Reading: The Cider House Rules, The Bookshop, A Walk in the Woods, Memoirs of a Geisha, Anna Karenina

Moving: swimming and walking

Learning: lots of good stuff

Watching: whales

 

15-24 July 2000: Vacation

Part the second

In the morning I was careful to bid an affectionate farewell to Mollie. Two years ago I had no expectation that I'd never see Shandy again, and now here's Mollie at nearly fifteen. She seems happier without Shandy's mindless roughhousing but she's still old: she used to talk as she greeted you after a long absence. I have no doubt she remembers me, but there was only a lot of stiff tail-wagging and no talking at all. She's a good dog.

And so we were off, after finding good pancakes at a place called Pine Acres just up a piece, not yet in Chaplin, on Route 6. I'll have to tell RRP.

When we came east two years ago in June, the weather acted like the worst sort of August: steamy, sultry, oppressive, still. We were concerned about that, but this time our whole week at home was pleasant, moist but not humid, warm but not hot, breezy. Lovely. In fact it was on the cooler side of warm, or at least so it was on the Cape. It didn't matter, though: there was ocean, and that's all I wanted.

Provincetown has always been special. It's beautiful, liberal, relaxing, home to lovely gardens, and it's surrounded by ocean. It was driving away from Cape Cod after a day at Race Point that our relationship began. It was in Provincetown that we got engaged. I had suggested it as a place to honeymoon but we wound up going to Key West instead--more reliable sun and warmer water. We meant to go one last time before we moved to Denver, in early August (the third anniversary of the first journey), but RDC broke his collarbone instead. I've always wanted to go back with him. So here we were.

I had finished The Cider House Rules on the plane and The Bookshop Sunday night. From the Tattered Cover I had supplied myself with The Archivist, A Walk in the Woods, and Memoirs of a Geisha; from the Co-op I bought Anna Karenina and Don Quijote. The bay lapped at the shore across the road; the ocean surged at our backs (a few miles behind our backs, but still). We had a bed and windows open to the cool salty air.

It was a good week.

We arrove mid-afternoon on Monday and navigated to the West End Inn. I landed too far east on Commercial Street and had to drive on it, which isn't recommended. Actually it wasn't driving; but we could feel the yellow wallpaper lowering as we crept through the throng. (After that we scoped what side street to use to avoid the one-way-edness.) After settling in, RDC suggested town instead of beach, and since it was cool and overcast and I had every intention of spending the next three days on the beach from sunup to sundown, I agreed. Commercial Street is just what it sounds like, although it was originally named for fishing commerce, I think. It's not as gruesome a tourist stretch as it could be, though, because Provincetown is a huge artist colony and a haven for gays and lesbians. So the shops are much more interesting than you'd expect, and Ben & Jerry's is the only franchise in town.

So we strolled, nipping to the bay to say hello on our way into town. The mineral content of the soil means that the ubiquitous hydrangea flower in the most vivid of periwinkle blues, but even with the flowers RDC said he couldn't tell a hydrangea bush without a naked Donna Reed in it. (I notice gardens more than I once did.) We did the usual shoppy kind of stroll, making this one different than earlier expeditions in P-town in that now we looked at housewares.

We found the shop where we bought my ring, Exuma, and the jeweler who made it. Unlike the jewelers we've consulted in Denver, he absolutely could reset my sapphire in platinum. (Jewelers in Denver deny that my simple, elegant setting exists at all, which means it's quite a wonder that I've been wearing for almost six years.) While having my rings reset is absolutely not a priority, I'm glad to know it's possible. Also he showed us a wedding band with a bend so it would nestle snugly with the engagement ring. This was just a slight curve, which I liked; I dislike bands that bend over backward to accommodate a pretentious cascade as if the monetary value of the engagement rock were more important than the intangible value the band represents. Color me hypocritical, though, because I wear my sapphire, not the wedding band, on the inside. The ring is a little too big, but the band is the right size; reversing them means I don't lose either.

Warren, our host at the West End, recommended Café Edwidge, and we aimed there for supper, detouring first to Café Blasé for a drink with an appetizer. This set the tone of the week. We hadn't exactly starved ourselves in Connecticut, but Provincetown is chock-full of good restaurants. After a warm (but not baked and oozy) brie, lobster for him and tuna for me, we still stopped for fudge on the way home. This store makes its own fudge and its own salt-water taffy, which set us both off laughing: salt water taffy in its native habitat. Nowadays we see it more often in Estes Park, the town outside Rocky Moutain National Park, above arid plains, between Roadrunner sandstone formations and 14,000 foot mountains, and a thousand miles from the sea.

