Dear Tobey

Amos

Dear Tobey,

Sorry I was Off Cape when you visited Provincetown last week.  Had I known you’d be accompanying your person, I’d have stuck around and given you a tour of the fire hydrants.  Next time.

First things first: I like your snazzy red collar, but I’m not sure how I feel about the governor not wearing one, too.  The white T/blue striped polo combo confused me.  My person says we should spiff up for important events. She makes her male people put on neckties, which they don’t much like, but I tell ‘em, hey, try wearing a pinch collar.  Didn’t Governor Patrick think coming to P’town was important?  Or was he just thinking something like: Casual Friday Lobster Roll Salt Water Taffy Penuche Vanilla Chocolate Softserve Swirl?

I mean, Governor Patrick sounded pretty serious about problems on the Outer Cape when my person and I watched the YouTube video of him answering a bunch of questions from serious people with what seemed like serious concerns.  He used words like “marvelous” and “charming” when he was talking about home rule, but maybe he was really just thinking something like: Striper Season Started Two Weeks Ago!

I’m really glad the governor wanted to talk about the “creative economy,” but I was wondering if what he really meant was “create an economy.”  You know, the kind of economy that brings in kibble in January, not just July?  The kind of economy that doesn’t need seasonal workers and supports dogs and their people year-round?  The kind of economy where the phones and computers work all the time?  The kind of economy that makes people sit’n’stay’n’wear neckties?

Well, pup, send me a peemail next time you’ll be out.  I’ll meet you at Twisted Sister for a vanilla cone, and then we can head to the Bark Park.

Wags –

Amos

Baleen v. Antlers?

Town Square, Jackson Hole, Wyoming

A silver lining on a quick trip this week to Jackson Hole, Wyoming: the rental car agency I’d booked with went belly up, giving me a chance to question locals as I rode public transport. My chats with a shuttle bus driver, two taxi drivers, the manager of a motel, a homeless man, and a seasonal worker from Jamaica shed light on a vacation paradise similar in striking ways to the Outer Cape except in one way: it’s doing pretty well in the recession.  Here’s a bit of what I learned:

There is no industry except for tourism.  People come from all over the world to visit Grand Teton National Forest and nearby Yellowstone.  Single greatest reason people move to the area? “Scenery.”  The town of Jackson has a year-round population of about 10,000.  Jackson’s the seat of Teton County (4,008 square miles), whose year-round population is about 20,000.  Those numbers swell by about 52,000 in the summer, as tourists and second-home-owners journey to Wyoming and Montana.  The numbers rise in the winter when about 5,000 venture to the area to ski.  Those who stay year-round take care of the tourists and the ballooning second-home market.

Most of the land is publicly owned. Ninety-seven percent of the land in Teton County is publicly owned.  Conservationists have carefully guarded the other three per cent, blocking massive development.

Housing costs are of the highest in the nation. Estimated median house or condo values in and around Jackson in July hovered around $600,000.  There is no affordable housing.  Year-rounders said rentals start at $1,200 per month, not including utilities.  Minimum wage seasonal workers rely on employers to provide subsidized housing.

There’s a shortage of seasonal workers. Employers use agencies on the internet to recruit summer help.  These agencies vet applicants and handle visas. The workers come from all over the world, although this year, many are from Ukraine.

Unemployment rates have dropped this summer. May = 6.4%.  Jun = 4.8%.  Why?  Seasonal workers.  Last summer, the unemployment rate hovered at around 1.9%.

Why aren’t things as bad in Jackson as they are on the Outer Cape?

There’s a winter tourist season.  Ski Truro?

There are several large national parks with picturesque wildlife in the area.  Grand Teton, alone, draws between 3 and 4 million animal-happy visitors a year.  Import elk and bears to the Cape?

No personal or state income tax in Wyoming.  Right.

The largest slice of Jackson’s small, rural population falls between the ages of 30 and 44, and it is growing.  They have kids.  ‘Nuff said.

