Regarding Art Nickerson’s recorded statement at the end of Cam Blair’s “When Turnips Were King in Eastham” (Nov. 18, page B7), I seriously doubt that there’s anyone alive who knew Cape Cod when Cape Cod was Cape Cod. There are certainly folks whose ancestors stood on the shore, watched Pilgrim aliens row ashore, and thought, “There goes the neighborhood.”
But there is no merit in having deep roots on the Cape or anywhere else. In the end, we’re all washashores. Your authentic roots are somewhere in Africa’s Rift Valley.
I have been visiting the Cape for 70-plus years. I recall an early trip when my father somehow located a farmer who rented his home to us. He and his wife moved into the basement. He took my family out onto the flats and showed us how to gather quahogs and razor clams. Later, the Mrs. taught my mother how to make chowder. After dark, we watched the Air Force rocket the hulk a mile or two out in the bay. Yes, it was the SS James Longstreet, but to us it was “the hulk.” When I finally learned its name and history, it didn’t sully my childhood memories.
Decades later, we brought our kids to the Cape every summer for two weeks. Wellfleet, the Sea Shell cottages, Green’s cabins. It took a while, sadly, for me to realize that telling my kids, “When I began coming to the Cape long ago” was a great way to spoil some part of their Cape adventures. So what if the hulk is gone? If kids no longer dive for quarters off MacMillan Pier? If dogfish are no longer catch-of-the-night in some Lower Cape estuary for a boy to say, “I caught a shark!” Their Cape experience is their Cape experience, and it can’t get any better than that, since time travel to the Cape in 1956 is not an option.
So don’t rain on anyone’s Cape experience or feeling of “home” because they weren’t born here. I wasn’t born in Wellfleet, but I’ll die here, my ashes drifting out of Wellfleet Harbor on the ebbing tide on the day after some distant (I hope) Labor Day. Six hours later, I’ll be a washashore, again and again.
Native or washashore — who cares? The sunset over Great Island looks the same no matter where you were born.