---

Tuesday. We stocked up on Warren's continental breakfast, and I added a larger volume of blueberries to my yogurt than there was yogurt to begin with. We got sandwiches and munchies and iced tea from McNulty's Market and tried unsuccessfully to cram everything into the cooler. And then we went to the beach.

I can't think of anywhere else on the East Coast than Race Point where you face the ocean northward. We set up our chairs, slathered the SPF 30, and settled in. I had said a chair on the beach is excess, but I've never had a chair with a footrest before. I haven't changed my mind about shoes, though. Those are always bad. And that's where we spent our day: in our chairs, on the sand, in the water, under the sun, with our books and each other. Perfect. Swimming, reading, sunning. This is why I should be a bajillionaire. I'd be so good at it.

I read A Walk in the Woods, recommended by both Nisou and SEBB. I preferred The Mother Tongue, but I'm just a sucker for etymology and philology. I don't know why this book is listed under travel, since it is more memoir. It's not even memoir, really, but humorous recollection. I liked The Mother Tongue because he didn't apologize for USAn English and pointed out that without the USA English would be about as globally important as Portuguese. Heh. Here he expresses just the right attitude about the Appalachian Trail, too: a combination of hope and dismay, awe and pity.

We dined at the Mews, which is so called because the building once held horses. In which case I would call it the Stables. The blurb about the place's history didn't mention any raptors. I have to find out in what context a mews can house horses. RDC had tuna and I had mushroom ravioli, and on the way home we stopped not for fudge but in a hat store whose name I forget.

The best job I had--of the seven in eight weeks--and the only one that lasted for the whole eight weeks--the summer I lived in Boston was Le Chapeau in Copley Plaza. I love hats. I loved helping people find hats. I loved proving women who believed they didn't look good in hats wrong. Of course, this generally involved matrons finding hats for their daughters' weddings, and looking good in hats requires a minimum of two things: no glasses and hair that recovers. Matrons who have matron perms (which is most of them, since that's a definitive element) mostly wear glasses and their hair smashes too much. So it's not the fault of their faces, their bone structure, but of their not yet indulging in contact lenses and their mistaken hair. Because I'm right, of course.

RDC's favorite (for me--he looked for a new fishing hat for himself) was a straw cloche that Brett Ashley would have worn. It was staggeringly beautiful, palest cream straw with a high crown and sloping brim and a wide green ribbon and flowers. Malheuresement I'm not Brett Ashley--well, I suspect that's actually fortunate--and have no setting in which to wear such a lovely thing. I could have tried all of them on. I wound up liking a plain sage green one with a domed crown and moldable brim. I put it back.

---

Wednesday was quite cool. I wanted to find a pond I swam in with NCS, twelve years ago on my first trip here ever. What I remember was that it was a deal warmer than the ocean, for longer swimming, and that although I had not gelled my hair for several days, there was enough residue in it that I could, Calvin-like, mold my hair into Ed Grimley. (It was 1988: lots of Dep.) I had found two likely lakes in Wellfleet on my map. We just missed Gull Pond Road, but that was okay because we could turn around in the Briar Patch, whose owner makes jams and jellies and chutneys and preserves but has not seen an elderberry for six years. So I was again disappointed in my perpetual quest for elderberry jelly. We bought some jams and chutneys for people, anyway. Gull Pond was, rightfully, only for Wellfleet residents, and somehow our map wasn't in the car and I couldn't remember the other possibility. So we went to Pilgrim Heights and walked through the dunes, came home and read on the harbor beach, protected from the wind but not yet so warm we wanted to swim, until it was time for a sunch (a late lunch or early supper) at Bubala's of more, braised tuna and french fries and the whale watch.

Vulture and calf

Whalewatches bring me to tears every time. I think even off Orcas Island, when we saw mostly seals and but nary an orca, I at least leaked a bit. Maybe it was the bald eagle or the several other sorts of dolphins we saw. I experienced my first in 1989, from Plymouth, with my mother, and it is one of the best memories we share. We might not have much in common or any way to express what we don't, but we do have whales, and I remember our spontaneous hugs and rare displays of trust as vividly as I remember the whale who swam upside down under the boat and looked at us with one eye, as vividly as I remember the cow and calf just a few feet down in crystal green water. That day we saw eleven named humpbacks and one finback. In 1991, we went again and I brought PLT, and I daresay the whales' majesty and antics overcame even his supreme cynicism. In 1994, DMB had come north and we went to Provincetown and on a less successful but still fantastic whale watch. Since then we've lived in the desert, so this was the first best whale watch I've been on in nine years.

apostrophe

We saw finbacks on the way out and minkes on the way in, but mostly, we saw humpbacks. We saw Vulture with her as-yet unnamed calf, and Apostrophe, and Spoon. We saw another cow and a calf who never showed their tail flukes and so went unnamed. We saw tail breaches and blowing from too far away to identify--an ethical whale boat never approaches less than 300 feet (or yards, I forget). (The 1989 curious whale approached us.) We saw someone beating the surface with a fin, a behavior not yet understood by us landlubbers. And we were all gleeful and joyous.

