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Title: Cape Cod is a number of things

Author: Allan Neal

Release date: September 14, 2024 [eBook #74413]

Language: English

Original publication: Yarmouth Port, Mass: The Register Press

Credits: Steve Mattern and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CAPE COD IS A NUMBER OF THINGS ***





                               CAPE COD

                         Is A Number of Things


                            [Illustration]


                              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.

Many a Cape bride followed her husband to sea, undergoing the dangers
and inconveniences of that life in preference to the lonely night on
the Cape, where she would be forever in fear of the news that she had
joined the legion of women whom the sea had made widows. Many bore
their children at sea and with a somehow pathetic zeal set about making
a home of their husband’s vessels. It was something to be with their
men, but with their best efforts at decorating, and making things snug,
the rolling vessels were a far cry from the comfortable white cottages
to which they hoped some day to retire, always within sight of the sea,
but no more to be upon it.

Much of Aunt Alice’s strength must have come from her mother who, in
1882, travelled to New York with her ten-year old daughter, Alice,
Alice’s sister Helen, and a large assortment of luggage, to board
her husband’s three-masted bark, the Obed Baxter, for a trip to the
other side of the earth. The vessel was bound for the Orient, carrying
kerosene and oil for the lamps of China and, as the vessel pitched in
the high seas of a northern February, oil fumes constantly escaped
through the hatches. This, combined with the constant lurching and
rolling of the vessel, gave all of the women a bad two weeks of
seasickness where there was no cure and no hope except to get over it,
and gain immunity. They did--and became as seaworthy as any members of
the crew.

The skipper, Aunt Alice’s father, had done everything possible to
recreate a normal existence for his family aboard the vessel. The
cabins were fixed up as nearly as possible like a Cape Cod parlor, even
to a parlor organ, which doubled for entertainment purposes during the
week, and as church organ for the regular Sunday services aboard ship.
There were rugs and easy chairs and real beds, and for the children
there was a dog and a bowl of goldfish. On a top shelf of the main
cabin stood a row of handsome crystal jars from which the children were
given a daily ration of multi-colored hard candies. Education was not
neglected, and a great store of schoolbooks had been brought aboard
from which the children, under the watchful tutelage of their mother
and father, completed their daily lessons. Each morning the Captain
conducted a short religious service and each evening there were family
readings from the Bible by the light of an oil lamp that swayed with
the vessel as she drove westward. When schoolwork and household duties
were completed, the children would wrap themselves in blankets and
watch the cold waters slip by the prow of the ship. Hungrily they would
watch for another sail upon the horizon and it would be an exciting
moment when other American vessels drew near to signal navigation news
and gossip of the home ports and of friends from the Cape.

Aunt Alice had departed New York on Washington’s Birthday and it was
over three long months before the ship sighted land. Then it was the
rather grim and forbidding bulk of Christmas Island that met their
eyes rather than the soft and familiar outlines of a Cape Cod shore.
Like many another traveller since, they must have felt that the magic
of “Christmas” was a mis-nomer. But there were other lands ahead,
all with surprises of their own. At Java Head a wild and noisy lot
of nearly-naked, native traders swarmed aboard the vessel with live
chickens and fresh fruit to sell and once the girls had conquered their
fears at the strangeness of them they were full of gratitude for the
change in bill-of-fare.

The “Obed Baxter” arrived at Shanghai on June 25, four months out
of New York. The tumult and confusions of that port would have been
startling in any case for the Cape Cod wife and her two small daughters
but it was made more trying by the fact that the Captain’s sudden
illness sent him to a hospital and left his family alone. Cape Cod spunk
showed itself then as it would be called upon to show itself on many
another occasion. Mrs. Baxter gathered her two children and secured
quarters at one of the hotels of the city. From there they visited
the hospital and found time to do some sight seeing as well. What
an experience it must have been, with the mother called upon to act
fearlessly in order to conceal her worst fears from the children! And
all in a land that was many thousands of miles from the peaceful Main
Street of South Dennis and full of strange sights, sounds and smells.
As they walked the streets a horde of beggars, chattering fearfully,
tore at their clothes and pushed against them so that it took the
greatest control not to show fear. On one occasion the first mate
became so infuriated at being jostled about that he pushed a Chinaman
backwards. The coolie fell into a boat, broke his neck and died, and
the mate was arrested and sent to prison. While awaiting trial he
contracted the dreaded cholera that raged throughout the city and died.
Now the father-Captain was ill and his First Mate dead, and the three
Cape women were more alone than ever.

At last the Captain, though obviously far from well, was released from
hospital and the family was united once more. While lying in harbor,
waiting for an outward wind, they experienced a real typhoon which
raised havoc with shipping in the harbor but fortunately did no damage
to the “Obed Baxter”. Seeking shelter from the typhoon, other American
Captains had entered the harbor. They must have looked awfully good to
the South Dennis family. There was a Mr. Thacher from Yarmouth and Mr.
Andrews of Woods Hole, (Woods Hole was only a two day buggy ride from
Dennis, after all), and with other Americans, joined by the camaraderie
of the sea, they formed an American neighborhood in the harbor of
Shanghai. There was much visiting and exchange of gossip and presents
and as the favorable wind held off there was opportunity to go again
ashore, this time with friends and under more favorable circumstances.
There was sightseeing, and souvenir hunting for Oriental whatnots that
would someday grace the little parlor mantle back home, and there were
ricksha rides for a nickel that made the once-a-year advent of the
carousel at Hyannis seem tame and expensive by comparison.

After picking up the remainder of the cargo at Hong Kong for the
homeward journey the “Obed Baxter” set sail for home. One of the
greatest volcanic eruptions of modern times had taken place in the
Java Sea which lent the sky a weird, bright orange tone so that every
day was like a perpetual sunset. The girls occupied themselves with
scooping baskets of pumice and lava from the sea which was gray for
miles with the debris of the volcano. (Aunt Alice, when last I visited
her, had a piece of this pumice at her kitchen sink and reported it
excellent for scouring pots and pans.) The “Obed Baxter” plowed through
the South Seas, through raging storms and high seas, and through the
doldrums when the ship hung silent and listless on a sea of glass. And
then, while still thousands of miles from home, real tragedy struck the
vessel with the death of the Captain.

Now the widowed mother and two small daughters faced a real test of
courage and control. The ship was under the command of the Second
Mate, who had only recently been promoted from ordinary seaman by
the Captain. He had learned his lessons well, however, and there was
nothing to do but go on. Aunt Alice’s mother stood fast on one point.
Her husband’s remains were not to be committed to the sea but they must
rest where he would have wanted to rest, on the hill at South Dennis.
An understanding crew prepared the remains as best they could and,
after a brief religious service, the flag-draped casket was secured
upon the deck for the long voyage home. Then, after nearly a year
away, “the Obed Baxter,” her flag flying at half mast for its departed
skipper, made New York. Now it was left to the mother to organize the
trip back to the Cape where she must begin a new kind of life ashore.
They had travelled across and back a limitless and hungry sea to the
other side of the earth in a small vessel that, save for the skills at
the helm, was at the will of the wind. They had encountered typhoon
and volcano, wild waves and listless calms, disease and death, and
one hundred and one moments of the terrors of the unknown. But life
went on, and you thanked your God that it had been no worse, for, in
a sea-going community, the sea had claimed so many, and brought about
such tragedy, that Cape people stood up to the buffets of life as
bravely as their stout vessels stood up to the angry seas of the world.
This was part of the strength that I had felt in Aunt Alice from our
first meeting. It was a strength that came from an abiding faith in God
and in His sense of the fitness of things--in an era when the living
was not easy, and only the strong survived.

But along with spiritual strength Aunt Alice had many another
attribute. At eighty, her one intolerance was for other people who were
so concerned with being old that they had no eyes for the wonderful
world about them, and particularly for the natural wonders of Cape Cod,
its land and its four seas. She loved lights and laughter and music,
and they were as important to her at eighty as they had been at eight,
when she would dance and sing for the amusement of her sea-faring
father. Once, when a play was produced by a local group in Liberty Hall
at South Dennis, I foolishly expressed surprise when she told me she
had attended both performances, and been among the first ones there.
“Why,” she exclaimed! “Do you think I could stay to home doing nothing
while all that excitement was going on right across the street?” But
she could never have just “done nothing”. While she washed her dishes
her mind was busy composing little verses, and when her household
chores were done she would attend to a voluminous correspondence, or
an item of news for the Yarmouth Register, or perhaps sort out her
memories of her sea voyage as she looked at the oil painting of the
“Obed Baxter” that hung in her parlor. She could reminisce about bygone
days when she attended the first class of the new High School at South
Dennis, or when she and her husband sang duets at the services in the
old white church on Main Street, but she never dwelt upon the past,
because she was too interested in what the morrow might bring.

