Towns Should Buy Willy’s
To the editor:
Regarding what has been happening at Willy’s Gym [Jan. 16, page 1], which has been going on for years: employees not being paid and so on goes back to when I was a member in Orleans over a decade ago. The facility is very important to the Lower and Outer Cape, but the owner has shown herself incapable of running a safe and healthy facility, despite being given chance after chance.
Many Willy’s members have now been coming to the gym I go to in Orleans and it’s sad to hear them get excited about things like heat. After reading K.C. Myers’s and Ryan Fitzgerald’s wonderful piece in last week’s Independent I think it’s a miracle no one has been seriously injured or worse.
It’s always been stunning that there is no community center on this part of the Cape. How about towns joining forces to purchase Willy’s as a community facility? The Nauset swim team would have a home pool again for practices and meets, and programs for all ages could be offered.
As someone who grew up on the Lower Cape and raised three kids here, I’ve always been appalled at the short shrift families and kids are given here. Barnstable has a Y and a youth center. We have nothing.
Let’s pool our town resources, buy this facility, and run it well so everyone, young and old, can enjoy it, and stop the dangerous and unhealthy situation that has been going on for far too long.
Candace Hammond
Orleans
On ‘Conversation Starters’
To the editor:
This Provincetown resident sincerely thanks you for the Independent’s “Conversation Starters” synopses of select board and other meeting agendas. This adds so much more for readers than just posting the time and date.
Our town governments have bemoaned poor citizen attendance at board and committee meetings. Your effort goes a long way toward addressing that problem by alerting the public to the agenda issues that might affect them. It saves the steps of going to town websites, finding the appropriate agenda, and opening a PDF to get informed.
Well done.
Shira Kavon
Provincetown
Living on the Edge
To the editor:
The Outer Cape is very nearly the easternmost extension of the continental United States (save for a stretch of coastline in eastern Maine). As I stood facing the sea the other day in Wellfleet, I became aware of standing precisely on the boundary of two vastnesses: the great and stormy Atlantic before me, with the whole American continent stretching out behind.
But there was more to it than that: I stood also on the exact limit of a vertical frontier. Beginning precisely at the soles of my feet was nearly eight thousand miles of solid Earth, while above me the thin blue sky soon gave way to infinite and empty space.
As I thought about this I remembered that there was still another sense in which we all stand upon an edge, a boundary, a frontier: our occupation of the mysterious place that we call the present. It is always vanishing, but always with us; it is infinitesimally small, but somehow it is where everything happens. Behind us, like the vast American continent, is the past; it is, like the land itself, written in stone. Ahead is the future, as teeming and unknowable as the ocean.
Malcolm Pollack
Wellfleet
