Chapter I: Part 1

CAPE COD

Is A Number of Things

ALLAN NEAL

The selections in this book have
appeared in different form in the
column Soundside of the Yarmouth
Register.

PRINTED AT THE REGISTER PRESS
YARMOUTH PORT
CAPE COD
DECEMBER 1954

_We had been driving along in the full glory of a September afternoon on the Cape. It was a wonderful world of deep blues and green pines, of gleaming white sands and of sunshine singing over everything. I had been pointing out things, afraid she might miss them, or not see all there was to see in them._

_She said, “I wish you could hear yourself as you sound to others. When you talk about the Cape it is as if you owned it, all of it,--and you treat everyone else here as your guest.” There was nothing to say to that because I knew it was the truth. Still, I knew that there was a better than even chance that, given a year, more or less, she would be irritating some newcomer from the Mainland with her own possessiveness. She said, “It is really a very nice place you know, especially on a day like this. But you have been everywhere and everywhere leads you right back here. You never leave the Cape except under protest, and you rush back as if it might disappear in your absence. What is it between you and the Cape?”_

_So I thought I would try, anyway, and I began_:

“_Cape Cod is a number of things, and it means a number of things to me...._”

_First of all there is the land, the bounteous and the beautiful land, and then there is the beautiful and bounteous sea that surrounds it. And there is the special way in which the land and the sea respond to nature and her varied seasons. There are a thousand colors and a thousand variations of each; there are a thousand moods and you never know which one to expect. You only know that the land and sea are there and that there is no dullness in them._

AT THE RISING OF THE SUN

It was the strange half-light between yesterday and today. From an intricate network of twisting, turning roads you could follow the headlights of the cars as they moved from all points of the compass toward the dark outline of the hill. The moist air formed diadems of light around the headlamps and their beams sparkled from the gleaming, rain-washed street. Sometimes the cars swerved to avoid a branch or bush that had been tossed in their path by the gale winds of the night. Sometimes the lights picked out some strange creature of the night as it scurried into the brush beside the road, alarmed at this unlooked-for intrusion upon its domain.

At length each car was in place upon the hill. There was still no activity upon the Main Highway below which snaked its way down past Quivet and Sesuit to the Outer Cape. The wavering lines of street lights that from a distance twinkled through the branches seemed to grow weaker as the night shadows were replaced by a silvery grayness. The rain ended but the storm was not over. There was wind, howling across the Bay from Manomet, tossing the flexible pines into confusion, rattling the branches of maple and scrub oak that were thick with new buds, making conversation nearly impossible among people who were otherwise occupied anyway in clutching their billowing coats about them. There was the Bay, lashed now into a white fury with huge combers breaking out of a gray-green sea all along shore. You could hear the sound of them as they hit the beach. In contrast to the Bay the lake below looked peaceful, cold but peaceful, and a circling gull above it rode with the wind. He did not move his wings nor did he make any sound. It was cold all right and you could tell it by the look of the trumpeter as the first notes of the grand old hymn broke across the hills. Although no sun showed at the horizon, the sky above it showed rosy hues and the swift-moving scud overhead revealed patches of blue that had not been there before. The wind tore rudely at the pages of the hymnals but from the group clustered in the lee of the stone tower the notes came loud and true.

Soon you could tell for sure that the sun was up from the sea at Chatham and that it was to be, after all, a wonderful day. Off across the woodlands toward the Sound the trees began to cease their agitation and the sun’s rays pierced the clouds to play about them. Along one side of the Bay the long, low fore-arm of the Cape became visible as though it had just then emerged from the sea; opposite, the cliffs of Manomet were majestic and purple in the morning light.

As the light increased the air became clearer and there was a new softness in it. There was a softness and a wonderful fresh taste and you knew it was spring. The pale sleepiness had gone from the faces of the people as it had from all the earth and in its place there was new color that could have been born of the wind or of this special day. Finally, the cars, that had groped their way up the hill through the night-shadows, turned down the hill and along the twisting roads where the first sunshine was already drying the roadside pools. The roads were clean and the season was new and you could see the symbols of the age-old hope and promise all about you.

So, at last, all the cars were gone and Scargo Hill was left alone to drowse away the first early hours of a bright new day. Below on the highway the street lights had gone out and, one by one, so had the night lights in the old white houses along the way. From some houses the first, gray curls of smoke from a morning fire drifted upwards. And Easter Sunday, at the rising of the sun, had come to the Cape.

NOR’EASTER

Sometime in a Cape November there will come the first real Nor’easter, punching an effective period to the end of Fall. Then the winds come roaring out of the northeast to whip the waters of the Cape into a white frenzy and howl around the corners of old houses. These are the winds that rattle the store signs along Main Street while torrential rains beat against the plate glass windows and the shoppers are not there. It is a time to spend indoors, huddled up to the warmth of stove or open hearth, while the sturdy Cape houses settle down into the wind to weather it out. Above stairs the old houses yield gently to the wind in a motion that is reminiscent of the roll of a ship at sea. Like the ship, they will ride out this storm as they have many another throughout a long two centuries.

