Cape Cod Love Letter
By B.J. Roche

Why not Paris? I think to myself as the sign: “Cape Cod 40” appears as we're zooming down Route 495 in a crammed car on a summer Saturday morning, the last stretch of a four-hour drive.

Why, I wonder, is our summer compass stuck on southeast? Why don't we ever drive four hours north, say, to Nova Scotia, or west, to the Adirondacks? What about Gettysburg, Niagara Falls, Outer Banks? Why couldn't we live a little, become Revolutionary War re-enactors? Or dude ranch people?

Because we are Cape people.

Every year, for about the past 20, we have returned, for a week at an embarassingly shabby cabin with a galley kitchen, lousy t.v. reception and a deck with the proverbial "distant water view" of Wellfleet Harbor. Like the bobolinks that return each year from South America to their favorite New England hayfield, we keep coming back to this crook of fragile land, where the museums hold, not Monets or Picassos, but pirate booty, whalebones and teacups from old tourist hotels, and the biggest decision of the day is not whether to visit the Louvre or Versailles, but this: bayside or ocean?

It is not lack of imagination--or an aversion to culture-- that brings us back year after year; it is the reduction of all things, for a few days, anyway, to the elements: light, air, water. And, above all, it is the  notion that vacation should not be such hard work. There's a lazy comfort to our routine, the bones of which we lay out on the long ride from pike to bridge: which night to go to Provincetown? Which for the drive-in? What day for the flea market? When we arrive at the Orleans Rotary, I have my Stop and Shop deli order ready, the Cape being the only location on the planet where we actually eat olive loaf.

***

I could tell you where our favorite beach is, but then I'd have to kill you.

We discovered it many years ago, and let's just say it's a bit of a schlep,

tucked away into grassy dunes and a brilliant green salt marsh on Cape Cod Bay. Its isolation and streaks of rockiness makes it a less-traveled, more sedate counterpart to the oceanside beaches. Over the years we've watched its contours change, one dune waxing as another wanes; one year the skeleton of a hardtop road appears in the striation of a dune; the next it is gone.

A few years ago we returned to find the place transformed by the previous winter, which had wreaked havoc on the Cape; its pebbly stretches smoothed over by a luxurious sweep of sand. The life-cycle of a beach: one more thing to ponder as, nearly alone, we swish-swash a half-mile out through knee-deep, diamond-dancing water to bask like seals on a sandbar.

This can still surprise you about the Cape; despite its image as a crowded, touristy place, you can still find a solitary landscape, like Henry Beston did  when he built is "Fo'castle," the little dune shack near what is now Coast Guard Beach  that became the setting for "The Outermost House," his Cape Cod classic. Much of this is thanks to the 44,000-acre Cape Cod National Seashore, a modern-day wonder of the world, and the other preserves that keep the Cape from being paved over.

Several years ago, in a rare outbreak of ambition, I bought a book by Adam Gamble, called “In the Footsteps of Thoreau: 25 Historic and Nature Walks on Cape Cod,” and each year we try a different hike, duly marking notes about each one. Each has taken us into the Cape’s remarkable wild side: Heathcliff and Cathy-type bluffs blanketed with wildflowers, the ruins of old farms, spectacular views of the ocean. One year, we explored Pilgrim Spring, said to be the location where the pilgrims discovered their first fresh drinking water in their new land. Last summer we discovered the village-like streets of Provincetown's West End, and explored the beech forest in the Province Lands, on the Cape's outer tip.

Often enough, though, there is magic even in the crowded places. Okay, maybe not in the traffic jams on Saturday morning, or the beach parking lot. But is there anything more fun than the kooky parade of humanity that makes its way Commercial Street in Provincetown on a warm evening? Is there a finer summer moment than your first day out, when you're standing at the top of the stairs, at, say Marconi or Nauset Light, and catch your first glimpse of the beach below: a sandy grand boulevard with a cast of tiny thousands, dotted with beach umbrellas that look like toy tops?

Above, a clear blue sky, and, beyond, all that water.

***

The Cape makes me want to be a better woman.

Though I vacation in the valley of the fried clam, I shall only consume broiled fish, I vow as we prepare for takeoff over the Sagamore Bridge. Early in my week, I even head to the basement of a church in Wellfleet for a bit of aerobic torture known as the Wellfleet Workout. By Friday, I'm brunching on vodka tonics and dipping my Cape Cod potato chips into smoked bluefish pate from the local fishmarket, and figuring out whether I want mashed potatoes or fries with my lobster pie at Clem and Ursie's.

Aspirations come easy from the seat of a beach chair. When I get home, I muse as I watch the tide come in, I will re-design my garden. Out with the phlox and in with the bushes of silvery blue Russia sage that grow so audaciously next to the lemony day lilies on the traffic islands off Route 6. I will grow blousy blue hydrangeas, even the lacecap variety, that seem to almost grow wild on the Cape, even though they are said not to grow in my temperature zone in northwest Massachusetts.

And I will be well-read. That ten-inch stack of New Yorkers accumulated over the spring will be digested, along with the latest Tom Friedman tome.

Like the diet, such plans are abandoned in short order, and by midweek, I have plowed through Jerry Stahl's juicy memoir of drug addiction, "Permanent Midnight," picked up for a quarter at a church tag sale on Route 6. And I know more about Archer Mayor's Brattleboro than Tom Friedman's Lahore.

There's a poster at the Wellfleet Library announcing a lecture by a very smart man. Oh, too bad, he's speaking next week. The extent of our cultural meanderings is to tune into an evening concert on the radio from Tanglewood while we play Crazy Eights in the living room. From our deck on Wednesday night, we can hear the music and see the contradancers on Wellfleet Pier as we play Scrabble.

Every year we say, "Hey, we should go do that."

Every year, we never do.

***

Last year I spotted a cell-phone user on our beach. Actually, he was not on the beach, he was in the water, cavorting with his golden retriever as he talked. This seems to me akin to those women who continue cellphone conversations in ladies' room stalls: it's just wrong. I want to tell him: no multitasking. Relaxing and searching for doubloons only. Get off my beach and come back when you can follow the rules.

Because, to my mind, that's what vacations are for, and that's why the Cape is the place to do it. If you allow--or make-- yourself drop everything, the Cape, or any other place you return to, year after year, becomes part of you, and its restorative powers can sustain you through the fall, winter and spring, until you return. Sometimes when I can't sleep in the middle of a January night, I take myself back to our beach. My breathing becomes the bay, inhaling, exhaling onto the sand. Soon I'm dozing.

The Cape is our catch-up zone, our reward for having made it through another New England winter. Could we ask for a better time and setting to slow down and reconnect--with kids, partners, parents and friends? A few years ago, we got together for an impromptu picnic on our beach with some old college friends who were moving to California.

It was one of those crystalline afternoons that I imagine only happens in the wide, high light of the Cape: no wind, no greenheads, warm water, tide just right. The dune grass danced a spangly silver, and as the kids scrambled along the paths through the dunes and carved out canals at the water’s edge, we sat in beach chairs psychoanalyzing our bosses and solving the world’s problems.

We stayed on the beach yacking until it was nearly too dark to see. It's a day, years later, that we still talk about. And if the olive loaf sandwiches and the beer hadn't run out, we might all still be sitting there.