The little house at the corner of Main Street and the High Bank at
South Dennis is empty now and lonesome and soon the signs of her not
being there to “put it to rights” will commence to show. I miss my
visits at the old house, but I shall always remember--and thankfully--a
fine friendship that gave me much to remember and an insight into the
kind of character that led Cape people to achieve greatness around the
world.




SOME NIGHT BEFORES


If there is one thing above another upon which a Cape man has always
prided himself it is his independence. Let them take what courses of
action they will on the Mainland, and let them subscribe to whatever
conventions they admire, the Cape man will make his own mind up about
the issues before subscribing to them. It is a tradition that has not
been easily come by, which back at the beginnings of American history
involved sacrifice and heroism and the expenditure of the skills and
treasure of the people, on the land and on the sea. In the year 1776,
several of the Cape towns met and gave their approval to a Declaration
of Independence from Great Britain a month before the official
Declaration was issued on that memorable and long ago July the Fourth.
The news of the Declaration on the first Fourth was a cause for almost
universal great joy and celebration throughout the Cape and the spirit
of independence that reigned that night has reigned in succeeding
celebrations right up to the present time. The Night before the Fourth
took on a very special and unique flavor on the Cape. Its nearest
counterpart on the Mainland would be the old-fashioned Halloween in
the pre-“trick-or-treat” era, together with a celebration of Freedom
and Independence that had some of the characteristics of License. This
was the night when the violent ringing of church bells on midnight of
the Third of July would usher in a night of revelry and pranks into
which had gone a full year’s planning. At least some of the sons of the
Sons of Liberty declared themselves, for one night, to be beyond the
law. Vested authority became fair game on the Night before and to them
and to the more grouchy or less-popular citizens of the village there
always befell the dubious honor of being among the first to have their
outhouses overturned amidst the boom and flare of giant firecrackers
and the sound of running, revolutionary feet down the sandy streets of
the village. The dawn’s early light would reveal the still-smouldering
ashes of Main Street bon-fires and of gruesome figures burned in
effigy. It would reveal mysteriously-displaced store signs and the
incongruous sight of carriages and wagons ingeniously hoisted to
a precarious position upon the rooftops of the village. The first
light of the holiday would also reveal the formation of the horribles
parade that would commence on Main Street and wind its way through the
village to the delight of younger children whose eyes were heavy from
a sleepless night of anticipation. These were now armed with hoarded
firecrackers of their own and the biggest hero among them was he who
had contrived the loudest explosion. The horribles wore fantastic masks
and old clothes and they rode in ancient and decrepit vehicles of the
town that had been borrowed or appropriated by night requisition.

The horribles parade marked the end of a night of freedom and confusion
and made way for the more formal celebrations of the day. Then came
the characteristic Cape clambake with the wonderful aroma of steaming
sea-weed and shellfish replacing the acrid smell of punk and gunpowder.
Then came the band concerts with the handsomely-uniformed bandsmen
tooting the “Stars and Stripes” at its very loudest to replace the
sound of exploding firecrackers. Where they failed, the inevitable
speeches of visiting politicians and local patriots nearly succeeded.
(It was a good time for grass-roots campaigning and the subject matter
provided by the Fourth of July could not have been more popular.)
As darkness fell, many of the villages supplied a formal fireworks
display, sky rockets and handsome set-pieces, where suddenly out of the
darkness there appeared in flaming color the unmistakable likenesses of
Washington and Lincoln, of the fife and drums of the “Spirit of Seventy
Six” and at last, amidst the final “ohs and ahs” of the deliciously
happy and weary multitude, Old Glory herself, handsomer and prouder
than ever as she wove in the mechanical breeze of the soft July night.
They were great days and happy days, something to be looked forward to
and talked about for many months. But however fine the day, however
well-contrived the day’s celebration it was the story of the antics
of the Night Before which always lived the longest. For it was then
that vested authority was often enticed to look aside from the surging
spirit of independence--and leadership passed, for a time, into the
hands of the town’s high-spirited young men, frequently led by the
Town’s Bad Boy.

Most of the villages had their Bad Boy just as they had their Fool. He
was usually an over-sized, over-aged, juvenile delinquent, a perpetual
adolescent who, nevertheless, had an ingenuity for thinking up unique
outrages that made him the recipient of a kind of perverse admiration.
In the village where I grew up the Bad Boy title was universally
awarded to Henry.

Henry, in spite of a wide streak of plain badness, was a man of
unquestioned charm, and the possessor, when he cared to avail himself
of them, of extraordinary native wit, skill, and intelligence.
He was a good hand aboard a fishing vessel, an expert mason, a
better-than-average carpenter, a wit and raconteur, and to the mutual
misfortune of himself and society in general, he was also a rare man
with a bottle and a glass. A wise employer would pay Henry his wages
only at the very completion of a job if he ever expected to see him
again. This was entirely satisfactory with Henry who was aware of his
own weakness and had the greatest respect for employers who treated him
accordingly. For when pay day for Henry came at last, a week or more
of outstanding celebration would follow, just as surely as the night
the day. One such celebration ended with his return from New York in a
taxi with a monkey and a parrot for fellow passengers. Directing the
driver to a neat, white house, Henry requested him to wait while he
went inside for the money with which to pay the fare. The driver has
obviously been impressed with the easy manner and good fellowship of
Henry but, after some minutes had passed without sign of his fare, the
driver hurried to the door of the house. An elderly and gentile Cape
lady answered the hasty knock.

“Where is your husband?”, the cabbie demanded.

“My husband?”, echoed the good lady. “My husband has been dead for
twelve years!”

Of course it was so and there was nothing to do about it. Henry,
knowing that his Cape neighbors were not much for locking doors, had
casually let himself in at the front and, without being seen, made
a quick exit out the back, into the safety of neighboring woods and
familiar haunts.

Henry’s episodes generally took place during the spring and summer
months because he planned on spending the cold days at Barnstable,
enjoying the warmth, food and hospitality of the County Jail. He was
always expected there then, and he hardly ever varied the routine. He
was popular with fellow inmates and with prison personnel and, if his
crimes were frequent, they were always of a comparatively minor nature.
Once, though, he betrayed the rules of hospitality and it can be
believed that his hosts must have taken a very dim view of it, indeed.
That was the time when Henry, having completed one of many sentences,
emerged into a bustling Cape springtime looking considerably stouter
than usual. It was not surprising. A mile or so down the road he drew
a prison blanket from under his swollen coat and sold it at a bargain
price to an unsuspecting householder. With these funds he obtained a
bottle and commenced the celebration of his release.

Henry, whose spirit of independence knew no limits and who knew better,
nevertheless, took the attitude that a certain village constable, who
then was the only force of law and order in the village, was the sole
cause of his various “persecutions”. In the village for many years
life became a constant kind of cat-and-mouse game between them. The
constable was probably a good man, who in a town that was almost
without crime was hardly called upon to be a brave one, but he had an
almost overwhelming sense of the importance of his own position and
it was probably that trait that made him the everlasting butt of the
revellers of the Night Before the Fourth. On that night, his home, on
the lonely outskirts of the village, would become an armed camp while
he, with a carefully-polished badge of authority on his chest and
shot-gun on his knees, prepared to withstand an assault which never
failed to materialize and never failed of success. His outhouse toppled
readily like a leaf before the storm, firecrackers boomed beneath his
veranda and beneath the very window where he sat in the darkness. Each
time he peered from behind his curtain the assault began anew. Finally,
as the first gray light of Independence Day filtered across the eastern
sky he would be hung in effigy in his own dooryard.

Henry was usually at the head of the attacking forces, of course,
and it was Henry, of course, who conceived the idea of giving our
Constable a memorable ride on one Night Before the Fourth. In the
village cemetery, in those days, there rested an ancient town hearse,
a curious, horse-drawn vehicle that was shaped like an elaborate
coffin on wheels and whose walls and top were entirely of glass. So it
happened that, on one Night-Before, the hearse was quietly pulled up
to the Constable’s house and he, protesting violently but uselessly,
was placed within it, listening to the heavy clasp close above him, an
unwilling captive in a glass cage on wheels. Then with great ceremony,
in the manner of Timberlane home from the wars, the procession and
its prisoner wound through the village streets. When, at length, the
conquerors tired of the sport the constable was abandoned in the middle
of Main Street where the first light of day and the earliest-rising
villagers discovered him in his glass prison. Law and order was
restored and he was released to try to restore his lost dignity. He
never really did--but he did learn that when some Cape Codders went
out to celebrate their independence they really meant it. For, ever
after, on the afternoon of the Night Before, our Constable could be
seen driving his Model T in the general direction of the canal with
never a look backward towards our village. On the morning of the fifth
he would be back with us, his badge freshly shined and his billy-club
at the ready to maintain law and order for another year--or, at least
for another 364 days.

