A man becomes a sea monkey without knowing. The boom goes port to starboard and back again and you learn to toss your head easy as you please, like a woman in a breeze. There’s no deciding in it any more.
The tell-tales whisper to me. The others think I’m daft to say I can hear them. But I’ve got the tiller and the bank account and there’s precious little tittering. They have last night’s booze roaring in their ears and don’t listen anyway. The ocean is their whorehouse. It’s my chapel. I hear the very beads slip through the calloused fingers as the Pater Nosters are murmured.
The tell-tales pat the sails like my father used to pat the flank of his horse. I never understood his love for that brute. Father would send me out to hitch it to the cart and snicker each time knowing if I took my eyes off that bag of leather and bones for a moment I’d get bit. He’d come by and pat-pat and I swear that beast would have rolled over and let the old man scratch his belly. They were both hitched to a sort of cart, so maybe they commiserated somehow. There is love in this world that knows no understanding.
Father would say one thing and mean another. He was downright oriental in this fashion. You had to fathom what he was driving at all the time. He said that if you went on the ocean in a boat you did not love, the ocean would know it, and you would be consumed. He said that all things in this life are that way.
It occurs to me now that father hated that horse the whole time.
Sometimes I think I’m feeling my way along the bottom. The others are pukers sometimes, but I think I can feel my mind’s fingers trail along the rock snot on the bottom all the time and the rollers don’t bother me. They’re all afraid of that bottom, oh yes. But it’s where we must go for the oysters. And it’s where we must go when the tell-tales don’t whisper soon enough.
My good friend Steve Devlin is the most productive person I’ve ever met, and I’ve met a lot of productive people. I’m sure when he passes away, he’ll still help them screw down the lid, and show them how to soap the screws to make driving them easier.
He builds houses on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts. He helped me to build my house, and we’ve worked together many times. He’s made his Central Cape Construction into that rarest of things: a success that deserves its success. Look out for flying wood! he says, and means it. To paraphrase, Steve is halfway round the foundation while the competition is still lacing its shoes.
We used to play in a band together, back in the day. It was the same way. If it needed doing, Steve was doing it while you decided, and laughing the whole time. Every once in a while he calls me and I hear the Blues Brothers yell in the receiver: I’m getting the band back together, man.
We were atrocious back then, but sublime. I can’t describe it any better than that. In entertainment, you simply have to give the audience a compelling reason to look at you. We always did that, one way or the other. There’s lots of ways to accomplish that. I suppose you could try learning to play your instruments properly, but that sounds hard. Steve used to say we were the band you had to see twice. The first time to have the most fun you ever had, and the second time to figure out we stunk.
Steve has done another thing which is rare and wonderful. He started a real, live tradition. Someone has to be the guy that says: You know, I think we should have a parade on Saint Patrick’s Day. People might come. Steve is that man.
Only with him, it’s hockey, and the The Lobster Pot Tournament. Steve was a good hockey player. He taught his sons in their turn to play, and helped the area he lives in to teach their kids, too. Like a true good citizen, he didn’t lose interest just because his kids were too old for it after a while. He kept going.
I remember when he first tried to put together the tournament. He beat the bushes and worked like a slave and paid all sorts of money out of his own pocket that no one knew about because he thought it mattered. Then that rarest of things I mentioned happened. Everyone else embraced it, too, and it’s become a tradition.
“I took my sons to a college hockey game, and they really liked the whole atmosphere,” said tournament director Steve Devlin. “And on the way home they remarked how great it would be to play in a game like that. So when we started this tournament, we wanted to bring that kind of fun to our games. We want this to be a fun tournament for the kids and for the fans.”
The action started last night and runs through Sunday afternoon with the teams combining for a total of 64 games.
Teams will be competing in four divisions: Crawfish (Mini Mites), 1 1/4 Pounders (Mite C), 2-Pound Broiled (Mite B) and 3-Pound Baked Stuffed (Mite A). Of the five BYHA teams in the tournament, four will be competing in the 2-Pound Broiled division with the fifth squad in line to contend for the 3-Pound Baked Stuffed crown. (The Enterprise)
So Steve got us all out of bed on Sunday morning at hockey mom hours, year after year, and we stand on the mezzanine freezing to death and watching the kids bob like buoys across the ice. Steve’s son, who we told you about here before, is playing music with us in the pick-up band instead of hockey now. That’s him over on the far left, along with my friend Chopper and another fellow from the band Cape Fear. They’re the ones that sound like they practice.
I’m getting old, I guess. I’ll still show up, though, if Steve tells me to. When the sun comes up, the birds sing, though they don’t know why.
