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first encounter

    SUMMER

    Eastham’s Beach Plan Is Ready

    Most beaches will be sticker-only; recreation, swimming programs are canceled

    By

    EASTHAM — The town has mapped its beaches, ponds, and landings and their parking areas with an eye to allowing socially distanced fun this summer.

    The exercise revealed that “we have a lot more available sand space than parking,” Town Administrator Jacqui Beebe told the select board Monday. “We have 20 percent of the parking needed for beach capacity.” Fortunately, many beachgoers walk, bike in, or are dropped off.

    Eastham “has the luxury of a couple of really substantial beaches,” Beebe said. First Encounter has eight paths to the water and 380,000 square feet at mean high tide, with “elongated” parking that encourages separation. “But at some of the beaches, the area of sand isn’t large and the parking is even smaller,” she said.

    Beebe and Christine Mickle, director of the recreation and beach department, used the data to recommend that most beaches become sticker-only, with First Encounter and Cooks Brook open to both day parking pass purchasers as well as sticker holders. Stickers won’t be required until June 20.  Parking will be reduced at most bay beaches and limited at public ponds.

    Mail-in applications for taxpayer and visitor stickers are encouraged. The town sticker office will be open Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays only from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on June 12 to 14 and the two weekends following that. Details and forms are on the town’s website.

    Sanitation is paramount as the season opens. The town has added daily cleaning and sanitizing to its contract for portable restrooms at beaches and high-activity recreation areas, as well as a weekly deep-clean and treatment with a fogger. That applies to permanent restrooms as well, which will also see some restrictions to guarantee separation. Handwashing sinks will be available at the permanent restrooms, and the portables will have external sanitizer supplies.

    The town is bringing on three additional summer employees who will travel among sites “in vehicles stocked with educational information, masks, and sanitizing supplies,” the plan notes. They are charged with reminding people about the need to maintain distance.

    While beach plans look promising, Beebe said, “the sad part is that, after many discussions, we can’t figure out a way to do the morning recreation program for kids safely. I feel horrible, and I know Christine does. It would be very difficult to keep kids busy and safe at the same time without doing field trips, taking buses, and stuff we normally do.”

    Beebe and Mickle considered options for continuing swimming lessons, but realized that, “for young kids, it’s a very hands-on task,” the town administrator said. “It doesn’t work for this year.”

    “Playgrounds are going to be open,” Beebe said, noting the need to wipe down equipment. “I hope everyone travels with wipes,” she said, “but we’ll have some, too.”

    Mickle added a more few bright notes. Her department will continue handing out activity bags for children every Wednesday, food card and pizza raffles, and two well-distanced events per week for families starting the week of July 6. These could include picnics, social distance dances, and family movie nights on the Field of Dreams. It is hoped yoga on the beach will be back, too.

    currents

    This Week in Eastham

    By

    Meetings Ahead

    Meetings are being conducted remotely. Go to eastham-ma.gov/calendar-by-event-type/16 and click on a particular meeting to read its agenda. That document will provide information about how to view and take part remotely.

    Thursday, May 28

    • Council on Aging Board of Directors, 1 p.m.
    • Board of Health, 3 p.m.
    • Joint School Committee, 6 p.m.

    Monday, June 1

    • Select Board, 5:30 p.m.

    Thursday, June 4

    • Zoning Board of Appeals, 5 p.m.

    Conversation Starters

    Sun Shines on Eastham 400 Sunset Series

    There’s not a day the sun will go down this summer without mention of the notorious “First Encounter” of Pilgrims and Nausets at Eastham’s eponymous beach. Starting June 1 at First Encounter Beach or at eastham400.org, depending on progress with the pandemic, a 10-minute presentation will begin every night through Labor Day, 15 minutes before sunset.

    Among other “400” activities that will go forward, Sundays at dusk in July and August will be time for storytelling around a campfire, either at First Encounter Beach or online. Recent Nauset High graduate Joanna Holleck of Brewster, a sophomore at Gettysburg College, will produce both series in collaboration with John Hanlon, who has organized the National Seashore’s summer campfires for 20 years.