Henry would never have served as a model of deportment on the Cape and
his good neighbors deplored his multitudinous misconducts. But his
crimes were generally petty and they had a Falstaffian flavor which
made him something of a legend. At one time or another you might find
his counterpart in any Cape village, and in a day when bad movies had
not been replaced by bad talking movies, and when radio had not even
suspicioned television, Henry’s latest escapades provided pretty good
conversation during long winter evenings on the Cape. Certainly the
celebration of Independence Day could not have been the same without
him.




SOME PURVEYORS OF NOSTRUMS


Look at any copy of the Register of fifty to seventy five years ago
and you will find that, if you can believe advertisements, there was
hardly any ailment then of man or beast that did not have a cure.
In the old newspaper columns you would find advertisements for Hop
Bitters--Invalid’s Friend and Hope (“no vile, drugged, drunken nostrum
but the purest and best medicine ever made”), Hood’s Sarsaparilla
(a “reliable invigorant that excites the liver to action”), Dyke’s
Beard Elixir (“guaranteed to force luxuriant mustaches or grow hair
on bald heads in from 20 to 30 days”), and a hundred and one sulphur
tonics for females suffering from “general debility and delicate
health”. For the gentlemen there was Dr. Dye’s Voltaic Belt through
which “electricity” could “restore health, vigor and manhood” and
for everyone, particularly in spring, there were a number of Ginger
compounds. Ginger, which rode the clipper ships back from the Orient,
was an especially favorite ingredient of spring tonics, which was often
combined with other ingredients, enough to exhilarate anyone. For
example there was Sanford’s Compound of Ginger which noted on its label
that to fine ginger had been added “genuine French Brandy, rendering it
very much superior to all other preparations on the market.” Inasmuch
as the alcoholic content was duly listed as 67% it must have been
superior indeed, and there would be little wonder if large segments
of the population might not be almost excessively exhilarated come
springtime.

The Cape was not left out of the race to make the greatest of all
“specifics”. A Hyannis doctor contrived the formula for Fletcher’s
Castoria, still a favorite household remedy which babies have been
crying for--or at--these many years. And part of the memories of
springtime for many a Cape Codder is the little bottle, full of an
untasty, brown liquid, called Speedy Relief, that still rests at the
back of many a Cape Cod medicine chest. This remarkable remedy, which,
from the label, seems to have been equally effective whether used
internally or externally, must have brought shudders to many a Cape
child before he hustled off to the comfort of a soft feather bed and
the joy of a hot soapstone in a flannel bag to drive off the spring
dampness that seeped into the unheated rooms above-stairs.

Speedy Relief was the invention of William F. Kenney of South Yarmouth
and many Cape people today hold a clear memory of the man with reddish
side-burns who carried a black bag full of small bottles and whose
calls were as regular as springtime. Of course Speedy Relief was only a
sideline with Mr. Kenney who was, in addition to being a manufacturer,
an inventor, the village jeweller, and in charge of the telegraph
office at South Yarmouth. In addition he had a tintype studio and
many a Cape scrap book is filled with pictures of belles and beaus
who posed before the broken Greek column in his studio. Nevertheless,
so sensitive are Cape Cod taste buds, that it is mostly the memory of
Speedy Relief that has lived on.

The wide-spread popularity of the Cape’s own specific played a part in
providing a new minister of the town of Yarmouth with some unpleasant
moments. His first service was progressing nicely, and it was clear
that he had the concentrated attention of all his parishioners.
Then he launched into his prayer on which he had spent considerable
preparation. All went well until he solemnly intoned, “and to all our
sick, bring speedy relief”. These words nearly brought down the house
with a wholly unexpected and unlooked-for reaction. The good parson
must have been sorely perplexed, indeed, until he was at length let in
on the fact that he had, all unwittingly, issued a kind of commercial
for a local panacea.

There was another kind of commercial and it may have been the
forerunner of all the terrible advertising jingles we are subjected to
today. It had a kind of fascinating ring to it, and it is certain that
all Cape children of the area were familiar with it:

                      “Speedy Relief is my belief
                      And so it is of many.
                      Put up in bottles
                      With little cork stopples
                      And sold by William F. Kenney.”

Less popular, but with its own solid core of supporters was Aunt
Sophie’s Bitters which were brewed in the little house at the corner of
Upper County Road and Depot Street. Aunt Sophie was a natural artist
as a brewer of herbs and potions, for she was the seventh daughter of
a seventh daughter, and what more was needed to imbue anyone with all
manner of special powers. Was something lost? The neighbors would ask
Aunt Sophie about it, and like as not she could tell them where to look
for it. Above all, she looked the part she had made for herself, and
acted it also, for, as she picked herbs in her yard she would carry
on serious conversations with the scraggly brood of hens that picked
their way about her, and they would appear to be listening intently
to her every word. Needless to say, small fry, on their way home from
school made a wide detour around Aunt Sophie’s house. But young men on
their way to sea--and young girls sick with love for them--would go to
her for their “fortunes”, and come away with wonder at the prospect of
their “futures”. Usually they would come away also with a bottle of the
grim tasting bitters which found their way into many a Cape pantry in
springtime.

Colorful as they may have been, the independent purveyors of nostrums
were definitely out-classed by the village pharmacies which were,
are, and very likely ever shall be, the heart of every Cape village.
Here, on a cold, dark February night one finds the only light, and
the only warmth, on an otherwise silent and deserted Main Street.
Here, in summer, all is pleasant turmoil and confusion with a long
line of small fry guzzling ice cream in the way that small fry
always have since the beginnings of ice cream. And about the racks
of multi-colored postal cards older folks gather, scantily-clad,
but bronzed and happy, only momentarily perplexed by the problem of
choosing the most appropriate card for Aunt Ella. Here are an endless
variety of magazines with colorful covers that only slightly exaggerate
the adventures to be found within. Likely as not some of them have
never been sold, but there is, somewhere, someone who enjoys walking
into the store to look them over each month. Many avail themselves of
this benevolent library service and it is a rare Cape pharmacist who
would make an objection. For the winter nights are quiet and long, and
company, even intently-reading company, is not so bad. In winter, the
pharmacy is a place to go, “up-street”. There you can feel the slow,
hibernated pulse of the town, hear an evaluation of local and national
issues, and woe to the candidate who fails to cover all the pharmacies.
The Cape pharmacist is doctor, librarian, caterer, banker, after-hours
post master, good listener, psychiatrist, moderator and custodian
of the local Forum where the freedom for expressing an opinion is a
sacred right, and where the news is born that has become stale before
the daily paper is delivered. Nowadays, nearly all pharmacies have a
druggist who has learned to decipher the illegible scrawl of the local
doctor and prepare the life-saving wonder drugs for the sick. But this
was not always so, and even now the shelves are filled with some of the
old-fashioned remedies which have their zealous partisans.

Once, in a Cape village, there was a pharmacy without a druggist, and
when a modern establishment opened nearby which boasted one it didn’t
really make much difference. There were few, if any, defections among
the established clientele. Late into the darkness of even a summer’s
night it would be the only light on Main Street, and the gooey sundaes
that were dispensed in its ice cream parlor were, for all small fry
of the village, the very high spot of the day. By today’s standards it
was a rather small and dark store. The clutter of its window displays,
which hardly ever changed from year to year, held back the lights,
and, from the old stove, that was a comfort in winter, the smell of
kerosene lingered on well into the summer. There was an extensive
library that was hardly ever disturbed by a purchase--and there was a
proprietor who was my very good friend, as well as white-coated steward
to our ice cream club. There was nothing he would not have done for us
in all the years of our growing up, and his presence in the village
drug store lent an air of stability to a community that had already
begun to undergo drastic changes at the hands of more and more summer
folk who had discovered its charm. He was never anything but kind and
helpful and, when we were old enough to recognize the strong smell of
“medicine” that he occasionally dispensed to himself in the shadows of
a back room, we were careful to avoid mentioning it, and only hoped
that he would soon be feeling better. Once, though, I nearly let him
down.

For years he had ordered the Sunday New York Times for us, and for
years we had paid fifteen cents for it. Then I discovered, by chance,
that a store in a neighboring village stocked the same paper for ten
cents. Five cents was then the price of an ice cream cone, and it
seemed very important, indeed.

“Did you know that you get fifteen cents for the Times while so-and-so
up the street only gets ten?” I asked him one day. He always
acknowledged a greeting or a bit of conversation with a characteristic
lift of the eye-brows so that when he didn’t feel a response necessary
you would know that he had heard you just the same. This time the
eye-brows raised at once, and the reply came quickly:

“That a fact?” I had a moment of weakness and was sorry that I had
gone into it, for even five cents was not an excuse for hurting an old
friend. But, standing my ground, I answered, “Yes, that’s a fact.”

