A TRANQUILITY THAT IS SPECIFIC TO CAPE COD

When I was a kid my family couldn’t afford to take fancy vacations. My father was a teacher while working construction jobs seven days a week just so we could get by. My mother first worked part-time at a local day-care affiliated with the Brockton YMCA, and then as an administrative assistant at our town’s local Intermediate School.

For our family, it was Cape Cod that eventually provided one of our only potential vacation spots. It did not require plane tickets which my parents could not afford or even a significant amount of driving from where we lived. During 1979 and 1980 we were able to spend the final weeks of those summers in North Falmouth at a tucked away harbor that felt like a remote paradise even though it was relatively close to home. There is always something new and beautiful to discover on Cape Cod, and in most cases it just means staying off the main roads, discovering villages, taking streets that look to be a bit less traveled and following your instincts rather than listening to the directions on your cell phone. Truly being on the Cape means never wanting to leave it, taking the time to discover nearby places knowing that every road has the ability to lead to somewhere magical.

During the late 1970s my father had been working on a house in North Falmouth, an area sometimes referred to as Wild Harbor by the locals. He had been hired to work on a cottage owned by the Rogan family at 27 West Ave., most likely getting the work through a colleague whose family owned a nearby house on the same street. The renovations he was doing were probably in exchange for use of the Rogan’s cottage at the end of each summer, one of the only ways that my father was able to arrange vacations for us. I had been with my dad at 27 West Ave. once before while he was doing construction work. We even slept over at one point during an early spring night so that he could finish a job he had been unable to complete the afternoon that we got there. The house was not winterized and I remember it being very cold and windy that night. We slept in the same bed upstairs. I attempted to put myself to sleep by reading The Boatniks, the book version of the Disney movie from 1970 that happened to be sitting on a nightstand next to the bed.

The house on Wild Harbor was far more inviting during our family vacation at the end of the summer. My dad would usually bring down a boat he would rent from the Weymouth Naval Air Station, usually transporting it on a strange roof rack that he constructed on top of our Volkswagen Bus. Sometimes he would show up with a Sunfish sailboat and occasionally he would bring a Boston Whaler. The Boston Whaler was a larger motorboat and required a rented trailer. While the Sunfish was fun for sailing around in the calm waters of the inner harbor, a Boston Whaler allowed us to explore the ocean waters far off of Old Silver Beach which was particularly exciting whenever we spotted the Island Queen ferry heading in either direction between Woods Hole and Martha’s Vineyard.

Wild Harbor had a little store at the beginning of West Ave. toward the top of the harbor. Even as a young kid, there was something very calming to me about waking up early and taking a solitary, peaceful walk along that sandy road down to the little general store. My guess is that they probably specialized in coffee and possibly muffins or breakfast sandwiches for adults, but as a kid I was more interested in candy, baseball cards, and the pinball-style game with a baseball theme that I would happily play until I ran out of change. To this day, I can still smell the cool morning air coming off the ocean in North Falmouth. I loved the combination of the almost spiritual independence and the remarkable beauty of the harbor even at that age. After spending the final weeks of two memorable summers at Wild Harbor my parents divorced meaning that whatever cohesive family unit was falsely on display during those last years quickly dissolved. My sisters were now old enough where they were more concerned with their own interests rather than focusing on the past and, in my case, I began creating an emotional barrier protecting myself by looking forward rather than backwards. My mom was fortunate to have earned her license to teach elementary school by that time, a full-time job that would better allow her to proceed as a single mother. Although I did not return to Wild Harbor again until the summer of 2024, I never did forget the value of those quiet harbor mornings on Cape Cod, the feeling that I got while walking down to that little neighborhood store at the top of West Ave. in North Falmouth.

By the time I was entering high school a few years later, I had a girlfriend whose family summered in the town of Orleans on Cape Cod. They spent summers at 38 Monument Road in an old house that had been in their family for generations. On occasion, she and I would communicate via telephone but more often we would keep in touch by writing letters. During the summer of 1982 she arranged to have me catch a ride down to the Cape with her dad one week while he was back in town. He drove me all the way to Orleans in his old green Dodge Dart, a car that still had a manual transmission operated from the steering column. I remember our journey together vividly, an incredibly awkward ride with a pervasive silence which made it especially uncomfortable. I recall politely asking him questions about his job. He described being a machinist and I think he told me that he worked somewhere close to the Blue Hills area just south of Boston. Her father was, and still is, a really good man and a dedicated father, generally quiet but someone who made his family a top priority. On the other hand, I was still young and unsure of how I was supposed to act riding along in a car with the father of a girl that I so badly wanted to kiss at every opportunity. Adding to the discomfort in the car, I was convinced the entire trip that he knew exactly what I was thinking, and chances are he probably did. Any opportunity for his daughter and I to be alone on the Cape was met with a loud warning to come downstairs or to find the rest of the crowd and join in with whatever they were doing. The two of us were allowed virtually no moments of privacy, and although I was still too young to really understand what I was feeling, it didn’t make me want her any less.

