PROVINCETOWN — Visitors to MacMillan Pier this summer are guaranteed a sighting of a great white shark — 12 feet long and with plenty of teeth. But the toothed creature isn’t here for the seals. Rather, it is serving as a welcome for the new outpost of the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy (AWSC), which is set to open on the pier this summer in the space that for two decades housed the Whydah Pirate Museum.
Whydah
FAKE NEWS
April Fools Issue
Price of Turnips Skyrockets
EASTHAM — The celebrated Eastham turnip has always been a lucrative crop. Weighing about eight pounds each — the same as a golden retriever puppy — the root vegetables are famously easier to housetrain, if somewhat harder to love.
But in the last five days, turnip prices have risen from $4 to upwards of $200 a pound. No one is exactly sure how the boom started. One theory is that people with disposable income, confined to their homes by the virus, are looking for new ways to spend money.
The recent government stimulus checks may have added to the frenzy.
Whatever the cause, Eastham turnips are flying off supermarket shelves as buyers race to hoard the last remnants of the fall crop.
“We’ve started calling turnips ‘this year’s toilet paper,’ ” said Marina Silva, a manager at the Provincetown Stop & Shop.
The price of one Eastham turnip is forecast to reach $102,033 by May 1, the same as a summer rental in Provincetown.
Outer Cape farmers see an opportunity. “Yesterday, I dug up all my lettuces and planted turnips in their place,” said Peter Staaterman of Longnook Meadows Farm in Truro on Tuesday. “My wife thinks I’m crazy,” he added. Staaterman has installed a state-of-the-art security system. “Turnip thieves are rampant right now,” he said.
Also rampant are counterfeit turnips. “A rule of thumb is: if a deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is,” warned Adelaide Smith of the Eastham Senior Center. “A good way to tell if a turnip is a genuine Eastham is to knock on it. If you hear an echo, it’s fake.”
Some people are investing in turnip futures, also known as seeds, which are going for $400 to $500 each. Meanwhile, tech-savvy buyers are using bitcoin to amass collections of digital turnips — also called NFTs (nonfungible turnips).
“We welcome this boost to the local economy,” said Jim Russo of the Eastham Chamber of Commerce. “But we should be wary — this could be a bubble.”
For now, people here are enjoying what experts at the Economic Policy Institute are calling “turnipmania.”
“This is the happiest day of my life,” said Margaret Maplethorpe, formerly of Wellfleet, after her winning bid at an auction of the Eastham Turnip Farmers’ Guild. “I’m so glad I decided to sell the house for this.” Tears of joy were streaming down her face. —Saskia Maxwell Keller
Finn Wittrock Spills Secrets of Horror
PROVINCETOWN — Finn Wittrock, one of the stars of the FX series American Horror Story, which was shooting around town in early March, squirmed uncomfortably as he sat on a bench in front of town hall.
The fresh-faced actor, who appears much younger than his official age of 36, said that, even though he was allegedly born in Lenox and studied at Juilliard, he’s actually 10,000 years old.
“I grew up in Bedrock,” he said, his eyes darting. “You know, the prehistoric town in the Flintstones. As a kid, I hung out with Pebbles Flintstone and Bamm-Bamm Rubble. My dad worked in the gravel pit with Fred and Barney. And then.…” Wittrock paused, staring up warily at the cloudy gray winter sky. “And then, I was seduced by a vampire.”
Wittrock is best known for his roles in various productions of American Horror Story creator Ryan Murphy. His characters are often queer — Rudolph Valentino in AHS: Hotel, an ill-fated hookup of Andrew Cunanan’s in The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Taylor Kitsch’s dying-of-AIDS lover in The Normal Heart — but that did not deter the young women who came to ogle at the Provincetown locations where he was filming last month.
After his experience shooting in this historic spot, Wittrock was intent on setting the record straight with the Independent: he is way older than the town. His pale skin is not just movie-star glamorous but hemoglobin-deprived; and he’s tired of pretending he’s anything but immortal.
Most of all, he wanted us to know that the storylines of American Horror Story are not just fantasy. “There’s a reason I’m cast so often,” Wittrock said. “I’m a glove fit. And I’m not the only one. You know that strange look in Sarah Paulson’s eyes? Well,” and once again, he paused. “I’ll leave that for her to say.”
The interview over, Wittrock put on sunglasses and was gone in a flash. In less than a beat, the sun peeked out of the clouds, and Commercial Street blanched in the bright light. —Howard Karren
Barry Clifford Finds Pirate’s Lost Eye Patch
WELLFLEET — The man credited with discovering the wreck of an 18th-century pirate ship here in 1984 is still pulling rich material from the deep.
Barry Clifford, who found the sunken Whydah and now runs the Whydah Pirate Museum in West Yarmouth at the former ZooQuarium, says he has recovered the eye patch believed to have been worn by Capt. “Black Sam” Bellamy.