    “I’m excited to learn more deeply about this place I love and where I grew up,” Holleck told a virtual meeting of the Eastham 400 committee on May 18.

    The news is less good for a July visit to Rock Harbor by the shallop Elizabeth Tilley, a replica of the sort of vessel from which the Pilgrims set foot on First Encounter Beach. Plans had been to share costs with Provincetown, which has now canceled its summer events. Committee members will review options, including a virtual program, with the John Howland Society, which has charge of the Tilley.

    Plan Addresses Flooding

    There’s no need to hazard a guess about what Eastham needs to do about climate change and sea level rise. It’s there for all to read in the 2020 Hazard Mitigation Plan approved by the select board last week and sent off to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for certification.

    Town Planner Paul Lagg told the board May 18 that action items lay out “a strategy for what the town wants to do in the next five years and beyond.” The town must have the plan approved in order to get in line for state or federal grants, Lagg added.

    FEMA’s community rating system “rewards towns that undertake floodplain protections beyond the minimum,” said Lagg. “Property owners get discounts on flood insurance policies” when that’s done. Both he and the department’s community development assistant, Debbie Cohen, are certified to assist home owners.

    Let’s Keep It Friendly

    Select board chair Aimée Eckman offered a “personal point of view” last week on the early return of part-time residents during the pandemic. “I don’t look at part-time residents as tourists,” she said. “I know people see out-of-state plates, [but] they’re our neighbors and friends. From the part-timers I’ve seen coming this spring, they’re extremely responsible.” She added that not every year-round resident is abiding by guidelines. “Just try to be patient with people and educate them if you see them doing something that might be a problem,” she said. “I think they’re open to being educated if people aren’t screaming at them.”

    June 1 Meeting a Door Into Summer

    Town Administrator Jacqui Beebe plans to present a draft summer services program to the select board June 1 that will include guidance on beaches, recreation programs, and the like. Her plans are informed by group meetings with other town administrators, select board chairs, health agents, and from National Seashore administrators who have been working towards creating uniform policies.

    Licensing for Alcohol Sales

    Eastham has no seasonal package store licensees, and select board member Jamie Rivers wants to keep it that way. “The town is very well covered by our year-round off-site liquor licenses,” she said May 18 during the board’s review of licensing practices.

    The current board can “look at the application package, make it tighter and more clear, look at what criteria you’re looking for, gaps or gluts, but you can’t set a policy for the next board,” advised Town Administrator Jacqui Beebe.

    Board chair Aimée Eckmann thanked Rivers for requesting more details from applicants for liquor licenses. “It has really made a huge difference,” she said. “There’s more of a plan instead of them just signing an application, throwing it at us, and we rubber stamp it…. If they go out of compliance, it’s clear what they said was supposed to happen.”

    EASTHAM 400

    1620 Events to Focus on First Encounter With Nauset

    Replica of Pilgrims’ shallop will visit Rock Harbor

    By

    EASTHAM — History will be docking at Rock Harbor this summer. Tying up next to the Coast Guard boat that rescued 32 sailors from the Pendleton shipwreck in 1952 will be a craft similar to the one that brought men from the Mayflower’s anchorage in Provincetown Harbor in 1620 to Eastham for their first live encounter with the indigenous Nauset people.

    “We’ll have some ceremonies and possibly some trips out into the bay” in the replica vessel, the shallop Elizabeth Tilley, select board member Peter Dibble said at the Feb. 24 meeting of the Eastham 400 Commemoration Committee. Built in 2000 by Peter Arenstam, the boat will be towed from Plymouth to Provincetown early in July for festivities there before being towed or sailed to Rock Harbor for a stay of several days.

    Eastham 400 shallop
    Select board member Peter Dibble displays a model, built by Richard C. Ellington, of the shallop that carried 10 Separatists and eight sailors from the Mayflower to their “first encounter” with the Nauset in December 1620. (Photo Ed Maroney)

    At last week’s meeting, Dibble displayed Richard C. Ellington’s scale model of the shallop, built to mark the 400th anniversary of the Dec. 8, 1620, event at modern-day First Encounter Beach. “It’s perfect,” Dibble said.