When a Nor’easter has passed, or settled down to a dull roar, it is a time for the Outer Beach, that magnificent stretch of shoreline that skirts the Cape from Provincetown to Chatham. One early Saturday in November I reached the Nauset Coast Guard Beach just as the peak of the high tide reached the shore and the unleashed fury of an angry Atlantic beat against the land to create one of the Cape’s most terrifying and awesome sights. The wind had shifted to the southwest and the sun was trying to break through the overcast but the seas piled higher and higher, as if through their own momentum. The whole surface of the sea was a menacing mass of tortured white breakers which threw their spume in smokey clouds a hundred feet into the air. The breakers themselves reached heights of over fifty feet and followed one upon another with such savage intensity that there was hardly any distinguishing between them. They tossed a mass of miscellaneous lumber about with incredible ease. At the near shore a huge, battered scow rolled over and over and was finally spewed out upon the beach, while out in the troughs of the waves several telephone poles and a tremendous, up-rooted tree were tossed about as lightly as if they had been matchsticks. The shore was rapidly becoming littered with the toll of the storm, an extraordinary collection of objects of every size, color and shape, each with a story of its own, each with a beginning of its own, united by their common destination--the outer beach of the Cape. Each of them was smothered in a cottony mass of foam that writhed in the wind and was iridescent in the wavering sunlight and piled upon the beach like banks of snow before a plow.

The air was full of salt, new-washed, crisp and exhilarating, and the call of the beach itself was irresistible. Making cautious and slow headway, I headed south along it with the sea nipping at my heels and the salt spray in my face. This was the beach that Thoreau had known so well and that Henry Beston so lovingly described in his “The Outermost House”; but even Beston, who knew the beach in all seasons and in all weathers, might not have recognized it that day. It was hardly there at all, for nearly all of its white wideness was covered with the gaping jaws of the waves that threatened it. Westward of the beach the salt marshes were completely awash and all the way to Route 28 you looked across a whole sea that was leaden and riled and made the whole landscape unfamiliar and strange. All along the beach the breakers tore and crashed against the high sand dunes. Walking became a tricky, perilous business with the sea acting as if it were possessed of some malicious wit of its own with which it could set a trap for the unalert. So great were the breakers that, when they would recede, a hundred feet of beach would stand bare and revealed only to be covered up in the very next instant while the water reached for your feet and sent you scrambling up the sand dunes to safety. The air was filled with the continuous roar and swish of the sea but after walking a bit you could anticipate its next attack by the crash of the comber and the intensity of the swish as it swept over the sand.

The wind had played tricks with the dunes, changing not only their shapes but their entire position. In one place a ship’s spar, remnant of an ancient shipwreck, had resisted the wind which then carved a huge vertical funnel around it. Erosion and the wind had left huge pillars of sand teetering under their own weight. The whole beaten strip of beach had the look of a miniature, tortured Grand Canyon. Even the usually indestructible beach grass had suffered. Its roots were exposed, its head bowed, and in the tracings on the sand one could detect the wild gyrations it had been forced to perform at the will of the wind. In seven distinct places the sea had crashed all the way through the barrier beach, surging over the marsh toward the main highway. Three of them were knee-deep and as you waded through them the water swirled about your legs with tremendous force. Walking became a real effort. At last the Outermost House was in sight and it was miraculously unaffected by the storm. Henry Beston would have been proud of the look of it as it nestled in the dunes unconcerned by the changing and chaotic world around it.

Fording one more breakthrough I found myself at Nauset Inlet where the sea crashed toward the Mainland without hindrance and the rip tides had a special fury of their own. For nearly an hour I perched upon a steep-sided dune and watched the waves reaching for the land. Behind me a ton of sand slid into the sea with a long sigh that emphasized the instability of my position. Suddenly, however, the sun, in its full brilliance, broke through the overcast with finality. Then the wind seemed milder, and, as the tide receded, the waves became less threatening. The whitecaps, now shining in the sunlight, took on such beauty as to quite belie their destructive powers. Out over the breakers a flock of seagulls appeared, flying parallel to the shore and screaming defiance as they flew in and out of the troughs of the waves. They seemed to have confidence that the storm was over. A few feet down the beach a red fox emerged from the protection of a clump of beach grass and walked cautiously toward the water’s edge. He sniffed inquiringly at the sea air and then, with more assurance, trotted off in search of breakfast. Gradually the great wide beach emerged from the ebbing tide. It was flat and wet and covered with the debris of the storm but the oceanside world was returning to normal. The storm had left some marks that might never be erased. And it left with me a memory of a day at the Outer Beach that I could never forget.