The Whydah went down in 1717. According to other ships’ logs of that era, Bellamy may have had an eye patch, or, at least, he wore one to look tough. It’s reputed that his lover, Goody Hallett, had a thing for them, according to D.U.B. Lievedischit, Clifford’s resident maritime historian.
The fragment of black material found in the encrusted ruins of the ship has traces of what fabric historians say could be the earliest example of Velcro. A tattered pirate catalog found nearby indicated that the eye patch could be purchased as a single item or as part of a package that included a peg leg and a parrot. —K.C. Myers
Free the Oysters
Dr. Shelly Silva has a very firm handshake. She also has the letters “B” and “I” tattooed in blurry blue ink on the middle fingers of her right hand: “BI.” I glance down at them and wonder where our conversation might go. Too much information? But when she rests both hands on the edge of the bubbling open-topped tank at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, I get the full picture: “BI-VALVE.”
“I was raised in New Bedford,” Dr. Silva tells me as she swipes her hand through the water in the tank. “My father — they called him ‘High-Line’ — captained scallopers for close to 40 years. I started fishing with him in the summers when I was 16, and when I finished high school I went at it full-time.”
She tells me she scored high on the SATs. “My guidance counselors were pushing me toward the Ivy Leagues, but my soul was out there on the ocean,” she says. “Until it wasn’t.”
As she shows me through the labs, all gurgling and smelling like seaweed and low tide, the doctor openly reveals her past struggles with drugs and alcohol, ubiquitous on the docks, and how she managed to enter recovery, Harvard, M.I.T., and then the University of Hawaii for her post-doctoral work.
When we get to the largest lab, Dr. Silva brightens. The cavernous room is a combination of Fulton Fish Market and Longwood Medical Area. The bubbling sounds are still there, now accompanied by the beeping and flashing of small monitors. Wires snake out of the multiple tanks, then are gathered by zip ties into wild Rasta-like braids before entering Dr. Silva’s office at one end of the lab. I see oysters, scallops, and quahogs, some sparsely corralled and freely floating, while others are stuffed in black plastic mesh bags. The shellfish, regardless of their condition of capture here in Woods Hole, are all wired, as if this were a mass EKG event. It is spectacular to see, if not a bit unnerving.
“We received a large grant from PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) to study the effects of caging these shellfish,” Dr. Silva tells me as she gently scoops up a four-inch free-floating oyster and untangles a wire before placing it back in the tank. “A PETA board member summers in Wellfleet, I believe on Lieutenant Island, and was disturbed to see the proliferation of caged oysters.” And that, she tells me, is how it came to be that WHOI is now researching the effects that caging these creatures has on their well-being, both emotionally and physically.
I’ll admit I was at first bewildered by this news. But Dr. Silva takes me into her office — a sparse, clinical space — where she shows me a series of graphs and charts, all glowing brightly on her computers. The preliminary data clearly show evidence that caging has some negative effects with regard to beta waves, calcium formation, and movement.
“We are in the very early stages here,” she tells me, “and I try not to let my personal feelings enter into it. That would be the biggest mistake a scientist could make. I hate to see these little guys caged like this, but that’s not science. This is.”
She is now making an expansive gesture with both of her hands toward the vast room on the other side of the window. I see the word “BI-VALVE” reflected in the window separating the two rooms. —Dennis Cunningham
LOCAL LORE
On Outer Cape Cod, Legends Buzz
A review of three of the most enduring tales
From pirate ships to alien sightings, folklore is part of life on the Outer Cape. The tales have long traveled from person to person, and it’s a tradition to bring them up, especially at gatherings around a bonfire on a dark beach, when the otherworldly events and the existence of ghosts don’t seem so far-fetched. But are they based in truth, or purely fictional, made up to keep people entertained and interested in local history?
A story does not have to be old to constitute folklore. Among three of the most frequently told stories, two date back hundreds of years, and one is more modern.
A supposed alien sighting at what was, in 1966, Dutra’s Market in North Truro, is possibly the local legend that’s most popular beyond Cape Cod. The shop is now known as Salty Market. Robert Matthews, age 19, got off a bus next to the market and called the North Truro Air Force Station, where he was headed. They said they would send a truck to pick him up shortly.
But things began to get very odd, very quickly. Matthews claimed that while he was waiting, he saw lights “moving from side to side across the sky.” He began to worry, and again called the base. The strange part was, they told him that they had sent the truck five minutes after his first call, and that Matthews had been nowhere in sight. It was an hour later when they received his second call. It seemed to Matthews that only four minutes had gone by.
For a long time, Matthews thought he had simply imagined the odd jump in time. But much later, he decided to undergo hypnosis in an attempt to discover what had happened. Under hypnosis, he explained that he went up a ramp, towards the lights he saw, and into a room that looked like a doctor’s office. The next thing he remembered, he said, he was standing at Dutra’s making his second call to the base.