Getting Here

A friend visited last week from Martha’s Vineyard.  She has grown children and grandchildren in Texas and New York.  Her New Yorkers tell her it’s easier for them to fly to Europe than to get to her on the Vineyard.  The new ferry traversing Long Island Sound provoked seasickness and isn’t for them.  Transportation.  It’s an issue now for people on the Cape and Islands.  And it was an issue way back when the Pilgrims settled in Plymouth.  I’m thinking about transportation this week and have some fun facts to share:

White settlers talked about constructing a canal between the “mainland” and the Cape from first landfall in the 1620s.  Surveyors investigated the possibility of cutting a canal during the War of Independence.  Nineteenth-century financier August Belmont created the Cape Cod Canal Company to carry out the project.  Workers, mostly Nova Scotians from Off Cape, finished the job in 1914.  The federal government bought the canal in 1928, hired WPA workers to dig a deeper, safer waterway, and put them to work building  new bridges (Bourne and Sagamore in 1935) during the Great Depression.  The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers maintains the canal today.

Early visitors to the Cape came overland by foot and by horse.  By the mid-nineteenth century, they also came on trains.  In 1854, tourists rode the Cape Cod Railroad as far as Yarmouthport and Hyannis.  They could get as far as Orleans by 1865, to Wellfleet by 1872, and then all the way to Provincetown in 1873.  Trains then went south along Buzzard’s Bay to Falmouth and from Dennis through Harwich and Chatham in 1887.  Tourist destinations clustered around these rail depots.  Wealthy summer residents came by train to stay in exclusive hotels, which offered elaborate meals and entertainment.

Everything changed in the 1920s with the advent of the car.  The Commonwealth started paving roads in the 1890s to accommodate bicyclists.  That’s when workers laid asphalt for the Old King’s Highway (running between Bourne and P’town) and what is now Rte. 28.  Routes 6 and 6A came into being in the first decade of the twentieth century. Once middle-class visitors could drive and venture off the beaten path, they rented cottages or built small houses away from the main Mid Cape tourist destinations.

The first traffic jams on the Cape were in the 1930s.  In 1909 but 75 cars were on Upper Cape roads on a single summer day.  By 1936, that number had increased to 55,000.  I’m guessing even more drivers are on the road this time of year on major Cape thruways.

Roadside Wrecks

I’m back in Wellfleet after a few days off-Cape visiting one of my kids in Maine.  My drive started just fine – I sailed out Rte. 6 and over the Sagamore Bridge.   Then I sat on the highway south of Boston due to a car accident, on the highway south of the tolls going into Maine because of a car accident, and then on the highway south of Portland due to…a car accident.  Roadside wrecks.  You’d think people were having trouble driving and texting.  What should have been a 5 ½-hour drive took almost 9 hours.  Rescue workers and police had so much trouble clearing the last jam that I had time to finish a crossword puzzle.  And I’m not that fast at crossword puzzles.

The drive got me thinking about transportation and the Outer Cape.  How did routes 6 and 6A come to be?  When were they paved, and who paved them?  What about the Cape Cod Canal?  Who dug it?  And the bridges?  Who built them?  Long-time residents may know the answers to many of my questions, but I don’t, so I’m reading a handful of books this week to learn more.  Today I’m skimming William James Reid’s privately printed 1961 work, “The Building of the Cape Cod Canal.”  Nifty photos.  I’ll be posting to share what I glean.

I’m interested in transportation nowadays, too, and want to understand better the role cars play on the Outer Cape.  Is anybody living car-free in the Outer Space who’d like to talk with a trusty radio reporter?  Anybody who rides The Flex or the ferry and wants to talk?  Send me your thoughts, reading suggestions, or offers of conversation through “comments.”

Terminology, II

As promised, snippets of exchanges with experts about the origins of “Outer” and “Lower”:

Deborah Minsky, Director, Truro Historical Society Highland Museum

“I have used the term ‘Lower Cape,’ but if I’m writing grant applications or thinking about culture, I talk about the ‘Outer Cape Community.’  Geography is part of it, but I think it’s also probably related to the fact that the fishing families are sort of now interchangeably living in Wellfleet, Truro, or Provincetown.”

Bill Burke, Historian, Cape Cod National Seashore in S. Wellfleet

“My understanding of Lower and Upper is that the prevailing fair weather wind is southwest, so when you sailed from Dennis to Truro, you’d be going downwind.  So, my understanding is it’s lower because you’d be going with the wind down the rest of the Cape to the lower part of the Cape.  That’s what I’ve heard.”

“’Outer Cape’ is not nautical in origin.  It’s more recent, maybe in the last 20 years or so, maybe even less than that.  “Outer” is the six towns facing the ocean to the east, from Chatham to Provincetown.  They comprise the outer beach or outer part of the arm.  In the Park, we think of the Outer Cape as running from Chatham out.  ‘Lower Cape’ includes Brewster and Chatham.”

