End of Summer 2021

Last year, the age of COVID. From Christmas until last week we stayed home. We survived. We ate out quite a bit, first take out, then outside, finally a few times inside. We walked, read, gardened, cooked, took a few local drives. Did most of our shopping at farmer’s markets, farms, speciality food stores. During most of the cold we built an afternoon fire.

Our first COVID trip was pre-cape stop in Essex CT then on to Orleans, MA on Cape Cod. Fantastic. The two nights in Essex was to break up driving. It was a perfect stop and will go back to the Griswold Inn on the way home. This is our sixth year at Peck’s Way on Ayers Pond in Orleans with the Kwait’s. There were also three years on Pilgrim Pond and a year on the bay marshes. Diane and I also stayed at several Inns in the area on our way to Nantucket. She recently said Nauset Inn was among our best B and B stays. Just up route 28 is Waquessett Resort and Golf Club, not our typical stay but an experience we tried one year. My first memory of Orleans is arriving in Orleans Center from the Cape Cod Bike Trail. I even remember Mahoney’s. Maybe we ate there. We would have been staying in an Inn on route 6A. We know the area well.

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Our Cape days start slow. I get up at six and put the morning routines to bed. By 7 or 7:30 I’m sitting on my living room chair with a cup of coffee, looking out the picture window or at the table on the screened in porch, facing the pond. The image sitting in that chair with coffee, wine, book, is one of my daydreams that help me get to sleep.

There is usually a little boat activity on the pond. Sailboats heading out to or returning from Pleasant Bay. A rare motor boat. Kayaks. In a good wind I love the sound of halyards on the masts. A seal passes through. Several osprey fish and inhabit the trees around the house. We see a few squirrels and chipmunks. Toads are fairly common. We haven’t put up a feeder this year but when we do there are a variety of small birds. This year we only hear them in the trees. Surprisingly there are fewer insect noises than at home in Yardley.

In front of the porch is a table and white plastic chairs. Closer to the pond is an old picnic table. When the sun is set or setting they are nice places to sit, a clearer view of the pond through the trees, a vodka tonic, glass of wine or beer, maybe a cool breeze, a faint marsh smell. The pond ripples in the breeze or can be a flat sheet of glass.

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Most days or evenings we spend some time at a beach. We tend to avoid Skaket (Orleans main bay beach) and Nauset (the ocean beach). There is a parking fee and a lot of people. So far this week we’ve sat on the inlet at the end of Tonset Road. There are several other town landings — Snow, Mill Pond, Doane and Priscilla. Unfortunately Doane and Priscilla now have beach permit signs. We ignored them. We spent several days on Pleasant Bay off route 28. We’ve been to Rock Harbor to sit on the Dyer Prince Road beach, to watch the sunset and buy clam chowder from Young’s. Pilgrim Lake is just up the road, good for kid swimming. We rented there for three years. And Wiley Park on Great Pond is another kid swim area. There are other beaches we frequent; “First Encounter” on the bay where the Pilgrims and natives first made contact; Wellfleet beaches and the National Seashore. Some years we’ve gone to Race Point or other beaches near Provincetown.

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There are walks. Off our driveway is a short pond side trail. Kent Point is a forest/ beach walk not far from the house. Fort Hill is a favorite in the National Seashore. In Wellfleet there is the Great Island Trail. Wellfleet and Chatham are shopping walks. Art galleries, boutiques, craft shops and restaurants. Some years we go to Provincetown, probably not this year with the COVID outbreak. Route 6A also provides a lot of craft and antique shopping. Many years Diane and I have done a pottery tour. There are a few shops in Orleans, the Sea Howl bookshop is one of the few that interest me.

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Food. Seafood. Delicious seafood. In town there is the Nauset Fish Market and the Orleans Seafood Market. We also go to the Chatham Fish Market and Hatch’s and Mac’s Seafood in Wellfleet. All are good; Hatch’s is a favorite. We cook in, do take-out and eat in restaurants. This week we’ve had Cod, fried oysters, shrimp, lobster roll, steamed clams, clam chowder (Young’s is delicious), scallops, seafood pies from Marian’s in Chatham and bluefish pate. Who knows what week two’s catch will be? We usually have a full lobster dinner. Corn and some other fresh vegetables come from a small farm or farm stand and we bring lots of tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant and peppers from our Yardley garden. I avoid supermarkets but don’t mind Nauset Market (milk, bread, cheeses, crackers; mostly staples, a few surprises). And there is an Orleans Whole Food Store. Some years Diane and I have explored some other farm markets on route 6A. We’ve also been to Orleans Hog Island Brewery and Truro’s Vineyards of Cape Cod.