A DRIVE DOWN CAPE

“Yes, I’ve been to Cape Cod. Drove all the way to Provincetown and back. There’s absolutely nothing to it, you know. Nothing but sand and scrub pine. How anyone could live there, or how anyone could choose to go there even for a visit is more than I can figure out!”

Every Cape Codder has probably been subjected to some such remark as the above from some “authority” who has taken all of a half day to rush down one side of the Cape and up the other, expecting who knows what miracles and side-shows, but seeing nothing anyway. It is a time to grit the teeth and be glad, at least, that they won’t be back. And yet you wish for a minute that you could show them, show them where the little lane they just passed so quickly led to a view that would be breath-taking in beauty and good for their souls, show them any of a thousand things that are waiting for those who would see. For where under the sun, if not on Cape Cod, could anyone find such infinite variety of landscape and seascape crowded into so small an area? Some of the new highways will be uninteresting, it is true, but so they are anywhere else for they are built for the age of speed when it is essential to go somewhere in a hurry and there is no time for looking around. But the new highways were designed by gentlemen with slide rules far away and they have nothing to do with the old roads that are still there to give pleasure.

There is, for example, a way of getting all the way down Cape to Truro and beyond and you need hardly touch any of the Main Roads in doing it. There is variety enough for anyone. You pass resort-type settlements, quiet ponds and hidden lakes, farmlands, beaches, vast panorama of two separate seas, flat plains and rolling dunes, salt meadow and fresh water brooks, dense pine woods and wind-swept clearings where the pine and the oak were gnarled and gaunt, but unbeaten. You can stop for a bit because there is no hurry and you can walk on a special stretch of beach along the Bay where there are no cottages and no people and the birds are many and varied. There the Bay smiles broadly all the way westward to where the protective arm of Wellfleet Harbor curves into the sea and northward to where the golden prow of Lieutenant’s Island cuts the water. Here is a beach to be combed, filled with all manner of treasure, a thousand romances of the sea at your feet. Here is air that is clean and fresh as it was in the beginning, swirling over a blue-green Bay, a white strand, and a salt marsh that is honey-colored in the sun and shot through with veins of brilliant blue by the high tide.

Leaving the beach to continue down Cape, you come suddenly upon the strangest scenery of all, where the moors of Wellfleet and Truro swell out of the Bay in fantastic shapes, and merely condescend to allow the old County Road to pass through them--which it does not do easily. The hills have been softly rounded by time and the wind, and they rise sometimes to great heights, only to fall off into sheltered valleys where the scrub pines grow. It is a crazy-quilt of topography and color, nearly smothered by a blanket of wild cranberry that is glossy-green in summer and scarlet in winter. The road is a roller-coaster, crossing and recrossing the railway, climbing tediously upwards and rushing suddenly downwards, winding snakelike, and almost repeating itself through the moors. And rounding each blind curve you come upon another sweeping view of the Bay, and of the flat hook of Provincetown in the distance. And always around you are the sand hills, like great ocean swells.

On some hills there are houses, so precariously perched that one expects to see them disappear like a ship into the trough of the waves. Sometimes the rains tear at the slopes and leave jagged scars; sometimes the blanket of wild cranberry is lifted to show the sand beneath, rose-colored in the sun. The telegraph poles along the highway stretch doggedly but insignificantly across the moors, black silhouettes that have adapted themselves to the surroundings until they look as if they might always have been there.

The moors have the look of old lands that might have been in at the writing of history. The encroachments of civilization upon them look temporary and out of place, and the sand hills have that about them which is eternal. These moors looked out upon the Mayflower in 1620 and felt the pioneer feet of Miles Standish and the other Pilgrims who set out from Provincetown to explore the Truro shore. At Corn Hill they discovered the Indian corn cache that was to mean so much to them in their struggle for survival. In these lands they found the strange grave of a white man indicating that not even Europeans were a novelty to these old hills. To the south, at Eastham, they had their first encounter with the Indians. It was this Bay shore that provided them with spring water, food, and the feel of land beneath feet that were weary from the motions of the ship. Looking for the familiar they found these dunes to be reminiscent of Holland, and they carefully gathered and took back to the ship any vegetation which looked like that of home. Then, with new courage, they turned their backs on home. They turned their backs on these moors that had given them succor. And then they sailed westward, into immortality.