The house at 38 Monument Road had Cape Cod personality, the comfortable feeling that you might expect from an old New England house, a creaky old stairway leading to the bedrooms upstairs, old books stashed away in several rooms many of which had probably been untouched for generations, a steep back stairway from an upstairs bedroom leading down to the kitchen area, old wallpaper, and several areas that could have used repainting. The shower was close to the kitchen near the back door entry to the house, and although the shower was indoors I remember it having the character of a classic outdoor shower while you were in it. Some days we all went to the beach. Other times, her father would take us out on his boat allowing us to jump off the boat into the deep frigid water quite a distance off of Nauset Beach. Despite the ice cold water, I was discovering something that author George Howe Colt referenced in his book, The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home, about early adolescent attraction. I began to understand the meaning of the word beautiful while watching my girlfriend climb back into the boat after being in the ocean. As George Howe Colt describes it, “Heaven is something with a girl in summer.”

A few years later I was old enough to make the trip down to the Cape myself. During the summer of 1985 I drove my first car, a tiny 1975 Honda CVCC, all the way to Orleans. It seemed like a long way to travel and there was certainly no guarantee that the car I had recently paid $350 for would actually make it that far. There are still certain songs that make me think of driving to Orleans that summer thanks to the car’s FM converter such as Sussudio by Phil Collins, The Power of Love by Huey Lewis and the News, the Dire Straits hit Money for Nothing, and Sting’s Love is the Seventh Wave. There was always music to listen to at the house in Orleans, as well, including several cassettes featuring the band 38 Special in the downstairs living room. My girlfriend had a twin sister who dated a guy two years older than we were. He would often drive down to Orleans in his Renault LeCar, a vehicle that was potentially even more ridiculous than my little Honda. In an act of competitive humor, he once put my multi-colored Honda out in the front yard with a “free” sign on it while we were out. Before he had the Renault, he drove an old Jeep Wagoneer, a vehicle that is now of significant value, but back then was just an old truck on its very last legs. The house in Orleans was crowded during those summers. I was forced to sleep in the same bed with the rest of the guys staying at the house in the bedroom above the kitchen, all of us together in one enormous bed. This included my girlfriend’s older brother, her twin sister’s boyfriend, and her brother’s close friend who was visiting for a few weeks. The sleeping conditions were a bit utilitarian and slightly uncomfortable, but we all knew each other well enough that after several minutes of ridiculous comments, we all managed to somehow get a good night’s sleep.

The family had a red four-door Chevy Malibu which was sometimes used to get the girls to work, originally at a restaurant called Captain Elmer’s and later at the Stop & Shop near the Orleans on-ramp to Route 6. It was a novel concept at that time to be able to rent movies from that Stop & Shop which we did on occasion that summer. My girlfriend once enthusiastically recommended that we see The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai, but then decided that we should rent Children of the Corn instead, a movie that I was actually petrified to watch but was not yet at a maturity level where I could tell her that such a film might force me to cower under a blanket. The two of us sometimes went to see movies at the old Orleans Cinema, now the location of a CVS drugstore. During the summer of 1985 we saw Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and Back to the Future at the old theater in Orleans. Still unable to afford a guitar at the time, I remember being intrigued by the live guitar scenes with Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future, especially when his band auditions to play at the school dance.

I specifically recall one memorable evening at 38 Monument Road, a night that remains etched in my mind although from an activity standpoint it was as uneventful and ordinary as the early morning walks I took while staying in North Falmouth. A group of us were just casually hanging out burning incense out on the front porch one evening and talking. We didn’t need to be anywhere, travel in a car, or compete for space around other people. I liked the idea of the stillness, of the peace and quiet, of being able to appreciate and enjoy exactly where I was in the moment, treasuring something completely serene about her voice, her soft skin, while at the same time falling in love with the approaching Cape Cod night, knowing that anyone would have to be crazy to ever feel the need to leave this place.

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