The breakers can be thunderous. Not far away naturalist Henry Benston lived in an isolated cabin and wrote the nature classic "The Outmost House", which recorded his encounters with the waves, the creatures and the dunes. "In this solitary dune, my house faced the four corners of the world," he wrote. "Listen to the surf, really lend it your ears and you will hear a world of sounds... sometimes the vocal sounds that might be the half-heard talk of the people of the sea." And if you love books, plan to spend time at the Parnassus Book Service in a big blue barn of a building on 6A in Yarmouth. You can pick a paperback from the thousands under a roof on the side of the building. If the store's closed just leave a dollar in the mail slot.
And employee Paul Noonan knows where to find each one of them. "We're known for our children's books, gardening, sculpting and painting books - but we should be known for a lot more," said Noonan, who worked in the Harvard University library before landing the job at Parnassus, his lifelong dream. The shop has thousands of nautical and marine books and thousands more on New England. They also have a large collection of Russian books, many in Russian. "We get a lot of requests from Russia," he said as he picked his way through the shop pointing out collections of military history, furniture, antiques, languages, arms and weapons, poetry and black studies. "We had more black studies books, but Maya Angelou came in and bought a lot of them. She bought a lot of our cookbooks too," he said. I wish I had time to tell you more about our trip, but I'm sure the editors are already cursing at me and figuring out which parts of this story to cut. Maybe next time, we'll talk a little about some of the things we encountered once we crossed the Cape Cod Canal to the mainland. But I'm told there are so many stories in New Bedford I won't be able to look back. |
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Herring Cove is a beautiful stretch of fine sand (and nude beach) at the far end of the cape and the eastern end of Route 6 and 6A. Travis and I dipped our hands in the frigid Atlantic and began our trip. Travis drops me off each morning and picks me up at days end. In between, he takes pictures. We're an odd couple, of sorts, a 27-year-old tech-savvy photographer and an old curmudgeon thrown together by a desire to explore.
you'll find the roadside next to his house crammed with colorful displays. This week, he has Easter bunnies of all sorts and sizes, balloons, baskets, signs (Happy Easter!) and, of course, eggs.
After Kris was diagnosed with Hodgkin's cancer four years ago, Peter gave her a spinning wheel and an angora rabbit to provide the fur for yarn. It was a perfect gift. Kris was always crafty and loves animals.
A few minutes later I met Dick Buck peering at the lake with binoculars.
When you step inside it's like entering an enormous office of an eccentric college professor. There are books everywhere. They're squeezed onto shelves that reach to the 15-foot-high ceiling. They're in piles on the floor, in boxes, on tables. You can't turn around without bumping into books.