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
If you like the taste of a lobster stew
Served by a window with an ocean view
You’re sure to fall in love with old Cape Cod
Winding roads that seem to beckon you
Miles of green beneath a sky of blue
Church bells chimin’ on a Sunday morn
Remind you of the town where you were born
If you spend an evening you’ll want to stay
Watching the moonlight on Cape Cod Bay
You’re sure to fall in love with old Cape Cod
If you spend an evening you’ll want to stay
Watching the moonlight on Cape Cod Bay
You’re sure to fall in love
With old Cape Cod
Who wants more pictures of the Sandwich Heritage Museum? I don’t care, I have them and I’m going to post them anyway.
The place has lots of interest in what they term “Colonial Gardening.” That’s a sketchy term, sort of like a “Colonial Bathroom” motif. Real colonists grew stuff and ate it for the most part. It was the Victorians that went crazy for cultivars to gape at. There are no parterres at SHM, and nothing is grown to eat, but the plantings are in keeping with the structures for most part. The gatehouse/gift shop has what used to be a ubiquitous New England house: weathered shingles, bow roof, heavy frames at openings, divided windows with real muntins and panes of glass, vertical board sheathed addition, garden bench, attic room hot as hell.
The best part of good landscaping is moving in and out of shadow and light, and looking from one into another. Dappled sunlight is good for the soul.
That’s a windmill that was dragged from way out on Cape Cod to be displayed here. It was padlocked, but we’ve been inside before. It’s amazing how little of anything inside is made from any sort of metal. All the gears and wheels are made from white oak. Hard as Calculus, but more useful over time.
Here’s the front. I painted the sky that color to make it more interesting for you, the viewer. Of course the sky is never that beautiful in actual nature.
A carousel is an entirely underrated piece of amusement. Even the old folks can sit on the benches in the chariots and go round and round if they’re too big for the horses.
I know the lion roaring is supposed to come first. Sorry. There’s a collection of venerable animals from carousels on display. They’re much more whimsical and interesting than the horse we’re all used to. There was the rabbit at the top of the page, this lion, a frog, a zebra, an ostrich, a pig, a stag, and a few others. Of course, I inspected their glass eyes most carefully to see if they were up to my old, exacting glass eye standards.
Sandwich, Massachusetts, of course. Founded in 1639. When I was a lad, much was made of the Bicentennial of the Founding of our Great Country. Jimmy Carter was President, as I recall, and was busy telling us to put on a sweater and drive real slow, so I remember it as the sort of interlude you have when a cranky, loony, old aunt comes to visit. It’s interesting to consider that Sandwich was hanging around Cape Cod for 137 years before those 200 years rolled by, which is 32 years ago on top of that. Sandwich is old.
The Sandwich Heritage Museum is like a loopy rich person’s stamp collection writ large. A series of loopy rich people, actually, as one lieutenant of industry bought another sargeant of industry’s weirdo assortments of whatever caught their eye, and put labels under it. I actually liked the disordered theme of the place, made very orderly; it’s the essence of collecting things.
The original loon was a blanket manufacturer who commuted to New Bedford and grew exotic rhododendrons. When you stand in the Orange Place and see row after row of fist-sized rhodies and azaleas for $5.99 each, it’s easy to forget that they were exotic and asian in the not too distant past.
At any rate, that guy died, and another crank that collected old guns and weird cars and assorted other curiosities bought it. Carpetbagger from Indiana.
That reminds me of a story. People from Cape Cod, and especially the two big islands offshore, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, used to be very insular. There were very few names — a dead giveaway. Snow. Crowell. Starbuck. Dexter. Higgins. Anyway, it got to be a running joke about how long you had to live amongst the locals before they would accept you:
A woman was born on a ship moored in the harbor in Nantucket. It was a beastly crossing from Old Blighty, and the doctor didn’t want to risk the poor mother delivering in the little launch with the oarsmen watching.
The baby — a winsome girl– was brought ashore upon her birth,and until the day she died, she never once set foot on a patch of dirt that wasn’t Nantucket. She became a kind of fixture around the island, raising a big family, starting charities for the less fortunate — in short she exhibited every manner of civic virtue you could name. She was prominent; so prominent that the whole town turned out for her funeral when she died, rich in years and accomplishments.
The old vicar mounted the pulpit. He paused for a long moment, removed his pince-nez, and polished them a little with his handkerchief. It was a method he used to gain absolute silence before he spoke. The crowd, already quiet, assumed a stony silence. Every eye was riveted on the preacher. He began:
“She wasn’t from around here…
Tag: cape cod
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
Recent Comments