In a year that seems to have brought as many visitors as ever to the Outer Cape, including some who say they’ve come to stay, we also heard from people whose usual pilgrimages seemed too risky. Waylaid, they described decades worth of memories of salty air, birds, the blink of a lighthouse — meditations on the Outer Cape from afar, for now.
Milwaukee, Wisc.
Diana and Leonard Goldstein did not make their usual trip to Truro this year. “We have not missed a summer since 1980,” Diana says. The couple live the rest of the year in Milwaukee, and the long drive seemed especially daunting because of the coronavirus.
Diana is going to be 90 years old. Her husband, she reported, is 93. Though this is the first time in 40 years they have not made it to their Truro place, there is no bitterness in her voice. “We were just talking about what a wonderful life we’ve had,” Diana says.
Orleans was, at first, the Goldsteins’ summer vacation spot. Back then, they lived in New York City. When, after renting for a few summers, they began to look for a house of their own, Diana remembers, “There were wonderful houses with beautiful lawns in Orleans.” But they didn’t find the right place until they drove to Truro’s Ryder Beach.
“When I saw our home in Truro, I knew: this is it,” she says.
A schoolteacher, she was able to spend June to September in Truro, while Leonard commuted every weekend from New York. The long stays gave her time to get involved in the community. She loved reading for story time at the Truro library. “I had a wonderful group of children,” she says. “They are grown up now and have their own children, but to this day some still come up to me and say, ‘I remember you!’ ”
Can they envision being back in Truro? Diana’s reply: “Oh yes, that is a must. We are lucky to be independent and healthy.” And she believes that the many years she and her husband have spent walking in the woods and swimming in the ocean and bay have a lot to do with that. “We were in the water every day we could be,” she says.
In 2006, the Goldsteins donated two acres to the Truro Conservation Trust. “I’m a nature lover,” Diana says. “We wanted to preserve the land as it is.”
Chicago, Ill.
Wendy Doniger is a retired professor of Hinduism and mythology at the University of Chicago who spends summers writing books on the deck of her Truro home. “I always drive cross-country in May,” Doniger says. “It takes me two days — I stay with a former student in Athens, Ohio, then another in Ithaca, before arriving on the Cape. So, it’s a very classical Greek trajectory.”
It’s a trip she has made since 1993. But this year, the drive felt too risky. “I just didn’t dare do it,” says Doniger, who turned 80 in November. “I didn’t know if I would pick up the virus along the way.” Then, in June, came another reason not to travel: Doniger found out that she needed a hip operation. She stayed in Chicago for that.
“I found that the best way for me to manage the pain of surgery and the recovery was to meditate on being in Truro,” she says. She would imagine herself on her deck, “on a day when there was a light breeze moving between the trees, looking out over the Pamet River, listening to the sound of the birds and feeling the ocean breeze.”
Another long-distance comfort for Doniger was that her nieces came to stay in Truro. “Knowing that my house wouldn’t stand empty took some of the sting out of it,” she says. “The thought that no one would be there made me almost as sad as my own selfish wish to be in Truro.”
In Chicago, Doniger kept writing. The work shapes her memories and her thoughts about the future.
“That is what I am looking forward to most when I think of next year,” she says. “Sitting on my deck with a cup of tea and my dog beside me, looking out onto the marsh, writing.”
Washington, D.C.
“I can feel my whole body change once I get across the Sagamore Bridge and open the windows to the sea air,” says Jane Leavy, a sports writer who splits her time between Washington D.C. and Truro. But this year, she was was worried about the influx of tourists during a pandemic. She didn’t come.
“I didn’t realize just how much of my heart I had given over to Cape Cod until I missed a summer here for the first time in decades,” she says.
Leavy has spent summers on the Outer Cape since she was three years old. “I learned to swim in Long Pond in Wellfleet,” she says. Her family came every summer, most often to Provincetown. “I have a photo of myself at Herring Cove as a teenager. We must have just arrived, and I am throwing my arms up at the sun in glee.”
Later, Wellfleet took on a remarkable significance for Leavy’s own young family. “Both my kids were adopted as newborns,” she says. “Each time we got the call that they could come to us, we were on vacation in Wellfleet. They arrived three years apart on the same date in August. Now they consider Wellfleet their coming-home place.”
About her Truro home, she recalls, “I watch the lighthouse on Land’s End blink every night when I go to sleep.”
Walks here have inspired a favorite pastime, Leavy says. “I began to see shapes in tangles of brush and pieces of driftwood. Then I got into dumpster diving. I would schlep all this wood, metal, and other junk home.” Wanting to do something with these treasures, Leavy learned to weld from a friend in Provincetown and started making sculptures.