In Orleans we do take out from Sir Cricket or Cooke’s Seafood. And locally we’ve eaten in Land Ho, Yardarm and Beacon Room. But usually we go out of town. Wellfleet has Mac’s Shack (popular, hard to get reservations), Wicked Oyster, the Bookstore, and The Pearl on the docks, an annual stop. Blackfish in Truro was trendy. Marshside in Dennis was a nice birthday dinner one year. In Chatham we liked the Impudent Oyster and this year looking at Pisces. The Sesuit Harbor Cafe is good for lunch; Oysterville Fish Too is a great find on Barnstable Harbor. In Provincetown we’ve eaten in the Lobster Pot and . . . There are many other restaurants I’ve forgotten.

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This end of week one, we awaited hurricane Henri. The track changed and it’s further west. Sunday we had some morning rain and wind but not a direct hit. Kwait’s are scheduled for a Vinyard trip Monday/Tuesday, I think they will be OK. So ends our first week of the 2021 season.

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Cape Cod

Griswold Inn, Essex, MA

Monday, August 16, 2021, we’re staying at Ayers Pond, Orleans, Cape Cod. We arrived Saturday after two nights in Essex, CT at the Griswold Inn. Today the sweltering 90s have given way to a cloudy day in the 70s. Since this is our first get away from Yardley since December 2020 when we spent several holiday nights in Bethlehem, PA. since this is almost our twentieth summer in Nantucket or Cape Cod, I am immediately on what I’ve called “Nantucket Time.” Enjoying the moment, no hurry, no thinking that I need to . . . Our family rented a cottage, Rattlesnake Bank” on Nantucket from about 1996 to 2006. In 2012 we began to rent on the Cape with Rob, Jenny, Eli and Viv. For three years we were on Pilgrim Lake and then moved to Ayers Pond. I was able to figure out the dates after I found a picture of Eli with a good size pond bass (he caught two in Pilgrim in 2014).

I just finished reading “Second Wind: a sunfish sailor, an island, and the voyage that brought a family together,” by Nathaniel Philbrick. The book may have caught my attention even if it wasn’t set on Nantucket, by a writer I’ve read — “Away Off Shore” (a history of Nantucket), “Bunker Hill,” “Mayflower,” “Why Read Moby Dick,” and “Abram’s Eyes: the Native American legacy of Nantucket Island.” I’ve also seen Philbrick speak several times on island. He grew up in Pittsburgh, with his father and brother became a dedicated sailfish sailor and regatta competitor. In 1986 he moved to Nantucket with his wife Melissa who also sailed. But the racing ended until 1992 when he washed off his sailboat determined to compete again. He had two children, Ethan and Jennie; he was thirty-six, writing full time.

Philbrick begins to train for a North American competition in Springfield in 1993. He decided to sail the ponds of Nantucket, many left behind by the glaciers. I recognized almost all to the ponds he sailed. The first Sesachacha was one of our favorite beach stops. The pond is adjacent to the ocean and is drained annual as a mosquito control. On one occasion Philbrick sails the pond after the cut had been made and water was rushing into the ocean. He likes a challenge and avoided being sucked into the Atlantic. Other ponds included Gibbs, Capaum, Caskata, Miacomet, and Hummock. Most of these sails although short are in winter, in one he is ice breaking. Danger never seems far away. Reading about Philbrick’s Nantucket brought back many great memories.

Philbrick admits the sunfish is almost not considered a sailboat by some sailors. But he recalls that Jack Kennedy loved them. He enters two competitive regattas. The first is the Midwinters in Sarasota, Florida. Before Springfield, he, Melissa and the kids (two boats) sail in the Connecticut River Race from Hartford to Deep River, just above Essex where we stayed Thursday and Friday last week. His second regatta is the North American in Springfield. As with all his sails in the book, we’re provided with detailed nautical descriptions. Many of the competitors are sailors Philbrick knew from his racing days in the 70s. In the end, after several races, he placed seventh in a field of sixty. Not exactly what he wanted but not a bad showing. Maybe he’d sail again.