FARMING THE SALT SEA

_With the Captain_

“Stay on Cape Cod, boy,” an old timer once counselled me. “There’s no snow to fight in winter and plenty of food in the sea for those who will go after it.” The Captain was one of those who went after it with the aid of one of those wonderful Cape Cod Catboats, in the beginning to sell his catch commercially, and later for the entertainment of the summer visitor on charter excursions into the Sound. Such a trip was something to look forward to with great excitement and it was no wonder that one gray morning he caught me with my foolish questions down. I arrived at the old fish shanty on the bank of the little tidal river out of breath and fearful that the lowering skies and soft gray puffs of fog from the Sound might cancel our long-awaited trip. I found the Captain seated on an upturned keg cracking shellfish bait and examining stout coils of sturdy hand-line. Like so many of my friends on the Cape he was never one to waste words and when I entered the fragrant dimness of the shanty he said his “good day” with a quick look in my direction and a slight nod of the head. (Nothing more was needed because if he hadn’t been pleased to see you, you would not in the first place have had access to the temple where all the precious tools of his trade were spread about him, where a green-horn could get all snarled up and ruin everything, and where more than sometimes the Captain would retire to think and claim sanctuary from the women-folk and the complications of life away from the shore.)

“Is it going to clear up,” I asked him breathlessly and fearful of the answer.

“It always has,” he answered soberly, and I have never been able to bring myself to ask that question of anyone since.

The Captain was right of course and it cleared much sooner than anyone could have hoped, with the first sun in many days shining eerily through the gray skies to chase the fog back out towards Nantucket. In what seemed moments, a mean kind of day had become a day of rare beauty and we were out in the Cat with a fair southwest breeze and the golden sunlight glinting off blue-green water. There was the wonderful smell of salt and of hemp and of the sun-bleached wood of the fish barrels that now carried only our hopes. There was the less appealing smell of the fresh bait in which the circling and scolding gulls had placed their hopes.

The Captain stood at the helm, his heavily tanned and wind-burned face almost black against the morning sky. One cheek was now heavily distorted and a thin line of tobacco juice seeped slowly out of the corner of his mouth. Sometimes he would wipe at it casually with the back of his hand in a most natural gesture and sometimes he would let go into the Sound but never would the tiniest speck reach the immaculate decks of his ship. His eyes were like an Indian’s, keen and penetrating, always alert and picking out things at sea, and back on the receding, pine-fringed shore, that I never learned to see although I knew they were there. He only spoke when there was really something to say and we knew that one thing he would ultimately say was that I could take a turn at the tiller. In spite of the importance of that to me it was entirely against the code to request the privilege before it was extended and I respected the code. When the great moment came the Captain would direct my course by the pointed-finger method and his own estimate of land and sea marks proved to be as unerring as any compass. Soon he would have guided us skillfully and mystically to the fishing ledge that was his secret. (He had given me explicit directions for three successive summers that had proved to be as different and contradictory as they were explicit before I became discreet enough not to ask again for the location of his particular salt water farm.) There we would sit with the sun warm and all over us and sending up little waves of heat from the bright sands of Monomoy, and with the lazy tolling of a distant bell-buoy in our ears.

The rhythmic toll of the bell combined with the slow roll of the boat was almost hypnotic and, in any other circumstances than good fishing, would have induced sleep to the worst insomniac. But the fishing _was_ good and it was a rare thrill to see the barrels fast filling with flounders, scup and tautog. It seemed that it might go on forever, a wonderful forever, the constant baiting and hauling, and the lively flopping noises from the barrels. But the sun moved relentlessly westward and after just one more catch it was time to stow our gear and weigh anchor. Then we would head for the distant shoreline of the Sound which was now but a hazy, purple line in the distance. Off towards Great Island the sun was an orange ball, full of promise of a bright tomorrow, but the air was suddenly chill and it was time to fetch the warm jacket that had been carefully stowed in the little cabin. The Captain now relinquished his “chaw” for a well-worn pipe and you could feel his mood of contentment at the end of a day well spent in a way he liked to spend it. My own reluctance to leaving the ledge was tempered by thoughts of the dinner waiting ashore and the pure joy of describing our fishing luck to the poor, land-bound neighbors to whom I would proudly deliver my share of the catch. Looking back on those summer evenings I can believe that those neighbors frequently had a superfluity of fish. But they were kind and gracious and laudatory and I never suspected for a moment that they did not share my excitement and enthusiasm.

The Sound is as unpredictable as any sea and there were days when the Cat rolled and strained and was never still. One of the safest and most seaworthy boats ever built, it can, nevertheless, achieve the most disturbing movements. But I could never let the Captain think me a landlubber by self-indulgence in mal de mere and I never did. I was grateful for that training years later when I rounded the Cape of Good Hope in a troopship that was being tossed about by the largest seas I have ever seen. Huge vessels that were part of the convoy would completely disappear for long and anxious moments into the gaping troughs of the seas and I was able to stay on deck and watch and rather enjoy it. Feeling the roll of the great ship as it edged its way around Africa it was easy to send the mind spinning back across the sea to that little Catboat on the Sound. I could have wished, though, that the Captain had been there and at the helm. I would have felt safer.

