A Cape Cod Notebook

As we drove off, disappointed, I said I don't want to JUST be on Cape Cod. I want to feel like I'm here, really here, sand between my toes, waves crashing, gulls calling out for a meal.

We are running out of space at the Nantucket landfill. I spent the winter driving by dumpsters, unable to stop myself from looking over the edge.

Despite what might be in your head, the 25-mile path from Yarmouth to Wellfleet is not just a bike trail. There are runners and skateboarders and walkers, many of us with dogs.

The most important teacher I ever had was not some Harvard professor, or one of many newspaper editors who carved up my prose. It wasn't even a person, a whole person anyway. It was an appendage.

What really impresses me at this time of year, at any time of year, actually, are the lichens. These otherworldly beings, growing on tree bark and branches, spreading on the ground or on rocks or gravestones, seem to thrive in any weather.

The other day I took some old friends up to Great Point. The weather wasn't particularly good — Nantucket in March, we kept grumbling. I don't think they'd mind me saying old friends, as it's true. Both are older than me by a mile, and they don't get around as easily as they once did.

Those of you who travel the north side of Cape Cod know that Route 6A has been closed in Dennis for several months, and a detour sends drivers either north through Sesuit Neck or south to Scargo Hill Road.

The European green crab has quite the reputation. They're smart ... in a dangerous way. They're voracious, predatory and they eat their young!

My father stands in the doorway of Henry David Thoreau's cabin on Walden Pond. Of course, there is no cabin anymore, instead the cabin's footprint is marked with narrow granite stones, giving the whole place an unintended funerary feeling.

My dog America, a full-on poodle, loves to stare into pines and oaks that quill out of a hillside down to the marsh. She'll do this sitting on a comfy bed by a window, standing outside on a deck, or curled atop pine needles.

We've all had one of those neighbors. You know what I mean. The ones that keep offbeat hours. Or they just wander onto your property without asking. Or they disturb your household with their comings and goings.

Nelson Sigelman writes about a friend who is an island fisherman with a mysterious past.

After years of watching people leave Nantucket during the winter, I decided I wanted to be one of them. Not for the whole winter, just for a week

When Walter Baron built his workshop on a side road in Wellfleet 40-odd years ago, he knew what he wanted to do: Build boats.

January is the time of year on Cape Cod when we really start to doubt some of our life choices. A couple of different decisions and I would be living in a place where the temperature rarely falls below 50 degrees, and there's no such thing as ice.

I spent many years as an objective observer of this place. An academic, a historian, a researcher. On my better days, an anthropologist or some kind of gonzo documentarian, snapping pictures and recording my observations on the yellow legal pads I took everywhere, even the beach. N

He already was becoming the most exemplary former President maybe in history, picking up hammers to help build Habitat for Humanity homes, donning a suit and traveling the world to encourage free and fair elections.

Bob McKeon, a 78-year-old retired state trooper, splits his time, as many do, between his primary residence -- his is in North Attleboro -- and his place on the Cape in South Dennis. A favorite activity is going out to dinner, and when he started posting restaurant reviews on a popular Facebook page years ago, he gained more and more friends -- many of them touched by his endearing references to his singular dining companion: The Bride.

What is it that pulls so many of us to a Christmas Eve service, even if we are nonbelievers or haven't stepped foot in a church since our cousin's wedding in 2019?

With all the ongoing controversy about whether a machine gun range should be built on the Upper Cape, it seems fitting to go back in time and revisit some history that in retrospect seems all but impossible, but true:Cape Cod once was home to an arsenal of nuclear weapons, 56 bombs located about 600 feet from a residential subdivision, in what was then called Otis, now Joint Base Cape Cod.

I am a genuine birder but a somewhat old and lazy one, with limited ability and ancient binoculars. I have some idea what is out there- soaring, skulking, or flitting about- but it is woefully incomplete compared to the information possessed by the array of gifted and obsessed observers that roam the Cape on a regular basis with powerful optics and awesome cameras.