Spoon and friend

Aha, that's another thing. I firmly believe that if there were more skipping, there would be less war. If these political summits were held on whale-watching boats--and people skipped on deck--they'd be a lot more successful.

The sky had been clearing all afternoon and we had a wonderful sunset coming home. The Center for Coastal Studies naturalist actually lapsed his narration as we came back into harbor, because the sunset behind the Pilgrim Tower left him speechless. I just searched for the Pilgrim Tower and this page was the first to come up. (On this trip, no whale came that close.) Of course Provincetown is a queer resort but I giggled at the unlikeliness of a Denver site mentioning Cape Cod. With the feedback I got before I left, I thought Cape Cod isn't much of a destination for Denver, but I guess I only spoke to straight folks. Here are good shots of the tower's interior and view. (We climbed it once, back in the day. The day of knees. Now we are in the night of knees.)

We found better fudge at a store that didn't waste its time with taffy, and from the usual stand on MacMillan Pier, a hot dog for RDC and the worst grilled-cheese sandwich in the history of the world for me. RDC thought he might die without half-and-half, and when we stopped at the Cheese Market (which had no cheese!) for that, I also bought a tub of pesto tortellini. I was ravenous, this time using the good sea air as an excuse. At home I use the healthy mountain air (when it's not over the limit for ozone, as it is currently) for an excuse. Whatever, as long as I can eat.

---

Thursday we returned to Race Point. I swam. I finished Memoirs of a Geisha and started Anna Karenina. I swam. I let my kite out and, tethered to my chair, it danced all day in the wind.

My kite (left) and its friend

In the late afternoon, properly burned, we strolled through Provice Lands, where we picked at least half a dozen maps off the trail. Why do people litter?

in the beech wood

sailboat off Province Lands

Waiting on the deck at the Lobster Pot for our table, I gazed out over the harbor as RDC got us drinks. The naturalist had spoken of how the economy and ecology of Provincetown have changed together, and how 75 years ago there were 60 (?) commercial wharves in the harbor and now there are two. The Lobster Pot is just east of MacMillan Pier, and just east of the restaurant, pilings rotted in the sand. It was low tide, and their tops poked out of the tidal flats. I have a tradition of seeing animals in pilings; my mother first realized I needed glasses when I mistook the pilings of a decrepit dock for a flock of ducks. When RDC came out with my lemonade, I nodded at the pilings. "At first glance I thought that one at the water's edge was a marmot."
He gave me that look he gives me when he wants to one-up me. "You can't bring a marmot to sea level. It'd explode." I gestured otherwise and he corrected himself. "It'd implode. Turn into a chipmunk."
"Too small," I contradicted. "Maybe a woodchuck."
"Too big," he countered. "Remember the fatties at UConn?"
"Well, anyway," I continued, "I bet a marmot would make a good pirate."
"They're hoary already."
"And can't you just picture one in an eyepatch"--here I squinted--"saying 'Argh, shiver me timbers'?"
He could.

Then it was time to eat. For the (I think) second time in my life, I received an entire dead animal on a plate.

That's how SEB described it. UConn had a twice-annual "special dinner" in which instead of unlimited swill, you received a ticket at the door and were permitted one entrée. In the fall, this was either surf--a barely legal lobster--or turf--steak gray as the most common hamburger. SEB had never had lobster and decided to try it, but when they handed her, as she said, an entire dead animal on a plate, she turned it back. (Less than a year later, she would be a vegetarian.)

Anyway, the first time I received an entire dead animal on a plate was at RDC's aunt's house. (I must have had lobster before the age of 26, but I guess only the peeled variety.) That was the first time I had to get through the shell, and they don't come with tin-openers. Now that's a bit of genetic engineering that would make sense: lobsters with zippers.

I looked at my dead animal. I couldn't be exactly Truitt because here was not an oyster but a lobster. They're both arthropods, thought, so I thought singing still might be appropriate. While a lullaby might have been better, I couldn't escape the '70s that this town is stuck in, music-wise. I crooned, "Precious and few are the moments we two can share," as I dismembered it. I was going to remove its eyes so it would stop looking at me but instead I just pointed it at the rest of the room so it could see the slaughter of its kinfolk.