The story, recounted in seasons one and five of Unsolved Mysteries and on unsolved.com and many other websites, seems, at the very least, exaggerated to most listeners. But some people think they have experienced similar, if not identical, instances of “missing time.” The late abstract expressionist Budd Hopkins, who said he saw a U.F.O. in Truro in 1964, famously collected stories like Matthews’s. They became a genre with its own peculiar motifs.
Another well-known story on the Cape is that of the Whydah. The Whydah Gally was a trading and slave ship launched from London in 1716 and attacked by pirates led by Samuel “Black Sam” Bellamy the next year. Bellamy took on the Whydah and several members of the original crew, who became pirates as well. But soon they encountered the horrible storm that brought the ship down to what is now Marconi Beach, in Wellfleet. The rumor is that gold and silver have continued to wash onto its shores from that shipwreck, even today, according to many locals’ stories.
There is historical and archaeological evidence to back up of many elements of this story. But though Barry Clifford, the explorer who found the shipwreck, believes he saw flecks of gold in the water near the site, the ship’s treasure has never been found. Expedition Whydah in Provincetown shows off artifacts and keeps the search alive.
Ghosts are said to have appeared at the Duck Creeke Inn in Wellfleet as recently as 1980, when Bob Morrill and Judy Pihl purchased the property now called the Wagner. But the ghosts themselves represent the deeper past.
Ghosts aren’t considered out of the ordinary here. “Almost everyone around here has a ghost story to tell and they are seldom about random ghosts,” said Dwight Estey, president of the Wellfleet Historical Society. “These sightings generally lead back to a person or specific event.” Of the ghosts, Morrill and Pihl were known to say, “Our ghosts are very comfortable here, and we are comfortable with them.”
Anna Neilsen, the Wellfleet youth services librarian, has heard the stories. “They say she’s a small woman in white, and the old owners used to see her.” Word is, guests have been scared off the property by a woman telling them to “sleep well” or other comforting things.
According to the former owners, the house belonged to a sea captain and the story goes that the woman in white is the captain’s wife. Their two daughters, whose ghosts can be heard walking around on the upper floors, died of smallpox. But not to worry — these ghosts have only been kind.
The Outer Cape is full of stories whose truth may never be known. For those who love stories, that’s not what matters. These kinds of tales are part of what makes this place magical.
Asked about Cape Cod’s folklore culture, Irene Paine, author of the historical novel Eva and Henry: A Cape Cod Marriage, replied, “We love our Goody Hallett, our ghost ships, our foggy bogs and resident ghosts. If you are up for a little prickle in your spine, leave your cell phone at home and walk the sandy back roads of Wellfleet and Truro in the moonlight. Take only a lantern and walk between ocean beaches at one in the morning, low tide. Or, enter an ancient cemetery to commune with the spirits of the ancestors. If you really want to feel the legendary vibe, get out there. It buzzes.”
YOUNG VOICES
Hope For Local Journalism
Student stories in this week’s issue:
We’ve written about how local businesses and town governments are coping with the coronavirus pandemic, but Garrison Guzzeau reached out to nonprofits from Eastham to Provincetown to ask how they are adapting, and what they worry about hope for now. Read his story here >
When Outer Cape eighth graders consider where to go to high school, Nauset Regional High School and Cape Cod Regional Technical High School are most often at the top of their lists. Talia Kantor Lieber wondered what goes into students’ thinking on where to go. She learned that their families figure in the decision-making. And that other questions loom and distract in this pandemic season. Read Talia’s story here >
A lot has changed about visits between grandparents and grandchildren during this crisis. Alyia Vasquez looked into the experiences of elders and her own generation. What she found was partly what you’d expect: it’s been hard and isolation is an issue. But she also found some surprising good news in the workarounds and new rituals people are trying to stay connected. Read Alyia’s story here >
Niev Witnauer is interested in truth-seeking reporting. But this summer she decided to explore stories where the truth may never be known — the kinds of ghost stories and legends often told at summer gatherings here. She delved into some of the Outer Cape’s most popular tales, from an alien invasion in Truro to a shipwreck off Marconi beach, and discovered the details as well as some people who help keep those stories alive and evolving. Read Niev’s story here >
Every summer that they can remember, Eve and Thea Samaha have made a pilgrimage to the Chocolate Sparrow on Wellfleet’s Main Street. This year, the store was shuttered, a “For Rent” sign posted on the lawn. The story deserved investigation. They learned about what happened, asked what might happen next year, and tapped townspeople’s longing for old fashioned shops like this one to be a part of our towns. Read Eve and Thea’s story here >
We are grateful to our 2020 Summer Fellows who were mentors and editors on this project. They all had their own stories in this week’s issue, but two of them that focus closely on younger people’s lives were in this special section. Don’t miss Cana Tagawa on the questions facing college students — will local students take a gap year or forge ahead into remote learning? And Allyson Birger reports on young people’s sense that they can turn this thing around — and it looks like they will be voting.