_Weir Fishing_

Spring comes slowly to the Cape. She comes with halting footsteps, hesitant and capricious, one step forward and half a step back. You wait, and you are happier for the waiting, for at last she gives the earth her full attention and the land is renewed and green and shining amidst its four blue seas. It is the blue seas that have to do with spring’s timidity. In summer they are the air-conditioners which give the Cape comfortable temperature while the nearby cities of the Mainland swelter. In November, their warmth holds back the winter and the threat of snow turns to rain. Then, until they are warmed again, they will, in April, hold back the springtime. Then, when your heart is ready for sunlight and the promise of spring, there may be a series of gray days with a chilling blast of moist air from the Sound, and in your impatience it seems as if it must be fated to be a year without a summer. From the still-naked branches of ancient elm trees a flock of crows caw defiance at the rolling mists from the shore. The first-come robins hop disconsolately about the grass as if they wished they were elsewhere and the crocus looks brave but somehow misplaced. It is the kind of day to make you look afield for comforting affirmations that spring is really on its way after all. Then you will see the little buds of green on the lilac hedge that only yesterday were not there. Perhaps through the opened door of a silver-gray barn you may see a Cape Cod boy putting the last perfect and gleaming touches to a fishing rod. But when you pass a certain large field where the fishermen’s nets have long been spread for mending and creosoting and find them no longer there, you know that the weirs are out and, weather or no, it is Spring.

Not so long ago, standing on the beaches of the Sound in spring, one could look along shore to east or west and make out the shadowy forests of the weir poles with their intricate web of nets stretching from the shallows of the land out into the fishways of the Sound. They, like the fleets of small fishing schooners that once set out from all our inlets to gather in the fish-harvest, were once an important part of the Cape’s economy. Like the fishing schooners, the number of weirs along the shore has declined today, for they are expensive to maintain, both in capital and in the demands upon the men who run them for skill and hard work. But the fish are still there, and still, in spring, some weirs are set out along the shore to trap them. The weirs consist of a long, leader line of poles and netting that runs straight off-shore. At the outer end of the leader more fish fences run at an angle to the line of poles setting out from the land. The fish, ever leery of inshore, shallow waters, follow the leader line of nets outward until they find themselves without visible means of retreat and the only obvious means of escape from this mix-up appears to be through a small opening which seems to be the more a logical course because of the number of fish-brethren swimming about behind it. When they have entered the beckoning hole they are in the Pound where the mysterious maze of nets spreads not only around them, but beneath them, and they are doomed.

There could hardly be a sweeter awakening than to that of the _chug-chit-chug_ of the weirs boats heard across the sparkling waters of the Sound in late spring. When I was growing up I would frequently rush to the window to watch the white wake from their broad-beamed sterns all the way to the weirs. When I knew from the sound of the returning boats--with their engine sound muffled now and the boats settling low under the weight of pay-load--I was punctually at the wharf to watch wide-eyed the unloading of the silver harvest. Trying all the while to keep out of the busy commotion of the unloading, grading, and icing down of the fish for shipment to the waiting cities, I would, eventually, end up with a prize--a newspaper-wrapped parcel of tinker mackeral. The delicious, combined smells of wet newsprint, salt and the mysterious, dark regions of the sea went with me up the beach and homewards.

Once I took a closer look at the weir operation, rowing in a dory across the ornery bars at the river’s mouth to where the water lapped softly against a sturdy, white hull in the gray, pre-sunrise. I followed the men over the side into the wide, stubby, gray-painted fisherman that would take us to the weirs. Feeling clumsy in the midst of adult fishermen friends who were suddenly full of business and doing all the right things at the right time, I sat quietly and somewhat miserably as the vessel made its way towards the nets. It was colder than I ever thought it could be on the Sound and the borrowed oilskins that protected me from the salt spray were stiff and had an uncompromising coldness of their own. But all of that was soon forgotten in the excitement of the arrival at the mysterious sea-fences combined with the glories of a sunrise over Chatham. Then the whole boat was alive with activity and very soon it was alive with fish. With hardened hands the fishermen grasped the nets and from the center of the Pound they drew the wonderful fish into the boat, a heavy, swirling, beautiful and ghastly, silver and multi-colored horde of tautog, cod, mackeral and haddock, and strange and unexpected things of the sea. In the capacious, interior of the rolling, settling vessel I was soon awash with them, knee-deep and more, and it was all the fish anyone could want for a long, long time. On the way into Port there seemed to be a good deal more than a sufficiency--and there were also squid. The day was now warmer--and now only through the greatest exertions did I maintain my sea-worthiness. Back at the river, which, with an assist from the incoming tide we navigated with style and without recourse to dory, I did not linger that day to watch the catch sent on its way to Boston.