    In another event planned by the committee, historian Ian Saxine, whose book The Story of the “First Encounter” at Nauset has sold out its first edition and is being reprinted, will speak at Nauset Regional High School on March 27.

    “We’re trying to find as many points of interaction as possible, so teachers are able to address things while bringing in another layer of authenticity,” NRHS Principal Christopher Ellsasser said. “We’re trying to weave together this opportunity with the learning that’s already happening.”

    Visitors to the Cape Cod National Seashore can do their learning while sitting on the sand at First Encounter Beach from Memorial Day weekend through the summer. The “109 nights,” as committee vice chair Tom Ryan described the program, will commence with the ringing of a bell 15 minutes before sunset and continue with a daily 10-minute presentation of “some fragment of our history” and a reading from Saxine’s book, plus a preview of coming events.

    On the nine Sundays of July and August, a “sunset series” will offer interactive programs around an electronic “campfire” at the beach. “Campfires are not bonfires,” Ryan said. “This is an electronic device approved by the fire department [that sits] like a bowl in the sand.”

    Also in the works is a tour of Cove Burying Ground, where three Mayflower passengers are interred. It’s hoped that high school students could be involved in all three programs.

    The committee voted to request $25,000 from town meeting in May: $12,000 for two part-time coordinators for the beach events, $6,000 for the cost of bringing the shallop to Rock Harbor and housing its crew, $4,000 for reprinting Saxine’s book, $2,000 for printing signs and beach sticker insignias, and $1,000 for rack cards.

    At the meeting, the committee reviewed other groups’ marking of the 400th anniversary. The Eastham Historical Society, which will open the First Peoples exhibit at its 1869 Schoolhouse Museum on May 1, has been working with an archaeologist to catalog its collection and is planning an extensive speaker series. The Cape Cod National Seashore will have three new outdoor exhibits: on Wampanoag use of salt marshes, on the Pilgrims’ search for water, and on the signing of the Mayflower Compact. The Federated Church of Orleans, which traces its history back to the congregational society founded in Eastham in the 1640s, will hold an open house during December. Eleven boxes of historical records from the church have been digitized and are available through the archives of the Eastham Public Library, which is planning a roster of special events.

    Ryan said that the Wellfleet Historical Society “has focused on their Native American collection and discovered they have representative items from all 10,000 years of documented habitation of Nauset. They’re doing a special exhibit all summer.” Over in Orleans, he said, the historical society “will focus on the seven [settler] families that came here. The focus isn’t how they related to Native Americans, or their faith structure — it’s their clothing and habitation.”

    The Cape Cod Genealogy Society will hold a free event at the Eastham library and the Chapel in the Pines next door on March 29 from 11:45 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. There will be talks on Mayflower descendants, Native American genealogy, and researching female ancestors, as well as 20-minute genealogical consultations for those interested in possible links to the Mayflower.

    For further details on 400th anniversary events, go to easthamthefirstencounter.org.

     

    EASTHAM CURRENTS

    ‘First Encounter’ Events Start With Lecture

    Bragdon will speak on early visitors to the Outer Cape

    By

    EASTHAM — The 400 Commemoration Committee isn’t waiting until 2020 to start the celebrations; the first of its events, in partnership with the Eastham Public Library, takes place this Sunday, Sept. 15, at the Salt Pond Visitors Center. Kathleen Bragdon, an ethnographer and author of Native People of Southern New England 1500-1650 will present a lecture titled “First Encounters Before the First Encounter,” about early visitors to North America and their interactions with the native communities of the Outer Cape before the Mayflower’s arrival. The program begins at 2 p.m.

    At the committee’s meeting on Aug. 29 Chair Jim Russo gave updates on the progress of several other efforts. The website celebrating the 400th anniversary of the fabled “first encounter” between Native Americans and the Mayflower Pilgrims was approved and is now live at easthamthefirstencounter.org. A 24-inch propane-fueled “fire bowl” was confirmed as a suitable alternative to the beach bonfire nixed by the town fire marshal. And the Patmos Gallery is donating space for an interfaith exhibit, currently a work-in-progress, in its location at Rock Harbor.