Cummiquid writer Susan Moeller takes a rabbit hole trip to an earlier Cape Cod.

The dark comes early. At first, I fought it. Disoriented, dazed. And doesn't it feel like midnight, the moon pooling on the ocean, spilt milk reaching for the shore? At least the clock in the stove, the one I cannot figure out how to reset, is right again.

Great Island in Wellfleet is a beautiful pearl on the Cape Cod National Seashore's necklace, the most dramatic of a handful of islands strung along Cape Cod Bay, linked by sandy strands.

They appeared suddenly one night on our patio, four young raccoons, a quartet of rumble-tumble trouble. They pressed their little bandit faces against our glass sliders, scratching to get inside our tiny cottage.

It started with the lupine.Last spring, I started taking the hound to Thompson's Field, a 57-acre conservation area off Route 137 in East Harwich managed by the Harwich Conservation Trust.

I've always thought Nantucket was rather flat — elevation-wise, that is. Our highest point is the Madaket Landfill, and after that is Altar Rock in the moors.

We all mark seasons in different ways, often using holidays like Labor Day past, Thanksgiving upcoming. For me, the circle always wheels around the constellation Orion.

I was leading a tour out in 'Sconset the Thursday before Labor Day when a local eyed us warily and said, “Summer's over, it's time for you people to leave.” Ouch! Now Labor Day has come and gone, the curtain falling on summer.

My chum, who these days walks the Outer Beach more often than I do, commented that “high tides are reaching further up the beach than they used to.”

The hound has gifted me a new image of hope. And it looks like an otter.

Where do you seek the soul of Cape Cod? The pounding surf on the Outer Cape? The stalwart beacon of Coast Guard Light? The broad stretch of the Great Marsh?

It's August on Nantucket, and to find a place where you will be alone and undisturbed, you need one of two things. You either need a four-wheel drive or a boat. The other Saturday, thanks to a good friend and some borrowed kayaks, we set off from Barrett's Pier and headed for the Madaket Ditch.

Among Cape Cod's remarkable attributes is a way of surfacing when and where you least expect it – associations, affiliations, allusions, connections, a single degree of separation among strangers.

We all mark time in different ways. For me, it's the dry cleaner.I have been dropping off clothes to the same dry cleaner in Hyannis since a week or so after I moved here fulltime in 1974 – that's 50 years ago.

People say half-facetiously that we should accept reality and change the name of this sandspit to Cape Dog.

The air is so thick, there's little difference between walking and swimming these days. High summer fog brings a certain relief to the island.

I come today to sing the praises of the simple sweatshirt.

This is embarrassing, but maybe making a public admission could save me hundreds of hours of expensive psycho-therapy:I have a thing going on — with a tree.

Lady Slippers are in a class of their own, so strangely shaped, with their pink pouched petals.

Birdsong, five in the morning. A sign that my neighborhood — a relatively new affordable housing subdivision — has matured. My neighbors' trees provide plenty of places for songbirds to perch.

About six o'clock one evening, as we were about to sit down to dinner, there came from the other end of the house a loud thunk, as though something had hit a window. I stepped outside to see what the noise was.

During the third week of May, when the oak leaves are still just pink flickers in the forest canopy, and the pitch pines had not yet begun painting the landscape with their dry yellow swaths of pollen, then the lowly huckleberry spreads its emerald scarves far and wide throughout the forest floor.

A white postcard showed up in the mail the other day. I had been summoned to Barnstable Superior Court – for jury duty.My immediate response? Great! Hope I can do it!

The other morning, I woke up early after a sleepless night. Luckily, we have reached the moment in the year where the days stretch on, if not quite forever, then pretty close to it.

Over the past few weeks our local snowbirds have been returning from their annual winter sojourns in the south.

Seen from space, it seems so obvious that Cape Cod is one.But we know better.