It was some time before I realized how much I had really enjoyed my trip to the weirs but it was no time before I had gained a tremendous new admiration and respect for the men who farmed them. There are fewer vessels _chig-chugging_ to fewer weirs in the Sound now, but still on a gray morning in April you can discover that the nets and the long stacks of silver poles have left their landlubber existence in the fields of the Cape to go to work on the salt water farms. And still across the blue waters of the Sound you can hear the music of the little vessels on their way to the nets. Then you know that the men of the Cape are reaping the harvest for the appetite of the city--and most especially you know that it is spring.

_Not All Fishing Is From A Boat_

Not all weir fishing is done from a boat. Across the Cape from the Sound is Cape Cod Bay and there, taking advantage of their unusual oceanography, some ingenious north-siders have a different kind of weir-fishing operation which, so far as I know, is unique. At many sections of the Bay, the flats, at low tide, extend so far out from the beach that their outer rims at high tide are well within the fish lanes. Taking advantage of this feature, the men of the north-side set their nets on the flats in such a way that at low water the Pound of the weirs with all its flopping captives was all but on dry land. To harvest the catch they needed no chugging weir boat. Instead they used a high-wheeled cart, horse-drawn, in which they set out over the flats to return heavy-laden with the day’s catch. Nowadays you can still see weir-fishing being done in this manner but the vehicle is more often a rusting Model T and it will never take the place for me of the sea-going horses and their faded blue carts. These carts were built for a single purpose. They belonged more to the sea than to the land and their pilots deserved the title “Captain” as surely as did their brethren on deep-water vessels--for the flats were tricky with channels and it takes more than a bit of knowing to plan a working trip out and back in the face of the incoming tide. I have often watched this strange kind of fishing on the north-side, following the blue carts to the Pound to watch the loading of the fish harvest. There was once a young girl who, with great respect addressed her grandfather as “Captain” and I can’t remember that anyone thought there was anything funny about it. Neither was there about her ability as a “hand” when the cart’s creaking journey to the Pound was completed and the work of sorting and loading commenced. She would wade into the squirming sea of fish with all the aplomb and skill of an expert, wielding shovel and pitchfork, and setting about her to left and right until, at last the cart was filled and the sea-going horse turned towards his home port. If I knew where that young girl of the blonde hair and blue dungarees were now I would tell her how wonderfully skillful she seemed to me as she went about her work. I would thank her, and her Captain too, for an unforgettable picture of a blue cart with its flashing silver cargo making its unsteady way over the flats while, behind them, the lazy gulls swooped screaming over the culls of the Pound and the air had in it the wonderful taste of a fresh, incoming tide.

_Not All Fishing Is For Fish_

Not many years ago, and for the first time in over a century, a long tradition of temperance on Cape Cod faced a threat which was the result of a most curious harvest from the sea. It was in the days prior to and just after the Great Depression that an unexpected windfall came to many sections of the Cape. The narrow land was surrounded by the sea and the sea was the avenue to the free lands across the water who were not engaged in the noble experiment known as the Volstead Act. Many a Cape “Captain” along the coast heard once more the old ancestral call of the sea and without hesitation he accepted employment in ferrying loads of contraband spirits into the convenient, little rivers and harbors of the coast he knew so well. He played a dangerous kind of game partly for money, partly for the pure thrill of winning a kind of hare-and-hounds game of nautical skill from the Coast Guard, and partly from a conviction that the law was bad enough as to not merit full obedience. There is often a conviction that Mainland laws are not tailored to the precise needs of the Cape. So it came about that on dark nights there would be a good deal of activity along the shore and in the dim light of a morning after the gray hulk of a Coast Guard Cutter would appear, always late, but always game and eager.

Sometimes an illegal load of liquor would be cached in shallow waters off-shore to await picking up at a later date; sometimes the Coast Guard pursuit would be close enough so that a sense of propriety indicated jettisoning the cargo before making a swift escape to the enveloping darkness of the Sound. Then, with the typical vagaries of Cape tides, the huge piles of burlap sacks would be exposed at the ebb and with rubber boots and wheel barrows (and a tacit understanding that there was no need to notify the authorities until morning) the people along the shore commenced a new kind of harvest from the sea. Cargos that may have been worth upwards of $100,000 were split up to find their resting place at last in Cape Cod cellars and barns. From behind a barricade of imported--and almost priceless--Scotch whiskey the new Cape Cod fishermen smiled sympathetically, but happily, at an arid and land-locked United States. Of course many of the cargos did reach their intended destinations across the canal. One went in a hearse that was part of an elaborate funeral procession and a red-faced constabulary did not realize it until twenty-four hours after they had solemnly and respectfully assisted in its easy passage up the Cape and to Boston.

The Cape Codders who had participated in the harvest of the burlap bags full of straw-covered bottles of joy were following a time-honored tradition of beach-combing and salvage. Many would have been incredulous at the suggestion that any gift of the sea was not rightfully a case of finders-keepers. It is doubtful that any game of finders-keepers was ever carried out with greater enthusiasm until, at last, the Volstead Act was repealed and the liquor traffic came to a halt. For some it had not been the proudest page in Cape Cod history but it had undeniably been one of the most interesting.