But now I was treated to a series of facial expressions that would have
done justice to a Barrymore. Commencing with the raised eye-brows his
face ran through the whole gamut, from disbelief to pained surprise to
complete puzzlement until, finally, scratching at his thinning hair, he
looked me straight in the eye, and said,

“Well, now ... _ain’t they foolish_!” I knew when I was licked and
I paid the fifteen cents then, and for many a Sunday after.

Years later, when the whole world was to have Fords in its Future,
and even a fifteen cent Sunday paper was but a memory, I called on my
friend for what turned out to be one of the last times, but perhaps
the most satisfactory. I had been away from the Cape for four years,
in faraway places across the sea, and the face of much of the earth
had been changed, and much of the earth would never be the same again.
Even Cape Cod had undergone a change in the war years, and it was with
rather strong emotions that I walked past the cluttered drug store
windows and into the establishment of my friend. Thankfully he was
there, a little older and a little grayer, but nevertheless there,
behind the counter in his familiar white coat. His eye-brows raised
in familiar greeting, and perhaps he looked up from swishing the soda
glasses for a longer instant than normally. But when, after a moment he
spoke, it was with the greatest casualness. “Hello, Allan,” he said,
slowly. “What’ll you have? A coke?”

Then I knew that not all of the earth had changed, and I was glad of it
as I felt the memory of four ugly years slipping quietly away into the
shadows of the little store. Then, as was customary, he joined me in a
coke, and we picked up the threads of our conversation, exactly where
we had temporarily dropped them, in August of 1941. It was good to be
home again.




MODERN HEROES OF THE SEA


February, on the Cape or elsewhere in the north, is a poor month, an
in-between month, throwing the weather book at you when your resistance
is weakest, hurling cold winds, sleet and rain, grayness and wetness
enough to almost make you forget that spring is not so far away.
February can bring a vicious kind of day that is unknown in any other
month, a day when Main Street is deserted and battened down, when
hurricane winds lash the trees and pile huge breakers upon the shore
and you huddle indoors and are thankful for warmth and dryness and an
occupation that does not call you out. February brought this kind of a
night and followed it with this kind of a day on the seventeenth and
eighteenth of 1952. The wind howled in hurricane force and there was
snow and there was rain. The telephone wires screamed their resistance
and, listening to their radios which could blot out the rage of nature,
Cape people, for the first time, heard the names FORT MERCER and
PENDLETON.

No one who was not then on Cape Cod can appreciate the horror and the
heroism of that night and morning. No one who was then on the Cape will
ever forget the pride we had for the men of the Coast Guard, nor the
rather special pride for those Guardsmen who were Capers, carrying on
in the same great tradition as their forebears who followed the sea.
Even now it is difficult to sort out the facts of that terrible night
when the incredible happened, and two sister-ship tankers broke in half
off Chatham to become four separate derelicts, each with a partial
crew, and each at the mercy of fifty foot waves that, with each gust of
angry wind, threatened to sink them.

News flashes first announced that the Fort Mercer was in trouble,
thirty miles off Chatham light. Finally it was announced that she
had broken in half. Meanwhile, the Chatham radar screen had shown two
large objects about five miles off the beach. This, it developed, was
the Pendleton, which had broken in two some hours before and because
of a broken radio had been unable to wire her predicament. Even the
Coast Guard, which had promptly dispatched every available vessel to
the scene from as far away as Portland, could not, for a time, accept
the incredible fact that two, five hundred and twenty foot tankers
had broken up within an area of forty miles and a few hours. Even on
the treacherous shoals of Monomoy there was no precedent for such
an accident. Nor is it likely that some other macabre accidents of
that night shall ever be repeated. For example, some time after the
Fort Mercer had broken in two high winds caught up the truant bow and
threatened to hurl it with tremendous force at the stern section. The
stern section, fortunately, still had engines running and the order for
“Full speed astern” was immediately given. The broken stern responded
just in time to save the Mercer from a terrible and probably fatal
collision with her own bow.

Of the hundreds of brave men who answered the Coast Guard’s call to
duty that February night, none displayed greater courage nor greater
seamanship than the personnel of the Chatham Light Station. It was
they who, without hesitation, launched two of their thirty-six foot
open boats into the awful nightmare of Chatham Bars. Fifty-foot waves,
thirty-six foot open boats, visibility zero, near hurricane winds,
bitter cold with sleet and snow and the blackness of night. The small
boats were each under the command of Chatham boys, Donald H. Bangs and
Bernard C. Webber. Bangs, after a monumental trip across the outer
bar to the sea beyond, first made contact with the Pendleton. Webber,
through sheer will power and the help of God, forced his boat through
overwhelming seas to the Pendleton’s stern section. There, through the
most skillful maneuvering, he took off thirty three survivors of the
wreck. His trip to and from the wreck was accomplished with himself
lashed to the wheel and his crew clutching the bottom of the boat to
keep from being washed overboard. The windshield was broken on the way
out and water washed freely over the boat and her crew. How Webber
succeeded in bringing his heavily overloaded boat back to safety and
shore will never be known, but he did it. And meanwhile, other vessels
had been rescuing the crew of the Fort Mercer. The great storm, which
could easily have claimed the lives of eighty-four, had claimed
fourteen, a heavy toll, but one which would have been so much heavier
without the watchful eyes and skill of the Coast Guard.

There is a long history of friendly rivalry between Cape fishermen
and the Coast Guard. Capers, who are often as at home on the water as
ashore are apt to be critical of the spit and polish and new-fangled
methods of the government service. But there was no criticism on that
February night. The hats of the fishermen were off, in tribute to the
brave seamanship they had witnessed. In many a weather-beaten face of
Chatham the eyes were moist when it was known at last that “the boys
have made it in”.

There were medals later, presented at a Washington ceremony. But none
would shine as brightly as the new place the Coast Guardsmen had found
in the hearts of their Cape countrymen.




THE CAPTAINS


When the Cape Captains came home from the sea it was their realization
of a dream of security and of normal family life for which they had
fought the elements and endured countless hardships. Behind them
stretched limitless miles of open ocean, the sea which had claimed so
many friends and relatives. In the great days of the Clippers, between
1840 and 1870, the white stones in the cemeteries with the notation
“Lost at Sea”, had multiplied so greatly that to a stranger today it
would seem that Cape Codders hardly ever lived long enough to die of
natural causes. In the year 1840 it was estimated that there were over
one thousand “sea-widows” residing in the County. Those who had come
home to stay ashore at last did so with humility and thanksgiving in
their hearts.

It is sometimes difficult to remember that the life of a deep-water
Captain was a business, and a grim and lonesome business at that, in
which the Captains were engaged in order to make a living for their
families. They chose such a way because the sea was at their doorstep,
and in their blood, and in the direction in which their talents lay.
Of course there was something in it of the strong call of adventure,
and they were equal to it, for they were intelligent and brave, and
true pioneers. No port in the world was beyond their reach and in the
clipper ships with the wonderful names (Red Jacket, Flying Cloud, Wild
Hunter and the rest) they reached them and returned, not once, but a
score of times, girdling the globe and reducing its size to the glory
of their country. But for most it was the vision of a final haven in
some Cape village, with wife and family, and enough money for security,
that kept the Captains going through all the lonely years at sea.

It is in the ship’s papers and correspondence of the Captains that
the inherent homesickness shines through and in ways that, in their
subtlety, make it all the more poignant. Thus a river across the world
“looks a little like our own Bass River”, and a distant shoreline
“makes me think of the highlands at home”. Perhaps the Captain
practices penmanship on a spare page of his log. Then you will see
that the names he has written over and over again are those of wife
and children, or of his home village on the Cape. Many would use their
spare time to dream of the home they would one day build ashore and in
the notebooks are frequent drawings of dream mansions, many of which
became reality in a Cape village.

Sometimes the controls are off and in some moment of nostalgia he
writes from the heart, baldly. One Dennis Captain writes to his owners,
“Please to send someone to take over the ship when we reach San
Francisco as I have been over three years without seeing home or family
and cannot be away from them longer.” Sometimes when things were going
especially badly the Captain’s remarks even broke into the “Remarks”
column of the ship’s Log as in this entry by a famous Cape Captain on
his fortieth day at sea in the Pacific: “Oh, for a cot in some vast
wilderness where I shall never see a ship again. If ever one poor
fellow has tired of anything it is I that is sick and tired of going to
sea.”

As you look over the yellowed pages that the Captains have left behind,
you feel that they only were able to shake their haunting vision of
home and family when they had the greatest reason to have overwhelming
pride in their craft and the challenges they offered. Let them break a
standing record for crossing a sea, or triumphantly outsail a superior
vessel, or accurately guess a position in mid-ocean just “from the
look of things”, or sail through tortuous straits where more timid men
had said “can’t be done”, and the pride of honest achievement brought
compensation for tiresome, lonesome hours away from home.