“The National Park is a separate entity.  We certainly don’t define the region.  It was already something well developed here. I like to look at us as a johnny-come-lately.  We were established in the ‘60s and were kind of superimposed on an existing six towns and their culture. But we’re also more than an administrative boundary.”

Robert Finch, Naturalist, Writer

“’Lower Cape’ and ‘Outer Cape’ are not official terms, and so their meaning varies. In my experience, many people use them interchangeably. The general consensus is that ‘Outer Cape’ refers to that part of the Cape that has frontage on the Atlantic Ocean – i.e., the towns from Chatham to Provincetown.  This is reflected in terms like the ‘Outer Beach,’ another name for Nauset Beach or Cape Cod Beach  or The Great Beach – all terms for the beach that fronts the Atlantic Ocean, also used in Henry Beston’s title of The Outermost House for his book about living along the Atlantic Shore.”

“There is a geological basis for the name, since the ‘Outer Cape’ was formed primarily by the Interlobate Moraine, as opposed to the Sandwich Moraine, which formed the towns from Sandwich to Orleans (some overlap, there – see Robert Oldale’s book, Cape Cod and the Islands: The Geologic Story). As a result, the ‘Outer Cape’ is sandier and has many fewer rocks than the rest of the Cape.”

Readers: Thoughts?  Stories?  Please share!

Terminology

I’ve claimed that the Outer Cape is a region, but I’ve done it with a little anxiety.  Which towns are included?  Are these different from the towns that make up the Lower Cape?

Today, I’ll tell you what I found on the web, when I wanted to get a sense of common usage.  In my next post, I’ll let you know what some of the experts – historians, a naturalist, a surveyor – had to say.

The Cape Cod Travel Guide, an official online publication of the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce, includes the towns of Eastham, Wellfleet, Truro, and Provincetown in its makeup of the Outer Cape.  Frommer’s.com weighs in similarly: Eastham, it claims, is the “official gateway” to the National Seashore and Outer Cape.

These online travel guides pinpoint a wild character that the four towns share by virtue of their proximity to Atlantic beaches.  Writers for frommer’s.com conclud that “[t]he Outer Cape, after all, is a place to play – in the sand, and in the delightful, unconventional towns that have flourished here, far from the rest of civilization.”  Writers for fodor’s.com focus more on P’town: “There’s a sense of abandon here, in the hedonistic summertime frenzy of Provincetown and out on the windswept landscape of dunes and marshes.”

So, for these four towns (linked to the National Seashore), a few key words to think about: unconventional, abandon, hedonistic, windswept.  Apart from civilization.  Does this sound right to you?

Other web findings of note:  some users interchange the terms “Outer” and  “Lower” Cape to denote the same area, while others include Brewster, Chatham, Harwich, and Orleans.  For instance, the Lower Cape Cod Coyotes, a regional youth hockey league, includes kids from all eight towns so far mentioned.

The Wikipedia entry on Cape Cod only confuses matters.  The unnamed writer declares with absolute authority – and absolutely no sourcing – that in the eighteenth century there were three sections of the Cape: Upper, Mid, and Lower.  “New arrivals,” the writer claims, took offense at the term “Lower” and opted, instead, for “Outer.”  The terms “upper” and “lower” are maritime, not geographical.

When a boat left Sandwich to the west headed for Wellfleet to the east, for example, it traveled down the longitudinal scale – from up to down the scale.  People have long since abandoned nautical charts as they traverse the Cape.  The traditional nomenclature became unfamiliar, and, therefore, discarded by many.  However, the old way holds on elsewhere.  On nearby Martha’s Vineyard, ‘Up Island’ still is the western section and ‘Down Island’ is to the east, down the scale so to speak.

Is this really longitide, or is it latitude?  And what about Maine?  How’d it get to be known as “Down East?”  Seems pretty “Up” to me.

Anyone?

An Outer Cape 4th

Wellfleet Fourth of July Parade I

Wellfeet Fourth of July II

A 4th of July celebration emblematic of the Outer Cape:

Like many small towns across America, Wellfleet’s parade incorporated classic cars, fire engines, Scouts, and the floats of small businesses to mark Independence Day.  I especially liked a local vegetable market’s enormous papier mache carrot.