_There is this much too about the Cape. There is people. There have been--and will be again--some very great ones, and there have been and will be again some middling poor ones. There are heroes of song and story, and there are the everyday kind of heroes who live brave and good lives and no one hears about it. A Cape Codder is not much of a one for blowing his own horn. He’s not much of a one for an argument either. His response to the perpetrator of an intolerable rudeness is to ignore him. That is why some Mainlanders go home to lecture folks about the “coldness” of Cape Codders. There is an inherent wholesomeness about him which, like his work and play, his home and health, is colored by the land and sea and the salt breezes that sweep over them. The land and the sea have worked upon him just as surely as he has worked upon the land and the sea. And when he goes away it is to dream of a cottage by the sea and a coming back to the land that is home._

“J.F.”

My good friend, J.F. Small, who kept a grocery store in our Cape village, might not be considered a great man by today’s standards but I considered him to be in the years that I was growing up and I always shall. He was kind and honest and efficient and he had a philosophy that was the equal of any situation.

J.F.’s store was a kind of hub of the community in those days and it was a good store, not one of the new kind where you wheel a little wagon around and feel foolish and can’t find anything, but one in which he helped you graciously and simultaneously to good merchandise and good conversation, and everyone had plenty of time anyway. It was a well-built store, a kind of Greek-revival with a Cape Cod accent, meticulously clean within and shining without. Only its huge front windows and pale yellow siding set it apart from the village of neat, white houses that sprawled around it. To compensate for that, there was, atop it, a fascinating cupola from which you could get a view of the Sound. Along the front of the store there was a commodious porch with two large benches. The benches carried on their slatted back a faded advertisement for Dr. somebody-or-other’s Bitters but bitters were already out of fashion and you could hardly have read the advertisement anyway because the benches were never empty. They had been placed just so to catch the pleasant breezes from the Sound and they were for resting and conversation.

Inside the store and along each of the two side walls were rows and rows of narrow wooden shelves that reached right up to the ornamental tin-ceiling. The shelves held a colorful mass of tinned goods and Quaker Oats and tea and if you wanted something from the high ones J.F. would secure it for you with a boat-hook. His aim was deft and true and it was always a temptation to ask for some of the little-called-for merchandise from the heights. In front of each of the tiers of shelves there was a long counter which held made-up orders and daily specials but most especially they held some very wonderful and tantalizing glass show-cases. The glass case to the right of the store held corn cob pipes and cut plug, shoe laces, work gloves and fish hooks, all in an ordered disorder that made everything easy to get at. No matter how much was sold this display always appeared to be miraculously unchanged. But it was the glass case on the left-hand counter that always drew my attention for inside it in regimental rows were displayed all the wonders of a small boy’s world. There were sleek, curly licorice whips and cigar-shaped licorice sticks; banana-tasting candy in the shape of bananas, mint-tasting candy in the shape of mint leaves, peanut butter candy in the shape of pink, satiny bolsters; there were heart-shaped peppermints with red mottos like “I love U” and “Oh you kid”, there were large, round, chocolate Old Fashioneds, orange and white “corn kernels” and many another item to keep a boy in agonizing, wonderful indecision. Time was only responsible to your own appetite and once you had made up your mind the penny candy would be carefully counted out and put helter-skelter into a small brown bag with a string around its neck. It would be discovered only later on the walk home that, somehow, several extra pieces had been slipped into the bag.

At the back of J.F.’s store there was a wrapping counter with a huge roll of butchers paper and a fascinating string that dangled down from an ornate iron cage at ceiling height. To the rear of the store also were the massive sliding doors of the cold room where all the good cuts of meat were hung. And then there was a stove-hole, neatly disguised in summer by a handsome chromo of Lake Como but, in winter, holding the shiny pipe that lead to a large coal stove. The cheerful glow from that stove in winter was a real attraction to the men of the village who seemed to much prefer it to the warmth of their own kitchens. There was always a cluster of rocking chairs about it and they were never empty. They were for resting and conversation.

J.F. ran his store alone, except as the summer population began to grow he would hire a boy to make deliveries, with horse and wagon for many years and, finally, with a small truck with the name of the establishment modestly proclaimed on its sides. He was leisurely and when he became successful it was almost as though it had been inevitable, even though you knew better. Once a Cape bank asked him to join its Board of Directors.

“I drove over to that shiny, new building,” he told me, “and it seemed as if even the car was hanging back on the way. When I got there I just walked up and down outside and looked at the bank and thought, ‘this is no place for you, J.F.’. Finally I got up courage to go in and they were all sitting around a table waiting for me. They introduced me all around as if I was really somebody and then they got down to business. I tell you it was nothing but trouble. It didn’t seem as if there was anything for me to _say_ but I thought about it some and I didn’t like it. Seemed to me there’s plenty of trouble in the world already without my sitting there and hearing about more of it and passing judgment on folks I don’t even know. So when it was all over I came home and wrote them a letter and said I would be pleased to stop being a director and I never went back.”