    Unfortunately, the shallop Elizabeth Tilley has not found a berth there. The committee sees the vessel as a major component in next year’s celebrations, and the ship’s owners have agreed to loan it to the town free of charge, but the Eastham side of Rock Harbor can accommodate ships up to only 33 feet long — five feet short of the Tilley’s length.

    The 400 Commemoration Committee will make a public presentation at 5 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 15 at the Centers for Culture & History, 3 River Road in Orleans.

    Select board masters time travel

    The Eastham Select Board met on Monday, Sept. 9 after a three-week hiatus — a busy period that encompassed the housing lottery [see separate story] and Windmill Weekend. More than a bit of board business had piled up in its absence. The backlog precipitated an unusual suggestion by Selectman Alexander Cestaro: “I make a motion to go back in time and grant the license.”

    He was referring to an application by Arnold’s Restaurant for a one-day liquor license for a fundraising event that had already taken place, three days earlier, on Sept. 6.

    Despite the clear violation of Einstein’s theory of relativity, Select Board Chair Amy Eckman assured her colleagues that this was not the first time such an approval had been issued retroactively. The motion passed unanimously.

     

     

    eastham currents

    Commemorating the ‘first encounter’

    By

    EASTHAM — Some 16 months before the 400th anniversary, plans are well under way to commemorate the Dec. 8, 1620 “first encounter” between Native Americans and European pilgrims. Perhaps the most ambitious aspect of the celebration is an effort to bring the sailing “shallop” Elizabeth Tilley to Eastham for both display and tours.

    The vessel, a replica of ones used to transport people and goods from larger ships to the coast in the 17th century, is owned by the Pilgrim John Howland Society of Plymouth. But questions regarding the cost and feasibility of towing and mooring the shallop were raised at a meeting of the town’s 400 Commemoration Committee on July 29.

    While an appearance by the Elizabeth Tilley remains a possibility, a proposed bonfire has been definitively nixed by Eastham Fire Chief Kent Farrenkopf. The committee considered several alternatives, including a fire pit and a six-foot-tall burning pyramid, but no final decision was made.

    The committee also discussed six programs to be held in conjunction with the Eastham Public Library. Three are designed for general audiences, focusing on the events leading up to the first encounter, the encounter itself, and the memorial commemorating the meeting. Three additional programs will be open to all but feature subject matter tailored for immigrants, young adults, and artists.

    A letter had been sent to the Mashpee Wampanoag Indian Tribal Council seeking input for the event, but no response had been received. The 400 Commemoration Committee planned to follow up with a phone call.

    Affordable housing lottery

    A bump in affordable housing is one step closer to becoming a reality in Eastham. Completion of the Village at Nauset Green — “a brand-new family rental development” at 140 Brackett Road — isn’t scheduled until February 2020, but an initial batch of apartments will be made available this October. Hopeful tenants should submit a pre-application for the housing lottery to be held at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 5 at the Orleans-Eastham Elks Lodge, 10 McKoy Road, Eastham. Those selected will then be eligible for the full application and interview process.

    Pre-applications must be sent by U.S. mail to Village at Nauset Green, P.O. Box 24855, Philadelphia, PA 19130 and must be received by Tuesday, Sept. 3 in order to qualify. Pick up a pre-application — in English, en español, or em português — at the Eastham Town Hall or at 140 Brackett Road, or download the forms online at villageatnausetgreen.com.

    Survey on Eastham cable service

    Do you have a strong opinion about your cable provider? Are there matters of local interest you wish were covered on television? Eastham’s Cable TV License Renewal Advisory Committee is all ears — electronically speaking. Take its online survey to give the powers that be your two cents on cable service in Eastham. The short questionnaire also asks how often you tune in to Lower Cape TV and what you’d like to see more of on your local access channels. Access the survey at surveymonkey.com/r/EasthamCable.

    Windmill is open once more

    As of Saturday, July 27, Cape Cod’s oldest and last working windmill is once again open to the public, although restoration of the exterior shingles will continue through the month of August. The town expects restoration to be fully completed in time for the annual Windmill Weekend — featuring a parade, craft show, and live music — on September 6-8. More information can be found at easthamwindmillweekend.org.

     

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