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On
the beach at Wellfleet.
4:00
PM. Photo: JH.
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If
you’re fond of sand dunes and salty air;
Quaint little villages here and there,
You’re sure to fall in love
With old Cape Cod. |
Lyrics to a popular song in the 1950s
Sung by Patti Page
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It rained yesterday morning on Old Cape Cod. Poured,
cats and dogs. The leftover from Hurricane Gaston, so saieth the Weather Channel.
All of which was good,
because the day before it was very hawt as the Bostonians would say on old Cape
Cawd. Hawt-hawt-hawt so that you were hoping it would rain and cool things off.
Which it did.
Once upon a time it would have killed me if I were at the beach and it rained.
But now when I’m at the beach and it’s all sunshine, I’m liable
to be afraid it might really kill me, even with massive sunscreen. The times,
how they change.
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A
late afternoon stop at the beach at Nauset
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So,
raindrops kept fallin’ on our heads, we made
a lunch date to meet friends in Chatham at a place called the Impudent
Oyster. We made the date for 12:30,
and figured it would take us a half-hour to get there. Why a half-hour? Why not?
I used to come to the Cape when I was a kid and then again when I was in college
for those houseparty weekends. Once you crossed the Bourne Bridge and the Cape
Cod Canal, as I recalled, you were pretty much there, give or take a half hour.
However, two things happened that mucked up our schedule. First, I’m reading Peter Evans Nemesis which
I’ll tell you about
in a day or
two. Some people would call it juicy or shocking. I’ll just say: I can’t
stop reading it. It’s about Onassis, which means it’s
about Jackie and Maria and Jack
and Bobby and Marilyn and money and
sex and murder and money
and sex and such. Kitty Kelley’s coming out with her expose
on the Bushfamily in a couple of weeks and all I can think is
that she’ll have to
go some length to beat this one for sheer shock.
As I was saying: reading the book, I forgot the time. My
lunchdates were already at the restaurant when we got in the car to make the
trip to Chatham. Which I
figured was a half hour away. We were coming from Falmouth this time. And the
route we took, Route 28 on the map, looked like the simplest most efficient route.
Which it might have been if it were a highway or a freeway. It started out like
that – a highway or freeway – although it soon became a two-lane
blacktop
except ... when it came to strips of shopping malls, or quaint little villages
here and there, followed by more shopping malls and more quaint little shopping
malls and more stop lights and more cars than you’d see on the FDR on an
ordinary Monday morning. It became like midtown traffic on a normal weekday in
New York, viz., Stress City.
All this originally planned out as an escape from the presumed overly frantic
Manhattan during the Republican Convention. I kept thinking of the picture of
Seventh Avenue on Monday afternoon on yesterday’s Diary.
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Caught
in the rain at Chatham
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A
little more than two hours later we arrived in Chatham. Our
lunchdates had secured the table, waited, finally ordered
some chowder, waited, finally ordered a main course, finished
it and finally left. When I called, finally able to get through
on the cell (not easy on lots of stretches of the Cape),
I got a very stoney acceptance of apology. Which sounds about
right after waiting more than
two hours for someone who doesn’t even show up.
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DPC
and Charlie Scheips on the beach at Wellfleet
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It’s hard
to find a place to park in Chatham on the Tuesday before Labor
Day when it’s raining. The place was mobbed, quaint little
village that it sorta still is (with heavy overtones of shopping
mall having advanced upon
it). The Impudent Oyster is no Swifty’s or Michael’s or Pastis or
Cipriani’s or Le Cirque and certainly no Le Bernardin. But hit the spot
it did for these starving stragglers.
From there we drove on to Wellfleet (by that time the rain had stopped) where
our friend Charlie Scheips gave us a tour of the beach on the
bay where he and
his partner Tom Graf have a cottage buried in the Japanese pines.
Beautiful; heavenly. Then we drove back down to Orleans where we stopped in to
see an old
friend whom I hadn’t seen in twenty years. By that time it was quarter
to eight and getting dark. On the recommendation of my old friend, we got on
Route 6 and were back home in forty-five minutes. By that time we also found
ourselves thinking about New York and the aforementioned picture of the practically
deserted Seventh Avenue on Monday afternoon. Thinking of how great it would be
to be back there on a quiet afternoon, like this afternoon, for example. |
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