A Cape Cod Notebook from WCAI

One of the things that holds the fabric of a community together, especially in a small town like mine, is what I like to call Public Gathering Places , or PGPs . These are places where we can have informal contact and conversation with peo ple we might otherwise never meet . With the rise of social networking, which allows us increasingly to isolate ourselves with a wall of dig ital connections, such public gathering places h ave become even more important .

The other day my dog Sam and I went for a walk along a stretch of the old railroad bed in South Wellfleet. At one point Sam went snuffling through the brush that bordered the bed and drew my attention to a pile of feathers there.

I am standing in a cold, bleak place under a leaden sky. A raw northeast wind cuts through my windbreaker and brings the smell of saltwater with it. This is not some remote beach or heath. In fact, I’m only a few yards from the unending roar of traffic on Route 6.

The other day I visited a friend who has several old apple and pear trees in his yard. As is true for most older fruit trees on the Cape, these have numerous regular rows or rings of small holes drilled around their trunks, as if someone had taken target practice at them with a miniature machine gun.

Last week I began to describe a walk I recently took on the pedestrian sidewalk that runs the length of Route 6 in Eastham – the only Cape town that has such a continuous walkway. What struck me most, for the first couple of miles, was the prevalence of old houses on both sides of the highway. Most were Greek Revivals and old Capes, with one or two Federal era structures. I must have passed dozens of them, some hidden or screened by fences or vegetation, but most quite visible. In any case, this

Here’s a Cape Cod factoid that you can use at parties during the holiday season: “What is the only town on Cape Cod that has a pedestrian sidewalk running continuously from one end of the town to the other? Think about that for a moment or two. Got an answer?

Sometimes the history of a place speaks to us in indirect, or hidden ways. Yesterday afternoon I took a walk up Lombard Hollow, one of half a dozen or so glacial valleys that run roughly parallel from east to west along the Wellfleet-Truro line. I don’t remember walking up this hollow before in December. It is a different place now, so open and bare, like a room with the walls removed. Its contours seem alive, active. As you walk up the nearly flat, fairly straight road, the ridges on either

One night last week, about 3:30 a.m., I was woken out of a deep sleep by a sound – a sound at once familiar, infuriating, and implacable. I knew instantly what it was, and what I would have to do, and I was already sorry. The sound was indisputably that of gnawing, a sound made by little sharp teeth, carving out a little nest for itself among the studs and cellulose insulation behind our bedroom wall, a sound somehow amplified by the very structure of the wall itself. I should not have been

On a sunny and breezy day last month, Kathy and I walked out into the dunes to pick some wild cranberries that grow in the wet bogs there. I’m always newly surprised at the extent, the sweep of the dunes, the expanse of ridges and valleys they contain.

Late one afternoon a few weeks ago, I took a walk along a Wellfleet beach facing Cape Cod Bay. At its start, this beach is backed by a low line of dunes, but after a few hundred feet, the dunes rise to become a low glacial bluff, a mix of sand and clay perhaps 20 feet high.

Some of you may recall—or perhaps may have seen—the dramatic geological event that occurred last summer at the Cahoon Hollow parking lot in Wellfleet. On the morning of August 19, after receiving six to seven inches of rain the day before, a large portion of the parking lot collapsed, creating a steep gully or ravine about 25 feet wide and 40 feet long, opening down onto the beach.

It’s become something of a cliché to hear members of my generation go on about how much Halloween has changed since we were kids. The main difference, we always seem to say, is how much freedom we were allowed on that one night of the year when mischief-making and self-disguise were not only approved but actually encouraged. In my childhood Halloween lasted all day, beginning with a costumed parade from our elementary school down the neighborhood streets. Our mothers – almost all of whom were

I remember the first time Kathy and I spent a couple of days in Euphoria, one of the dune shacks in the Provincelands managed by the Peaked Hill Trust. It was the last weekend in October and we arrived just at sunset. All the way out the light grew more and more intense, igniting the dune crests. A gibbous moon hung in the southern sky. The wind was stiff out of the northwest and growing stiffer. We dug the key out of its hiding-place and went inside. Euphoria is a small, low-pitched shack with