Many of the Captains never realized their dream of retirement ashore,
but many did, and with the money from their voyages they built their
lovely homes along Main Street. Into them went some of the most exotic
woods of the tropics, molded into fine panelling by ship’s carpenters
who loved the feel of fine wood, and played their own kind of music
upon it. And into the panelled rooms went the relics of their hundreds
of thousands of miles at sea--teakwood stands and rosewood chairs,
tables inlaid with mosaic and ivory, the finest of china and crystal,
wallpapers from France and carpets from Belgium, and all the countless
odds and ends of curiosities that have appealed to souvenir collectors
of all times and generations. Often there were so many things that they
spilled out of the house and into the attic where they reposed in the
Captain’s sea chests that were kept standing “at the ready” just in
case. Every house had such a surfeit of Oriental silks and embroidery
that many a young girl, who wanted something really different to wear
to a dance, preferred to buy a bolt of calico from the village dry
goods store. But when all the curios and souvenirs had been distributed
about the Captain’s home, the place of honor would still be saved upon
the parlor wall for the oil painting of the Captain’s vessel as it was
depicted by some far away artist as it entered the Port of Naples, or
Calcutta, or Singapore. For the Captains could never divorce themselves
entirely from the beautiful winged ships that had brought them safely
home.

From their homes the Captains took their thankfulness and humility
to the white churches of the Cape, many of which they had helped to
build, and to which they gave their active support. All of the Captains
had held regular Sunday services aboard ship, fair weather or foul,
and many had held daily readings from the Bible which they kept in
their cabin and from which they found frequent solace. Hardly anyone
has been so thoroughly committed to the care of the Almighty as the
Cape Captain putting out to sea. Church-going brought the same kind of
inspirational orderliness to their life ashore as they had taken to the
helm of their winged vessels. At every Cape Meeting House one would see
faces that had been long gone, but dearly remembered, as the Captains
came home. These marine aristocrats were a subject of awe to the young,
and their return was an occasion for joy to the adults, for there was
hardly a family which did not have some connection of its own with the
blue waters that stretched away from the Cape. So to the churches they
came, imposing figures in Sunday black, often with magnificent beards
and mustaches, always with a kind of slightly rolling gait that set
them aside from their land-bound neighbors.

The Captains took their pleasure too. Fraternal orders were established
in every village and they took an active part in them. There were
trotting races over established courses such as the track which once
ran around Wychmere Harbor, or the Trotting Park at West Dennis. And
there were wild races over the snow with sleighs, such as took place
over South Main Street in South Yarmouth down to the river, with
horse manes flying and the beards of distinguished gentlemen thrust
into the wind, while sleigh bells tinkled and the unblemished snows
of yesteryear crunched beneath the racing hooves of the Captains best
horse flesh. Having a fast horse was almost as important to them as a
fast ship. And in every village there was a favorite gathering place
where, in winter, they would sit about a sizzling stove and have
a pipe, and rattle off tales of faraway places which were then so
familiar that no Cape boy could have been troubled with geography. In
summer there were other things to do for recreation. Then it was time
to paint up, caulk, and launch the small boats that they always kept
handy. From them they could fish in the bounteous home waters, and feel
the old, familiar swells of the sea, and dream a little.

But the Captains had not come ashore to live in idleness. Almost
at once they threw themselves into hard work ashore, putting the
hard-earned money from the sea to good use. The biographies of the
Cape Captains show them to have been as much masters of trade as they
had been of their vessels. The list is imposing--bank presidents, and
founders of banks, railroad presidents (for they sensed the wisdom
of joining forces with the puny ribbons of steel that were already
luring freight away from the sea), founders of manufacturies such as
the mammoth salt works of the Cape and the 100 worker shoe factory
at West Dennis, cranberry-growers and exporters, shipbuilders and
ship owners--they were active in everything, and often they were as
successful ashore as they had been at sea.

When the Captains came home from the sea they had a busy life and a
good life, and it was good to be at home. And for the communities whose
life they had so greatly enriched it was good that the Captains had
come.




_There was the narrow land and there was the sea that washed against
it and there were people that developed many of the characteristics of
the homeland. They turned to building with ingenuity and with loving
care, and in the clean lines of their fences, their houses, and their
places of worship there was something of the land and the sea, and of
the kind of people they were._




THE CAPTAINS’ HOUSES


There is often more to a Cape Cod house than meets the eye. First,
there is an atmosphere, which even the most insensitive person can
notice if he is left alone with the house. Once I found myself in the
hands of a most unusual real estate broker who volunteered to show me a
house which she insisted she would not, under any circumstances, sell
to me. It was technically “For Sale”, but it was, she said, “not a
happy house”, and she did not want me to have it. She could not really
tell why she felt as she did, but, standing in its front parlor, in the
midst of parlor organ, wax flowers, and Victorian confusion, I suddenly
sensed what she had felt. It had nothing to do with a creaking door
to the upstairs, which alternately opened and closed, although there
seemed to be no wind outside the house. No, it was just that all the
bright sunlight streaming in from the windows could simply not dispel
the sensation of trouble and sadness in the poor, little house. Each
heavy drapery seemed to retain the sighs and each distorted mirror
to reflect the tears of an unhappy time. It had been a Captain’s
house because the familiar symbol of symmetrical spruce stood in the
dooryard, but something was wrong about that house and even now it
seems destined never to have a permanent tenant. Fortunately, I soon
found my own piece of Cape Cod with an old Half House upon it in
which at least two fine Dennis Captains had found comfort with their
families. I knew at once that it had been a happy house where the sun
shone in through crude, old glass as if it meant it, and where there
had been laughter of the young, and enough love and affection to go
around and fill its little rooms. Call it atmosphere, or spirits, or
what you will, there is something about the feeling of an old house.

And structurally any old house can yield a story of its past. On the
Cape this especially means when additions were made to accommodate an
expanding family, or when a move or two was made across a field, or
across a whole town, in order to enjoy the house in a better location.
For the Cape Codder regarded his home as moveable as his vessel and
they were built from the beginning so that you could up anchor and move
her off with the greatest of ease. Even to this day the Town Report of
Dennis lists among its Police Duties from 15 to 20 buildings “escorted
through town” each year. My own house was no exception. Three ells
have been appended through its long years of service and it has been
moved to a new location at least once. Now it defies Cape tradition by
facing north instead of south, but as the family room is now exposed
to the sun, and the refreshing southwest breezes of summer, the break
with tradition seems practical. It is easy to trace the structural
changes that have taken place within the house to satisfy the taste
of succeeding generations. There is the elimination of the partition
of the “borning room” to make a larger living room, the installation
of larger windows by a generation that couldn’t be bothered washing
the old, small panes, the relocation of the stairs for convenience
and safety, and many other changes that a little house-detective work
reveals. Recently, in the course of some reconstruction, I revealed
some timbers, in one of the newer walls, that were heavily encrusted
with salt. Clearly they had come from the old salt works on the River.
When the salt works were abandoned Cape thrift put their timber to work
in many a home, sometimes to the despair of carpenters who find that a
nail soon rusts out of such wood. But the wood places definitely the
period of the reconstruction of the wall.

Wood with a more interesting story was found not long ago in a
Captain’s house on Bass River, the large “Red House”. Mr. John Sears
had been doing some carpentry work on an ell of the “Red House” when
he was puzzled to come across some charred beams in the attic. He
at first tried to think of some ancient fire at “Red House”, until
he remembered a story he had heard when a boy. It seems that a Cape
schooner, laden with southern lumber, was beating its way up the coast
in 1812 when it was suddenly attacked by a British vessel. Being near
the land, the unarmed Yankee crew beached the vessel and took to the
woods. The British sent a party ashore to set fire to the stranded
vessel and then sailed away. The American crew watched them go, and
then ran from the woods to extinguish the fire. They floated the vessel
on the high tide and proceeded up the coast to Bass River. Part of
the cargo had been scorched and charred, but it was strong and sturdy
timber, not to be wasted on Cape Cod, and plenty good enough for an
attic beam where it would never be seen. So here in the “Red House”
on Bass River a carpenter found sturdy beams that had been through an
action in the War of 1812, and another old house had revealed some of
the secrets of its romantic past.


_Two Captains, Two Sisters_

Just beyond Cove Road in South Dennis, where Nickerson’s Cove thrusts
out from the River toward the white church on the hill, stand two
large, white houses. They face different directions but their back
doors are convenient to one another and these are connected by a
footpath through a field. Both houses were built in the year 1849, the
one to the north for Captain Obed Baxter Whelden, the one to the south
for Captain Ellis Norris. The Captains had married sisters and it was
they who had first worn the neighborly path between the two houses,
a tradition that has never changed. The Captain Whelden house is now
owned by his granddaughter, Miss Anna Nickerson, while Captain Norris’
house is owned by Mrs. E. S. LaRiviere who has named her home “The
Skipper’s Stairway”.