And it's not that I wasn't glad of the cup of drawn butter. It's that I don't understand why something that's supposed to be a delicacy is commonly dipped in butter. Conveniently, the lobster came with a boiled red potato, a better butter delivery device, which I sliced and soaked and also devoured. After the legs and the claws and the two little morsels on the sternum, or where would be a sternum if a lobster had bones, it was for the tail. "Time to operate!" I exclaimed. "It takes a very steady hand!"

So that was good. And the Mad Hatter was still open, so I bought my hat. And that was good. And then we went home. And that was good.

---

I woke as usual at 6:30, because I know what a vacation is. I had wanted to take my camera into town Thursday evening but I forgot it, so I left RDC asleep and scampered into the fresh sunlight. I love the weathered, salty shingles and white trim on the New England shore. I love the gardens in Provincetown. So I walked into the center of town and as far as the Mews, looking for buildings.

on the west end of Commercial Street

I like how this house's shutters coordinate with its garden. No, I haven't mastered the panoramic shot yet, although my camera comes with directions for taking one.

The activity on Commercial Street in the early morning--early by local standards, since in Provincetown the breakfast places don't open until 7:30--is the stuff that can't happen at any other daylit time: deliveries. Also joggers. And the old people who're up at 4:30 and think the rest of us are lollygaggers. And window-washers. In front of Planet Rainbow a woman looked over her squeegee at me and demanded, "Why are you smiling?"

Hostile bitch, I thought as I considered the truth versus the response I wanted to give. Because it's another staggeringly beauitful day under blue skies, green trees, yellow sun, in a town with wonderful gardens and early morning sunlight glittering off the bay, and here I am walking through it in a long dress flapping around my ankles. Stupid fucking question, and I wasn't going to tell her any of that, if she was so unjoyful she didn't know anyway. So what I said a beat later, calmly because it was true, if not the whole truth was, "Because I don't have to wash windows at seven o'clock in the morning."

"Fair enough," she replied as I passed her.

on the east end of Commercial Street

Twenty minutes later, on my way back, she stood across the road washing another window. She sought my eye. "Hey, you stole my heart this morning---" I raised my eyebrows: yeah right. Apparently this expression doesn't convey the dubious disdain I intend it to: she continued, "What are you doing tonight?" Hostile, direct, demanding, this woman had it all. See, it's a good thing I didn't go out some other early morning, because I'm not good at lying off the top of my head. But perhaps she had thought my stated reason masked another, more friendly reason to smile at her before.
"Sorry, I'm going home today."
"Next time, then. I'll be here."
"Washing the same windows?"
"All over town." If she understood that last implied insult, she didn't let on.

And so we left. We stopped at Head of the Meadows for a last scuffle in the ocean, but we didn't stop long--we wanted to be back on the mainland before traffic and I wanted time at my lake. Head of the Meadows might have been a better beach to try that week--it had a sandbar a hundred feet out for body-surfing and such shallow water between the shore and the bar that the water might have been warmer.

Before the lake, we needed food. From Hallmark, the aprés beach snack spot of champions, RDC got fried clams and french fries, and I got a mocha chip cone and french fries. I wish I'd stocked up on Lactaid: with more lactase I could've had a shake, and a mocha shake and fries from Hallmark is one of the perfect meals in the universe.

Finally, my lake. Writing about it makes me more homesick than anything else, makes me question why I live here and not there, makes me forget that I couldn't afford to live there and eat too. But I can always visit, and it'll never change: it's in a state forest, and it drains only its own forested hills.

This was the first time in years I've worn eyegear in the lake. When I was a child, I had a play mask and snorkel; this time I wore goggles so I could steer. I have been citified, though: municipal pool water gets murky on its own, but seeing the golden light filter through what few feet of aquamarine water I could myopically squint through nearly squicked me. I gave myself a stern talking to and felt better, but I also didn't open my eyes underwater anymore.

I had waited to make my long swim until whoever was at the east end left, but they kept not leaving. I'm glad they didn't: I loved their dog. I never asked the man or his son their names (nor they mine), but their Lab-n-setter's name was Mack. That dog never took his eyes off the five-year-old boy, either. A really good dog, like the nurse in Peter Pan. Big ears. The boy was sweet, too; he wanted to show me how he could swim and he'd move around with only one foot on the bottom, like Roger Walker in Swallows and Amazons.

We had two peaceful hours at the lake until a clan of smoking inbreds showed up, at which point we decided we were cold and due in Orange anyway. We'd been waiting for rush hour through New Haven to ease, but now the bulk of traffic is eastbound out of Stamford, and west leaving New Haven was nothing. We ate at a place RDC's aunt recommended where everyone looked familiar to RDC in the way that everyone around Old Lyme looks vaguely familiar to me. I'm not sure if this effect is psychological or actual, but in RDC's case it's likely he was several people's third cousin.

 

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