The Wellfleet Public Library’s float announced its fundraiser to install solar panels. Marchers carried banners with slogans to raise awareness of “Nature Deficit Disorder” and to remind the crowds to continue to work for peace. They advocated for affordable health care. Young people carried a banner with Henry David Thoreau’s command. Simplify.

People out here want to be close to nature.  To eat organic carrots. To work for peace. To simplify.  They also want to have fun.

Demography Is Not Destiny

New Hampshire demographer Peter Francese’s talk yesterday at Nauset Regional Middle School in Orleans crystallized problems and possibilities on the Outer Cape.  “Demography,” he declared, “is a fourth of what you need to know.”  Francese parsed bar graphs to convince educators to think about culture, the attitudes and values that have produced the numbers he studies and the region in which we live.  You can read about the meeting by clicking here. And you can see the statistics for yourself by reading the handout Francese presented here.

Francese discussed what he’s learned about the Outer Cape by crunching the Cape’s census data from 2007.  His findings are dramatic.  The Outer Cape’s population is shrinking except when it comes to older folks.  Spending for public schools is rising even though enrollment numbers are falling.   “Demography is not destiny,” Francese said.  “You can change it.”

People often claim their regions are “unique,” Francese said.  That’s generally not true, but in the case of the Outer Cape, for a variety of reasons, he said, it could not be more accurate.  I’ll add that it’s worth examining what makes the Outer Cape a distinct region as we think about what’s broke and what needs fixin’.

Which reminds me of a book I brought home from the library this week.  In 1985, ecologist Charles H. W. Foster published The Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance.  President John F. Kennedy signed legislation in 1961 creating the National Seashore.  Foster wanted to know, some twenty-odd years out, if the six towns abutting the National Seashore constituted a self-sustaining, cohesive “bioregion.”  Was the grouping of these towns merely an administrative sleight of hand, or was there something deeper that connected what we think of as The Outer Cape?

I’ll save his findings for another post, but I want to share a passage with you in conjunction with Peter Francese’s warnings about demography and culture:

In economic terms, there is no dominant industry.  Traditional agricultural and fishing activities have declined over the years, and manufacturing is limited to local crafts.  The largest economic activities are land development and service to seasonal visitors.  Of emerging significance is Cape Cod’s position as a retirement community, a growth industry of its own.  Delineated by the transportation ‘spine’ of Routes 6 and 28, the lower Cape has an economic identity, but its real economic center is the Seashore itself (viii).

Settling Back into Life on the Outer Cape

When I left home in Dallas in 1980, my mother gave me two pieces of advice: wherever you settle, find a good doctor, and get a library card.  I returned to Wellfleet for the summer on Sunday.  So, Monday, always following my mom’s advice, I made phone calls for physical therapy and planned my trip to the library.

Medical services on the Outer Cape are harder to come by than library facilities. I need PT but because of overbooking can’t get seen in town for a month.  The library, meanwhile, was its usual hive of productive activity.  People were standing outside locked doors, waiting to enter at opening time.  Swarms of parents and young children headed for the kids’ section.  Teens opened laptops and returned DVDs.  Older folks headed for “new arrivals.”

I plopped down by the “Cape Cod” section, looking for books for my summer project for WCAI.  My specific goal is to finish a series of radio stories about challenges peculiar to the Outer Cape – such as why my fellow Fleetians have long waits for health care but enjoy a superb library.   More broadly, I want to understand what sets the Outer Cape apart.  My sense is that many answers are rooted in what we think of as “nature” – space we imagine as untouched but which exists because people have made conscious decisions to shape and create it.

Like most people who are drawn to this part of the world, I’ve been coming to Wellfleet for 14 years because of its quiet beauty.   During the school year, I live in the Boston area with my husband and our 16 ½-year-old triplets.  Wellfleet is for family time throughout the year and especially for summer.  I’m a reporter and historian.  The ways that people and their places intersect interest me most.  It’s my sense that the wild places on the Outer Cape may be faring better than the people.  I suspect there is a correspondence between the two.

As I explore the links between people and places this summer for WCAI, I’ll be frequenting the Cape Cod section of the library – and driving to Orleans for PT. Many of you know the history of the Outer Cape far better than I, so send suggestions and perspectives in “comments.”  Others may have lots to learn.  Send me questions, and I’ll do my best to track and post answers.