Captain Norris’ stairway is unusual not alone for its beauty and
craftsmanship, but because it may be the only stairway on the Cape that
was entirely built at sea. Captain Norris was skipper of the “Maggie
Belle”, and soon after his home was built he began planning his unusual
staircase which was actually built at sea aboard his vessel. It was
an almost incredible feat to accomplish away from home. Measurements
must be precise so that the staircase would fit against the wall of
the front hall of his South Dennis home. The unprotected side of the
staircase (it was built in a graceful spiralling curve) was finished
off with a single board which was subjected to steam for long hours
and then, with infinite patience and care, molded into the intricate,
twisting design of the stair. At last the staircase was finished and
the ship was able to conveniently unload it at the foot of Cove Road
where a wagon conveyed it in style to the house. There it was promptly
installed, and there it remains today for all to see, a perfect fit, a
thing of perfect beauty, a stairway to elicit admiration, indeed.

There are many beautiful staircases on the Cape and they somehow became
synonymous with the prosperity of the owner of the house. None have
the same appeal for me, though, as the simple beauty of the Skipper’s
staircase. Aside from the stairs, themselves, it may have something to
do with that little footpath which, despite changing occupants, has
wound its way through the century from house to house and never once
has been allowed to grow over. That is the way of it with neighbors on
the Cape.

The little footpath ends at the homestead of Captain Whelden. This
fine old house is picturesquely set on a knoll with a view of the
winding Main Street of the village, of the Cove of Bass River, and the
Captain’s Church on the hill. It is perfect example of the influence of
classical Greek architecture on Cape construction of the last century,
and so artfully is it placed among its plantings that it appears as if
it must always have been there. If you should pass through the swinging
front gate you would walk past beautiful English box trees that are
over a century old and among the largest on the Cape. These and other
beautiful trees, the handsome panelling within the house, and the
original gold-leaf wallpaper that came by clipper from France to South
Dennis, are only a few of the attractions of this lovely, white house.
And--as with all Cape houses--it has a story of its own.

Captain Whelden was master of the coastwise schooner “Robert Graham
Dunn”. He was another of the gallant men of South Dennis who chose
a career at sea that gained success for himself and glory for his
village. Unfortunately that career was cut off when, at the age of
sixty-four, he contracted yellow fever in Florida and died aboard
his vessel at Pensacola. With the same longing all Cape Cod men felt
abroad, the Captain died with the single word, “home”, on his lips--and
the First Mate of the “Dunn” was determined that the good Captain’s
body should be taken to his beloved village for burial. But this was
the eighteen eighties and the same superstitions that led Cape Codders
to bury smallpox victims in an isolated spot (in the belief that this
would stop the spread of the disease) held the crew in awesome fear
of contracting the dreaded fever. They mutinied at the prospect of
carrying the Captain’s body home.

The First Mate of the “Dunn” must have been a courageous, loyal, and
determined man, for, at length, the ship’s mutiny was put down, and,
in a metallic casket weighing well over a ton, the Captain’s remains
began the sad journey back to the Cape. Captain Whelden succumbed to
the fever on Memorial Day, 1888, and on July 4 he was laid to rest at
South Dennis, just down the road from the home he loved so well. Twelve
Captains carried the heavy casket. It was a fine tribute to the memory
of the man whose big white house by the side of the road still graces
the little village at the heart of the Cape.


_East Is West_

Not far from the houses of the two sisters the charming old Cape Cod
homestead of Captain Alpheus Baker, Jr., sits beside the Upper County
Road. It is a white Cape Codder, trim and snug and gracious, and it
must look very much the same now as it did a century ago. Old trees
throw a graceful pattern of shadows against it in the summer sunlight
and there is a perpetual air of friendliness and serenity about it.
The house would hardly be noticed by the stream of traffic that rushes
by its dooryard in the summer months, but the house is complacent too,
and wears the air of there being “nothing new under the sun”. One
would not have to see the treasures within it to realize that it is a
cosmopolitan house, content now to dream its dreams of a colorful past.

A “Short Trip Guide to America”, published as late as 1875, dismisses
the Cape as a “wild and desolate”, but interesting, section of the
Atlantic Coast,--this while devoting considerable pages to the
description of the “wonders” of Lawrence and Lowell. It is curious that
when a guide book was describing the peninsula as “wild and desolate”,
perhaps because it did, indeed, lead a life quite apart from the
Mainland, Cape Codders, themselves, were among the most cosmopolitan
people on earth. For them, distances were measured in terms of days at
sea, and days meant nothing while in pursuit of their fortunes. Through
the medium of the wonderful clipper ship, and the blue seas that were
always near enough to be seen from the rooftop of any house, the world
was at their doorstep. The best illustration of this, which also throws
light on Cape character, is the well-worn anecdote of the central Cape
Captain who had travelled many times around the world but had never
negotiated the twelve mile buggy ride to Chatham. When asked, “How
come?”, by someone who must have been a Mainlander, he would reply, “I
just never had any business there”. But the Captains _did_ have
business in Singapore and Hong Kong, in Java and the Indies, and in
every important port throughout the world, and there they sailed often.
At the time the “Short Trip Guide” was being written Captain Baker of
South Dennis, still in his thirties, had already made several voyages
to the Orient.

Once, on a return voyage from Hong Kong, Captain Baker brought with him
to the Cape two Chinamen and one young Chinese woman. The woman was
installed at the Baker homestead as a nurse for the Baker children,
and, for what few stay-at-homes there were, a touch of the Orient came
to South Dennis. The nurse was capable and attractive, and evidently
her young charges were devoted to her. One can only guess at her
thoughts as she stood on the bank of Bass River looking westward into
the setting sun; or as she walked up the winding Main Street which
must have seemed so silent and colorless after the bright hues and
loud cries of Hong Kong. And one can only guess at the thoughts of the
people of the town who looked through the curtained windows of staid,
white houses at the strange figure in Oriental dress who walked their
streets. It is to be hoped that they took her to their hearts and, if
folks in the village then were as they are today, it is a certainty
that they did. But one April, before the Cape burst into its myriad
colors of coreopsis and broom, of lilac and daisy, and lupin, and all
the wonderful signs of springtime that might rival the colors of China,
she fell ill, and, in the little back parlor of the Baker home, she
died.

At South Dennis, in the old cemetery on the hill, and hard by the Baker
memorials, there is a plain white stone which reads, “Chinese Woman;
Brought from Hong Kong by Captain Alpheus Baker, Jr.; April 5, 1872 at
31 years.” Not far away is a monument to the memory of Captain Baker,
inscribed, “His sun is gone down while it is yet day”. For the Captain
had outlived the Chinese woman by only two years and had died at the
age of thirty-six. Strangely enough, he too had died in a foreign land
and was buried in Sourabaya, Java, where another white monument denotes
his final resting place.

The old cemetery on the hill at South Dennis is a quiet resting place,
watched over by sentinel cedars and the towering steeple of the
Captain’s Church. In summer there is the exotic perfume of wild roses,
of fern, of sweet grass and of pine. It is very Cape Cod and, standing
by the Baker plot in June sunshine, one feels the Orient is very far
away. Still, if one took to the gleaming seas, and rode the wings of
the clipper ships, Hong Kong was nearer than Chatham--at least if one
had business there.




OF CAPE COD FENCES


Sometimes, riding around the highways and byways of the Cape, you
become so conscious of the mass impression of uniqueness and beauty
that you lose sight of some of the finer details that have gone into
it. Of such details is the Cape Cod fence, a very important part of
our landscape, but one that frequently goes unnoticed. Cape fences add
to the air of security and independence and snugness that all Cape
houses wear. They were the product of an age of hand craftsmanship and
artistic imagination, and many of them were designed, and even whittled
out, aboard ship, in all the four corners of the earth. Needless to say
they bear no resemblance to the poor products of mass production which
are labelled “Cape Cod Fences” and sold over the counters of department
stores many miles from the Cape.

With the advent of the summer visitor the picket fence has enjoyed
a popular renaissance and they look very much at home around old
or reproduction Cape cottages. When June arrives the fences form a
handsome background for the multitude of climbing roses that tumble
over them in colorful cascades. The summer people have also made
frequent use of the split-rail fence which was certainly used on the
early Cape but never as widely as some other types. Over on the North
side there were bothersome, but handsome, field stones which, as the
land was cleared, were built into rambling walls, adding so much to
the charm of that area. As the nineteenth century grew old and the
land was secure, and the Captain’s prosperity was being felt in the
villages, it became time to indulge in tidying up and beautifying
the stark simplicity of earlier times. Then the mansions became more
ornate and so did the fences. You can see them all over any village,
particularly on Main Street, such as the very beautiful wrought iron
fence that surrounds the Captain Obed Baker mansion in my own village
of West Dennis. The elaborateness of the fences became as much a symbol
of the wealth and importance in the community of the owners as did the
houses, themselves. Fortunately, all of them somehow managed to retain
a standard of good taste and authentic Cape Cod flavor which makes them
both suitable and attractive.