Each year Leavy leaves an unfinished project behind. When she arrives in Truro the following year, she picks up where she left off. Last fall, Leavy found pieces of an old treadmill behind a friend’s house. “I looked at them and saw a horse. So, my biggest regret,” she says with a laugh, “is that I didn’t get back to finish that horse.”
U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling has questions for towns that have issued host community agreements to marijuana businesses.
Provincetown, Wellfleet, and Eastham town administrators all received subpoenas last month ordering them to produce documents, emails, and any other correspondence associated with the agreements.
They must appear at the John Joseph Moakley U.S. Courthouse to testify before a federal grand jury, according to the subpoena issued on Oct. 8 to Eastham Town Administrator Jacqueline Beebe. The notice commands her to be at the courthouse at 10 a.m. on Nov. 14.
Rae Ann Palmer, town manager in Truro, which has given a host agreement to a cannabis farming group, the High Dune Craft Cooperative, had not received one as of Tuesday, she said. But Wellfleet Town Administrator Dan Hoort and Provincetown Acting Town Manager David Gardner both have, they said.
No one knows why exactly. Katherine Laughman, who represents several towns including Eastham for KP Law, said she could not comment on the subpoenas because federal grand jury investigations are secret.
Lelling’s interest has something to do with the host community agreements, which are the critical first approvals marijuana businesses must get from towns before they can seek state licenses. In the case of medical marijuana dispensaries the agreements are called letters of non–opposition.
The subpoenas call for all written, electronic, or other records relating to any business that has applied for a marijuana (adult use or medical) license.
Officials must include “every iteration and draft version of the agreement,” the orders state. The U.S. attorney wants voicemail recordings and everything pertaining to public deliberations. And he has demanded all records that identify current or former town employees who have been hired by or received payment from a marijuana business applicant.
Gardner said he suspects the subpoenas have to do with the investigation and Sept. 6 arrest of Jasiel F. Correia II, the mayor of Fall River, whom the U.S. Dept. of Justice has charged with “extorting marijuana vendors for hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes,” according to the U.S. attorney’s public announcement. Lelling’s office, which is prosecuting Correia, states that the bribes range from $100,000 to $250,000 in cash. In exchange Correia agreed to issue non-opposition letters and community host agreements to marijuana business owners, according to Lelling’s office.
Correia, 27, issued at least 14 non-opposition letters for marijuana businesses to operate in Fall River, including two for his current girlfriend’s brother. And when the Fall River City Council passed an ordinance to limit the number of marijuana licenses in the city to 20 percent of the number of off-premises liquor licenses or 11, whichever is greater, Correia vetoed the order, claiming that it would eliminate competition, Lelling’s announcement stated.
Attorney Michael Fee, a Truro resident who represented the High Dune Craft Cooperative in obtaining host community agreements from Truro and Wellfleet, said Gardner is probably correct. The host community agreements have been controversial from the start, he said.
“I can only speculate — I don’t know what Lelling is thinking,” Fee said. “But he’s probably thinking of the abuses unearthed by the Fall River mayor. These are egregious violations of the public trust.”
The host agreements give communities leverage over marijuana businesses. Towns are allowed by law to ask that up to three percent of sales revenue in the first five years be given to the towns as “community impact fees,” said Fee.
There is a clause in the law stating that community impact fees must correlate with the actual cost burden a new marijuana business places on police, fire, and other municipal services.
How do you judge such an impact with a completely new industry? Fee asked.
“My feeling is some cities and towns feel they can interpret this broadly,” Fee said. “So it’s an environment that’s ripe for unscrupulous public officials.”
Towns can also ask for other payments, as well as donations in kind, in the host agreements. These agreements are all public documents.
In Provincetown, for example — which has host agreements with seven pot purveyors — the community impact fee for all vendors is three percent of gross sales. Plus the cannabis vendors must give a discount to low-income medical marijuana card holders and donate 100 hours of community service activities. Each applicant also agreed to make an annual charitable contribution of up to one percent of gross revenues to a fund established to provide grants to social service agencies.
While host community agreements may have some controversial aspects that are open to interpretation, Fee thinks U.S. Attorney Lelling is looking for major corruption, such as what allegedly occurred in Fall River.
It’s highly unlikely Lelling will find anything like that on the Outer Cape, Fee said, adding that the agreements with Truro and Wellfleet on which he advised clients are completely appropriate.
In Provincetown, Gardner said the seven marijuana businesses that have host agreements are still waiting for final state approval. The furthest along, Curaleaf at 170 Commercial St., will probably open in January.
Wellfleet has five host community agreements for retail sales and one for cultivation, though none has final state approval.
Truro has signed only with the High Dune Craft Cooperative.
Eastham has two agreements, one for retail, one for both retail and cultivation.