A Cape Cod Notebook from WCAI

This happened on the evening of our last rain storm, or what the old Cape Codders called a “ tempest . ” I’ve always liked that word, “tempest.” It goes back to Elizabethan times. Shakespeare used it as the title of his last play , in which the spirit Ariel says, “We are such things as dreams are made on. ” Its root comes from tempus , the Lati n word for time, and it connotes a great disturbance, one in which the doors between the present and the past might be suddenly flu ng open.

This is the brightest time of the year. That may seem like a counterintuitive statement , since spring on Cape Cod usually conjures up images of cloudy skies and rain showers. But on a sunny day in early May, if you can divest your self of seasonal prejudices, the world can seem mo re bright than at any other time of the year.

Last week I discussed a couple of recent examples of a forced or strategic retreat from our beaches due to a ccelerated erosion, namely the closing of the public parking lot at Wellfleet’s Cahoon Hollow Beach, and the closing of foot access to the beach at Eastham’s Nauset Light parking lot.

The history of the retreat of our beaches in the face of the unappeasable force of the ocean is a long and ongoing one. But over the past year the process seems to have kicked into a higher gear and presented us with a fascinating variety of retreats, strategic and otherwise.

I was walking in the backwoods with a friend the other day. He was waxing philosophical about trees, drawing lessons from life about them. “Look at the circle of life here,” he said. “Here you have healthy trees standing tall, others dying and dead all around them. But look, on the ground, are new shoots, just beginning to grow, and actually nurtured by the old dead trunks.”

There has been much singing down in the kettle hole tonight. Spring peepers and wood frogs are out in force, producing an electrical, amphibious chorus magnified by the megaphone shape of the hole. At dusk I walked out to the edge of the yard and, in the dying light, made my way slowly and carefully down to the wetland at the bottom of the slope, trying not to disturb their singing.

I remem ber the first time I visited Walden Pond. It was a brilliant spring day , decades ago now , when I cycled out to Concord, Massachusetts. I had read and admired Thoreau for years and this was my first trip to the spot where he wrote his classic account of living alone in the woods. I arrived with great expectation s , but came away oddly disappointed.

Last month, late on Valentine’s Day afternoon, I went out to Chipman’s Cove to see if I could get some oysters. Normally I don’t bother going out so late in the season, since the recreational shellfishing flats are usually pretty well picked over by mid-February. But my son and my daughter were making dinner for us on Sunday and their sole request was to have some Wellfleet oysters, so I decided to try.

One afternoon at about four o’clock I set off for a walk in the Provincelands dunes. I took the entrance off Snail Road, and as I walked up out of the miniature oak forest and into the dunes themselves, the sky began to cloud over. But the red ball of the sun dropped below the cloud bank in the west and flamed on the horizon, casting a rosy glow across the broad expanse of sand hills.

One day last month, when the temperature crept above freezing and the wind dipped below ten knots, I decided to do a beach walk from Newcomb Hollow to Ballston Beach, a distance of about 2.5 miles.

I had a pretty happy childhood, all things considered. Actually, most children growing up in America in the early 1950s experienced a general sense of well-being – that is, if y ou were white and not poor.

For the past several days I’ ve been mapping a small area of woods in the southern part of our town known informally as “The Maze.” The area i s about a half square mile in exten t, or something over 300 acres.

It was now 1:05, and still no sign of the Flex bus to Orleans. I stood in front of the Eastham Superette talking with the man in the electric wheelchair, on to which he seemed to have packed and tied all his worldly possessions.

I seldom ride the Flex bus, which, for those of you not familiar with it, is that part of the Cape Cod Regional Transit Authority that serves passengers from Harwich to Provincetown. Despite being a strong believer in public mass transport, I have tended to view the Flex bus more as a well-intentioned gesture rather than something that fulfills a real need.

Today I want to talk a bit about the “wrack line,” that more or less continuous line of debris left on the beach by the previous high tide. The content of the wrack line can be meager and ordinary – just a few bits of seaweed – or overwhelming and dramatic, like the 40-foot carcass of a dead humpback whale that washed up at Newcomb Hollow several years ago. But if we only investigate the content of the wrack line, big or small, I think we miss the bigger question.