While reading “Second Wind,” I was reminded of David Halberstam. I remember reading his book on the Kennedy administration, “The Best and the Brightest.” He is also known for his reporting and writing on Viet Nam. And he turned to sports writing. I read “The Amateurs,” the story of four young oarsmen training in Princeton, N.J. for the rowing competition in the 1984 Olympics. In “The Purist Ambition Of All,” in the New York Times, Norman Hildes-Heim wrote “In The Amateurs,” David Halberstam focuses on the quest of four oarsmen to become the United States’s single sculler in the 1984 Olympics. He has drawn interviews with a number of figures in American rowing into a narrative that becomes a paean to the four oarsmen who devoted themselves to becoming Olympians ”because they wanted to, for no reward other than the feeling itself.” Halberstam also rowed, sculled near his home on Nantucket.

I remember hearing David Halberstam speak on Nantucket. Don’t remember the topic. I googled “Halberstam Nantucket” and found an 2007 article, “Nantucket on my Mind.” He fell in love and purchased a small house island house.

“This is my thirtieth year as an owner here. I bought my house in 1969, the year I began working on “The Best and the Brightest,” the moment when I went over to writing books full time. Over the years I have come to love the island – it has given me sanctuary in a difficult and often volatile professional life, allowing me to work diligently each summer while putting myself back together among people who I know love and care about me. I leave the island in the early fall rested, but with a great deal of work done. I stumbled on it at first – my friend Russell Baker brought me here in 1968 and I thought it was the most beautiful place I had ever seen. It seemed to have more of the good things of life and fewer of the bad than any vacation spot I had ever seen before; it offered an almost-perfect balance between the possibilities for friendship and the right, when I needed to work, to my privacy. Because the happiest part of my peripatetic childhood was spent in a small town in northwest Connecticut, Nantucket – with its strikingly handsome library, the sense of community manifest at high school games – reminded me of the best part of my youth. People knew one another and treated one another with respect. The people who did have money (and it would be considered small money these days), those old Yankee families said to be very wealthy, very consciously did not manifest it. In the great houses along Hulbert Avenue, our showcase street that runs along the harbor, the houses were, as they always had been, a little worn down, with bathroom sinks stained green by the relentless drip of the water – a reminder of plumbers never summoned.”

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Most of the essay documents the changes Halberstam saw as the “Old Nantucket” became wealthier. Small houses (like the one we rented for ten years) were torn down for modern mansions. Rusting red Jeep’s were replaced with top of the line SUVs, driving and parking became a challenge, restaurants went from “classic” to expensive “trendy.” I was amused to read Halberstam, his writing echoed the changes we saw during our summer visits. But I also appreciated what remained from the past. Halberstam writes:

“For all of the crowding downtown, many of the beaches remain secluded, the nature walks are pleasant and accessible, and there is no time for them. If you want to picnic, and have a boat, there are places in Polpis, the large inner harbor, where, if you know the tides, you can miraculously enough go and picnic in a beautiful spot – more of an idyll than one can imagine on the East Coast – and never see another soul. I am a fairly serious fisherman, and our light-tackle saltwater fishing is arguably the best along the East Coast, perhaps because we are so far into the Gulf Stream. But it takes time and skill to learn how to fish here, and money will not do it all for you – you have to learn to handle a boat in what are daunting waters, going out on days when the weather changes, when the shoals are murderous and when the fog rolls in so suddenly that unless you know what you are doing, it can all be quite terrifying. I know, because I had a boat for ten years, and it was a difficult and exacting apprenticeship, not so much learning where the fish are – that part was easy – but how dangerous the Atlantic Ocean can be. So perhaps it is not surprising that, for all the money being spent on boats, many of them with GPS/Loran guides that should make dealing with fog and shoals virtually idiot-proof, on the July Fourth and Labor Day weekends, the most crowded days of the year, you can be at choice spots for fishing for blues or stripers only thirty minutes from Madaket Harbor and not see another boat.”

I’d love to vacation on Nantucket again but when our rental was sold and I assume replaced with a mansion in 2007, Orleans, Cape Cod soon became an acceptable substitute. A few 2021 Cape Cod photographs.

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