What had become something ornamental had once been extremely useful,
which may explain the frequency with which you will see a fence on
village streets. “Good fences make good neighbors” is not a Cape
expression! With husbands and sons out on the broad Atlantic, or only
God knew where, there was no inclination on the Cape to discourage
neighborliness. Far from being a defense against neighbors, the Cape
fences were primarily built as a barrier to four-footed intruders. For
in the old days beef and lamb and pork products were delivered to the
villages “on the hoof”. Large droves of cattle and swine were regularly
driven through the village streets, all the way down Cape. In each
of the villages the butcher would select his purchases and then the
herd would be driven on until the last animal was sold. The route and
estimated schedule of such drives would appear in the Register columns
some time in advance in order that the towns could be made ready to
receive them. It must have been a day of great excitement when the
swirls of sand, rising from the outskirts of the village, heralded
the approach of a drive of pigs or cattle that would soon be passing
through Main Street to the accompaniment of the shouts of the drivers
and the delighted whoops of small boys who were the unofficial escorts
of the herds through town. Without a doubt there were anxious moments
for the home-owners along the way who could be grateful for the sturdy
fences that stood between the pushing, shoving animals and their prized
flower beds and vegetable gardens.

Now, once again, the fences are purely ornamental, and the regular
drive of cattle has been replaced by the cellophane-wrapped cuts of
meat at the chain stores. But some of the fences still have a function
and one of these is my own favorite, the white-painted, acorn-topped,
hand-turned posts which support three substantial rails. There are
many fine examples of this wonderful fence all over the Cape and they
are good, not only for their clean lines that blend so well with the
landscape, but because they were wonderful on which to sit while
watching the passing show--in days when one could find time for, and
enjoyment in, just sitting. In the Cape village where I grew up there
was a fine one, close by the post office, and it used to support a
dozen men and boys, sitting, like starlings on a telephone wire, all
in a row, and making just as much noise. This was the local Forum.
Here, the blessings of freedom of speech were enjoyed to the full, and
everyone had his say, sitting on the same level as his neighbor, with a
whole long fence to choose from and no seat better than another. It was
an all-male society, with some whittling, some cussing, some spitting,
and more than a little story-telling. Here, there was an unwritten
law about accepting even the tallest tales with complete credulity,
and, with such latitude given, the tales sometimes became very tall,
indeed. But I believed every last one of them, and really still do.
Furthermore, if that fence had not bowed to progress years ago, I would
be there now, pop-eyed and listening, while the summer’s sun warmed my
back and my bare toes dug into the sandy soil--for, from a perch on an
acorn-topped fence, your toes could just reach the soil and it was a
comfortable feeling.




SOME OLD MEETING HOUSES


Perhaps no single work of man enhances the beauty of a Cape village
so much as the sparkling white churches whose spires point unerringly
toward the blue heavens and serve as landmarks to Cape Codders at sea
and ashore. One can find them conspicuously at the center of each of
the old villages, and, indeed, it was from their presence that the
villages grew. For the early Meeting Houses were not only centers of
worship but of government and of all community activity. Distances
between villages were computed as between Meeting Houses and until
very recently there were many road signs directing travellers to one
or another of them, a testimony to the importance of the church to the
life of the town.

The early colonists of the Cape were a plain but very pious people and
in view of the hardships they endured in the building of a new land
it was little wonder that they turned to their God for help, and in
Thanksgiving for His bounty in the new surroundings. In many cases they
built their churches before they had built their homes and they used
them. Someone who visited the Cape remarked that “there are too many
churches for any of them to prosper”, but, at one time or another each
of them was filled to the rafters. The settlers came to church out of
choice and necessity and as the land prospered the farmers and the
tradesmen and the Captains came in humility and thanksgiving, giving
generously to the support of the beautiful, white edifices that were
the symbol of their devotion to Christianity. They have survived waves
of free thought, of come-outers, Quakers, and bad times and good and
they still stand, a monument sculptured in wood to man’s best dreams,
their plain, dignified and honest lines a living testimony to the
character of the Cape men who built them. Thankfully, after the custom
of the forefathers, Cape people still gather at the churches on Sunday
and there are none here that stand empty and abandoned.

In the early times on the Cape the activities of the whole week were
directed toward the Sabbath, and its observance took much longer
than the hour or two now devoted to it. Sunday in all the villages
really commenced on Saturday night when the diversions and duties of a
workaday week were finally and quite definitely put aside. On Saturday
afternoons Cape kitchens were warm and fragrant with the aroma of a
week’s baking, part of which would first be savoured at Saturday night
supper when the succulent baked beans and brown bread would make its
traditional appearance on the kitchen table. And Sunday breakfast was
almost as traditional with the warmed-over beans frequently accompanied
by fish cakes of local cod which had been taken from a cool Cape cellar
or buttery where it had been put down in native salt. Breakfast done,
Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes came out from their week’s retirement,
usually to the utter distress of the younger members of the household
who, from the stiff postures and unhappy looks and squirmings could
have been in fetters, rather than in starched-bosom shirts, black store
clothes, and--most repulsive of all--highly polished, imprisoning
boots. So restrained did the young feel without the casual freedom of
their weekday clothes that they would have had neither taste nor heart
for play, even had it been allowed. So they sat stiffly with the other
members of the family, as if awaiting the judgment, until, at quarter
to eleven, the commanding tones of the great church bell were heard.
Then the great movement commenced along the narrow, twisting lanes,
with each house emptying its very sedate and formal members into the
streets which led to their common destination, the Meeting House. There
they would find their more distant neighbors assembling outside with
the horses and wagons that brought them secured in the rambling sheds
nearby and within sound of the fine old hymns that would soon be
rolling out through the opened windows.

The motorist of today on Cape Cod will, in time, begin to look for
familiar landmarks. A white spire soaring above the pines indicates
the presence of a village and each has identifying characteristics of
its own. To the traveller coming home to the Cape there is no other
landmark as welcome a sight as the old, gilded weather cock which
perches above the West Parish Meeting House at West Barnstable. When,
from the new Mid-Cape Highway, you first catch sight of this grand bird
shining, golden and bright and triumphant above the trees you know that
you are really on the Cape and that an old friend is keeping the same
watchful eye over land and sea of today as in the days of the American
Revolution and before. For the weather-cock crowns the steeple of the
oldest Congregational church building in all America. It is a beautiful
structure which served the Town of Barnstable as Meeting House during
the most fateful days of American history and, through the foresight of
some Cape Codders, it is now being restored to its full, and original
magnificence. Already the exterior of the church has been restored
until it is now the very same one that was familiar to Commodore John
Percival, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, James Otis, and a host of other
great men and women of the County in the days when greatness seemed
to touch all those within sight of the dunes and the salt marshes of
Barnstable. The site for the Meeting House could not have been better
chosen and today, more than ever, the old church, on a slight elevation
where tree-lined Cape roads meet, is an edifice of great beauty and
dignity, commanding attention.

As beautiful as the newly-restored church appears from the outside, it
is, nevertheless, the unfinished interior that proves the wisdom of
the restoration program. Looking upwards at the dome of the Meeting
House with its tremendous beams and unique bowed rafters is an awesome
experience. Standing there it is impossible not to feel in touch with
the historic past, with the very beginnings of America. And you marvel
at the artistry and ingeniousness of the builders who carved these huge
timbers from local forests, who weighted them down for a full year
to achieve the desired bow shape, who built a framework which is as
staunch and true today as ever it was, and that has stubbornly resisted
the encroachments of passing fashions. The workers who are in charge
of the restoration have been touched with the magic of the place.
They speak with great respect of those long-ago builders of the Cape
and they point with enthusiasm to the many ways in which the historic
structure is coming back to life.

Just down the road a piece, and toward the great marshes and the
picturesque dunes that stretch out towards Sandy Neck, the King’s
Highway continues its rambling way from West Barnstable down Cape. It
is a street of green lawns and historic houses, of flowering shrubs and
well-kept gardens that flourish in the good, black earth of the North
Side. There is so much to see there that even the most observing may
pass by, unseeing, the peaceful, old, white church at the corner of
Rendezvous Lane at Barnstable. Amid the shadows from ancient trees the
church dreams serenely in the summer sunlight and it is difficult to
imagine that this is the very spot where, in the year 1774, there took
place one of the most unusual and daring blows for liberty in all our
history.

The Third Baptist Church of Barnstable was formed in 1842, after it
had purchased, for $77.00, the second Barnstable Court House which had
been built in 1774. The old, wooden building had been abandoned by
the County upon the erection of the new granite Court House and the
Baptists found it well suited to their needs. The building was turned
around from the Highway to face Rendezvous Lane and some alterations
were made to make it more suitable for a Meeting House. Today, a bronze
tablet within the church proclaims that “this building was the Court
House where the Kings Court was forced to end its sessions by a band of
patriots in September 1774.”

