Cape cod

Boston Harbor Hotel, 6:42 a.m. I tossed on a robe, had a fight with an unfamiliar coffee machine, then threw back my bedroom curtains to soak up the best part of chronic jet lag. Fuschia skies intensified before a beautifully fat, gold sun peeped above the horizon. Some hours later, a three-tier stand stacked with PB&J sandwiches, smoked salmon, vanilla bean scones and fig jam obscured the same uninterrupted view, from the Rowes Wharf Sea Grille downstairs. Proffered a frankly overwhelming selection of colorful loose leaf teas, the irony wasn’t lost on me, a Brit, as I raised a pinky. “Green Sparkling… Tropical Oolong… Organic Big Ben English Breakfast… Chai Imperial? How about L’Herboriste?

A few days before Labor Day I tend to get nostalgic for the sixty-five summers I spent in Chatham on Cape Cod. The feeling starts slowly, especially during our after-dinner, three-generation family strolls around the Chatham Lighthouse in the charming Old Village. If it is our last evening before returning to Europe, my father would be broiling the last steak. The stroll begins with a nip in the air and the gently falling, silver leaves from the trees that line small streets. There isn’t any traffic; residents of the Old Village walk. Later, when my mother had two bionic knees, she was still lovingly called the “fastest woman in town.” Now she strolls with the rest of us. We are savoring another tradition, after a summer filled with golf, tennis, swimming, boating and feasts.

Cape Cod winters are brutal: they are long, freezing cold and windy. Cape Codders don’t know what spring is. The Pilgrims, having first touched terra firma in Chatham after months at sea, headed across Massachusetts Bay for Plymouth to more shelter. Days jump from those when Cape Codders think that Old Man Winter has played a nasty trick on them once again, to days of suddenly delicious warm sun which breaks through feathery skies, filled with what my father Bob called ‘unused air’. One of my dearest memories of spending a winter living in Chatham’s Old Village is of my father, Bob, in mid-May, appearing in his 10-foot skiff putt-putting out of the Mill Pond past our house, wearing his salt-laden floppy hat, heading for Stage Harbor to do some clamming.

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. The pretty, preppy town of Chatham, Massachusetts sits more or less at the elbow of Cape Cod, just after the swollen bicep of Hyannis and just before the Cape’s forearm tapers upward to Wellfleet’s freshly disembedded oysters, Truro’s schools of Subaru station wagons and Provincetown’s shallow-swimming shoals of gays. People who’ve never seen the Cape assume that it’s universally charming in an Olde Newe Englande sort of way: shingled houses and lobstermen, homely pubs with whaling paraphernalia on the walls and yellowed photos of Norman Mailer behind the bar. But, like any 340-square-mile place, it’s multifarious.