J.F. thought a minute and then a look of puzzlement, incredulity and good humor came over his face.

“You know what?”, he said. “There’s a big picture of me hanging on the wall of that room. There’s a brass plate under it with my name and ‘Former Director’ on it!”

Perhaps J.F. was already out of place in the twentieth century. His first, uneasy recognition of this did not come until the thirties when the store was still prospering and life in general was as uncomplicated as ever.

It was in the thirties that a lot of new terms began coming out of Washington and the Cape first heard of “the little people” and the “forgotten man.” No Cape Codder would think of himself or his neighbors as little people and no one locally, at least, was ever forgotten. J.F. had always extended credit and had often given merchandise to help neighbors over the rough spots of poor cranberry or fishing years. A catastrophe such as a fire was the direct responsibility of the whole community. Otherwise, most people in our village, in those days, helped themselves--and had never imagined there was any other way. Nevertheless, the wheels of government had begun to grind and there was no doubt in Washington that the Cape was a part of the United States. Each mail brought J.F. a new form to be filled out. It was either an inquiry into matters he had always considered to be personal or a set of regulations to be followed in running the grocery.

Whatever professor devised those forms it was a sure bet from the beginning that he had never been inside a village store. Poor J.F. would squint through his glasses for hours at the devilish forms. Sometimes he would ask me for an opinion but, fresh as I was from college, and full as I was of the concept of the “century of the Common man”, I could make no more head nor tails of the forms than could he. Finally he would shrug his shoulders in mystification and shuffle the forms into a pile at one end of the wrapping counter.

As the weeks passed the pile of forms grew until at last it was too big for the wrapping counter. Then they were set upon the floor where they were nearly out of sight and would have been out of mind except that the letters became more and more frequent and the demands more forceful. At the end of six months the pile of government verbiage was monumental and the letters had become almost violently threatening.

One day there came a letter from Washington by Registered Mail. It looked very ugly and very important. J.F. never told me what was in that letter but soon after reading it he stooped down and gathered up the monumental pile of forms and placed them on the wrapping counter. He wrapped them neatly and methodically in the good butcher’s paper and he tied them securely with the string that dangled down from the little iron cage at the ceiling. To the huge bundle he attached an envelope addressed to the government at Washington and inside the envelope he had written a note in his neat, meticulous script:

“Dear Sir:
I do not know what it is you want me to do and
I am too old now to take the time to figure it out.
I give up. I am closing the store.
Respectfully,
J.F. Small”

When he had made the bundle ready and inspected it for mailability, he picked it up and walked past the glass cases of candy and cut plug and he never looked back all the way to the Post Office. The Grocery Store was closed.

All of the merchandise in the store was hurriedly disposed of, but J.F. kept the building, and the chairs that were for resting and conversation and the stove that was for warmth in winter. He also kept the wide front porch with the two benches that had been set just so to catch the breezes from the Sound. I would sit there with him often, looking through the large windows to the clean, but empty, glass cases and the haunting shadows that the long-gone cans had left behind them on the rows of shelving. We would sit there and smoke and talk, or sometimes not talk, and we would watch the sleek, new cars of the summer visitors going by lickety-split to the new Super-Market down the street.

AUNT ALICE

Just at the corner where Main Street meets the High Bank Road at South Dennis there stands a little, gray half-house that was built back in 1835 by Captain Eleazar Nickerson. Above the door there is a beautiful fan-light window to set this little house off from others of its kind in the village. Wisteria vines have broken their way through the porch flooring and press around the fan light and lilacs press against the corner of the house. It is now an empty house and a sad house and it will never again be quite the same house without Aunt Alice. But it will be there along the High Bank for many another year and it will be loved again and hear laughter again because it was built to endure. And it was built with great artistry from its exterior dentil to its fine old panelling. It will always be “Aunt Alice’s House”.

I had just reached the door of the old white church at South Dennis after a Sunday service when I felt a tug at my arm and turned to meet Aunt Alice. She was small and sparkling and it was difficult to believe that she was eightyish. She was neat as a pin and there was a twinkle in her eyes that betrayed a sense of humor and something in the way she held herself that spoke of great inner strength. She was full of enthusiasm for the Yarmouth Register and she wished to volunteer her services in any way she could be of help. So, at eighty, she became the village correspondent for the paper, gathering the news, putting it down in faultless English in a firm, precise hand, and prefacing it with an appropriate bit of verse that was like a breath of springtime in any season. The problems of other people were always of more importance to her than her own and it was sometime before I learned very much about her. When I did I knew that my new friend was one of the last living members of that large and courageous group of Cape women who had gone to sea.