The march of a “Body of the People” to Barnstable on September 27,
1774 took place as the result of an Act of Parliament which, in those
hectic days, seemed to be enacting everything possible to alienate its
colonials. The new act proclaimed that jurors, heretofore drawn by the
selectmen, should now be chosen by the Crown’s own representative,
the Sheriff. Under such a system it was obvious that the Crown would
control the whole local system of justice, and those who came before
the courts, and were known to be unsympathetic with the Crown, would
receive very short shrift. The patriots decided that, to effectively
show protest to such an act, they must close the lower courts, in order
that no appeals would reach the “packed”, higher courts. To carry out
this purpose a large body of men assembled at Sandwich on the night of
September 26, 1774. There they planned for the morrow what must have
been the Cape’s first picket line.

On the morning of September 27, the newly-formed Body of the People
moved towards the old Court House at Barnstable. They were afoot and
on horseback, with the horsemen in the lead, and through every village
they passed their number was swelled. When they passed the home of
Chief Justice Otis they respectfully raised their hats in salute
and preceded him to the Court where, 1500 strong, they awaited the
opening of Court. The air at Rendezvous Lane must have been charged
with suspense and expectancy when, at last, the Chief Justice and his
aides, led by the Sheriff, complete with drawn sword and staff of
office, approached the unprecedented group who blocked their passage to
the Court House door. Justice Otis, upon ascertaining the business of
the group, ordered them to disperse. Through their leader, Nathaniel
Freeman of Sandwich, they replied, “We thank your honor for having
done your duty; we shall continue to perform ours.” And continue they
did, until the Justice left the scene and it was established that
there would be no session. Before the day was over the patriot band
had furthermore obtained written agreement from the Justices that
they would not carry out the objectionable Act of Parliament that had
inspired the march.

If the Body of the People became the Cape’s first picket line, it was
also the most orderly one anywhere at any time. In their preparations
for the march on Barnstable they had ruled against the use of profanity
and alcohol. They were well-disciplined, and entirely under the control
of their democratically-chosen leaders. The group at Rendezvous Lane
on the September morning was no “rabble in arms”; it consisted of
some of the truly great men of the Colony, making an effective, but
respectful, protest against an injustice which threatened the freedoms
for which they had crossed the broad Atlantic. It was like the men of
the Cape to settle their own problems in their own way. Two years later
the Colonies adopted the Declaration of Independence. Cape Codders had
chosen their way at the little white church in Barnstable.

From the window of my old house at West Dennis I look out over the
blue Cove of Bass River to where the white Captain’s Church rises on
the hill at South Dennis. It is bright and peaceful and meaningful.
In summer it is framed by the lacy branches of elm trees on the near
shore; in winter it is a beacon of light in a gray landscape. I have
watched the purple shadows of night slide softly from its sides in the
spring sunrise; and I have watched an autumn sunset gild its steeple
with burnished gold. It is good to have it there, where it has stood
and looked across the Cove for over a century.

It was felt that Dennis had come of age when, in 1795, the Southside of
town were granted a Meeting House of their own, to be erected at South
Dennis. At first the new Meeting House was supplied by ministers from
other churches but by 1817 the Reverend John Sanford was called as its
own pastor to administer to a church membership of twenty-nine persons.
Eighteen years later the church had become too small to accommodate
the growing parish. Then, too, there was already stirring within men
the inspirations of a country come of age, when the hurried, rather
crude buildings of another era must be replaced by an architecture
that was more expressively American. So, in 1835, it was decided to
tear down the old edifice and build a fine, new church on the same
site. It was hoped that the auctioning off of the pews, combined with
the voluntary labor of men of the village, would be enough to get the
building started, at least. Fortunately for all of us there was also
the matter of the beans.

The men of the parish met on a bitter, cold day in January to consider
ways and means of financing the new church. It was the kind of day to
discourage any kind of action, and the offers of financial help were
desultory and infrequent. Thoroughly discouraged, one of their number
slipped out of the meeting and returned to the warmth of his own
fireside to think the matter over. Finally, he had an inspiration and,
calling his wife he asked her if she could provide dinner for as many
as were attending the meeting. “For,” he said, “if those men go home
for dinner they will never come back and that will be an end to it.”
Upon hearing the problem the good wife set to work. Luckily, the weeks
baking was almost intact in the buttery, and, by the standards of the
Cape in 1835, it was not at all unusual that there were twenty-five
pies stored there. But that was not all--there was Indian Pudding, and
baked beans galore, yearning for the company of the huge loaves of
brown bread that soon came steaming from the oven. All that was needed
to complete, a dinner, the very smell of which might fill any man with
a sense of well-being--and generosity--was coffee. And soon she had
made coffee, scalding hot, and brimming over from the biggest container
in her house. In no time at all the full dinner had been delivered
to the meeting where its effect was such that the men of the parish
took on a whole new lease on life and began to outbid one another in
generosity. The huge sum of $6000 was raised, enough to build the new
church, and some of the men became so enthusiastic that they could not
wait to get to the bank to withdraw their money.

So the white church was built, there upon the hill, and it was not then
very different from the building a visitor would enter today. The same
tower clock, and the same auditorium clock would, when not seized by
the temporary fits of temperament that are the privilege of age, be
telling the same old time, while the same chandelier with its lovely
etched globes would be sending forth the same warm glow over the white
walls and straight-posture-demanding pew. And the light would glint as
ever from the sides of old silver, the original Communion Set. Now,
from the front of the church, instead of from a balcony as before,
would come the strains of organ music from an instrument that has been
doing its Sunday duty for nearly one hundred years at the same church,
and had done duty elsewhere for a hundred years before that. This is
very likely the oldest organ still in regular use in America, and it
is not just by coincidence that it is frequently used to play hymns
which have in them the fresh, salted breath of the sea. Tablets offer
long lists of names of the South Dennis Captains who were members of
the church. Now, as then, among the congregation to whom “He gives
the keeping of the lights along the shore”, there are Nickersons and
Thachers and Crowells and Bakers and Kelleys, and there are newer faces
and newer names. Many have followed the advice of their first pastor to
“read and understand the history of your pious forefathers, than whom
no people under heaven are entitled to higher honors.” And all have
helped, and gladly, to keep this splendid symbol of the forefathers
faith a living and a meaningful one. So it is too all across the Cape
and up and down it, wherever a white church looms by a village street,
and its noble spire points to the blue heavens.




_When you have finished with it you have only begun. You speak of
a number of things that are yours, and it is the smallest fragment
of the picture. Have you seen the Cape at Christmas? Then the nights
are black and the Christmas lights shine brighter and in the crisp
night air the stars shine brightly too. The villages are evenly-spaced
islands of lights along the highways, cheerful islands and brave ones,
and you feel that there would have been room at the Inn here, or in any
of the small homes which look through unshaded windows and greenery
toward the streets. Do you know the Cape in summer? Then there is a
sudden hustle-bustle along Main Street and you count the number plates
from every state in the Union. It is a time of sunshine, tanning and
gilding, and the soft, dreamy haze of August. It is roses tumbling
over fences and the merry tinkle of ice in frosted glasses. It is blue
skies and white clouds, and blue waters and white sails, and the drone
of outboards on the River.... It is extra clerks in the stores and the
cheerful jingle of bulging cash registers, and better still, the shouts
and laughter of children as they splash in the warm waters of the Cape
while the fizzing spray breaks over them, and the sun toasts them, and
they are free. Have you seen the sunrise over Chatham Bars? Or seen it
set from St. Andrews or Sunset Hill? What of the woodsy road that winds
along Shawme Hill where you can watch the old town of Sandwich dreaming
through a summer’s afternoon, where you look over the quiet mill pond
and its white church spires to the blue Bay and the cliffs of Manomet.
Have you watched one of nature’s miracles at the Herring Run in Brewster
of an April day; or stood beside a quiet inland pond at Harwich of a
fall evening and watched plumes of mist rise from the water to do a
graceful ballet while the Cape begins to sleep? Have you followed any
of a hundred beckoning roads to whatever treasures they may reveal?
When you have done all these things you will begin to know a part of
it. One day, as you cross the Canal bridge, your heart will begin to
lighten, and the tensions of the Mainland will slide away. The land
will take on a wonderful familiarity, and you will know that you are
home, and that is all there is to it._




[Illustration]




              The paper in this book was manufactured
              by the Strathmore Paper Company of West
              Springfield, Mass.
              The type is Devinne and Caslon.
              Cover was executed by Louis Marini of the
              Colmar Press, Wollaston, Mass.




                          Transcriber’s Notes

Perceived typographical errors have been silently corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation and compound words have been retained as
printed.





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