Allan Neal

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 8] 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 10] 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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”. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”