The Whiteness of Cape Cod

“Now, I have a problem with New Jersey. I loathe it in its entirety. Countless times in my long life, I have said aloud that there are two places I would never live: North Dakota and New Jersey. Ever since moving to Teaneck in the year 2000, Fargo has looked more and more attractive. When I walk around the park in front of our house, just for example, I never clap eyes on a native speaker, nor anyone who, like myself, descends from eight to ten generations of North Americans. Given the one-fourth Cherokee I contain, some of me has been ‘American’ even longer than most of me.” Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Ruminant With A View

By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

“Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows . . . .”—From “The Whiteness of The Whale,” Herman Melville, Moby Dick

TEANECK New Jersey—(Weekly Hubris)—8/27/2012—Bear with me. We will get to Cape Cod, which is not an eventuality in which I had much faith, about three weeks ago, after eight hours on the road from New York City.

My spouse and I left for the Cape within the precise six-millisecond-wide-window in which every homo sapiens in New Jersey, New York and, for all I know, Connecticut, decided to get into her or his automobile and swing out onto I-95 (a wretched, miserable, accursed piece of interstate at any time of the year but, apparently, worst of all in early August), heading for the Massachusetts coast.

My Yoga-class friend, another writer, Kathryn, had warned me: “The traffic may be pretty bad.” Being a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, however, Kathryn’s dire warnings are often understated. I failed to catch her drift: it was, as usual, so subtle.

The traffic was not, Kathyrn, “pretty bad,” I can assure you. It was not “traffic” at all. Traffic, eventually, moves. What Dean and I entered into on I-95 was . . . . Well, remember “Musical Chairs”? That party game some of us still recall playing as birthday-cake-poisoned children? The moment when everyone freezes, and the one still moving loses a chair? Well, on I-95, no one, but no one, lost a chair on August 5^th. We were all, together, suspended, in what felt like an invisible matrix of concrete.

I’m lying, of course: hyperbole is the last refuge of the totally outraged. But, truly, it took us eight hours to complete a drive Mapquest generously estimated at five, and the very same cars—there are NOT two such Ferraris, NOT two such Porsche Targas like those to which we were glued for the duration—went over the Bourne Bridge (http://www.cape-cod-for-couples.com/cape-cod-traffic.html) with us into Sandwich, either slightly behind or slightly ahead of us, as they’d been ever since Manhattan.

When a Ferrari can’t get by an ancient Ford SUV and on with it, you are not in traffic, per se. You’re in another dimension where movement is but a fond memory. If I’d been in the Ferrari, or the Porsche, I’d have been swearing in Serbo-Croatian by the time we reached the bridge.

So. We arrived on the Cape in the pitch black dark (not mid-afternoon, as planned) and, on the Cape, we found that there are no street lights. Not only are there no street lights, but there exist quaint entities, unknown in the rest of America—unknown in the rest of the Western World, I’d opine—labeled (or not, we found) “cartways.”

Our dear friends, who’d invited us to spend a week with them at their retreat on the Cape, lived on one such cartway.

Cartway. Look it up. “A road for carts.” “A rough, unimproved road.” And, best of all: “Cartways probably got their name from the old days when ox carts were in use.”

No kidding. Ox carts!

Thank God for the Cape Cod police is all I can say because, as I’d left Logistics to the two men involved in arranging this vacation (our host and my spouse), we arrived without a real set of directions, a street address out of Alice in Wonderland, and only the host’s Florida cell phone number (a phone turned off at the late hour of our arrival, we discovered).

Returning to the bridge from the wrong coast of the Cape, on entirely the wrong access road, I flagged down my first cop near Sandwich and asked the way to Brewster, a town known to be in the vicinity of our hosts’ dwelling. This jolly, kind soul in blue directed us up (pitch-black, two-lane) 6A, and off we went, bumper to bumper once more.

How hard could it be to find an address in Brewster?

An hour farther on, and resolutely heading across the island in the wrong direction again (yes, Virginia, some of us Luddites still lack GPS’s, but not for long, damn our eyes), I spotted another patrolman. Flashing my lights, honking my horn and waving out the window, I finally got him to pull over and investigate the female lunatic in his rear view. He got on his working GPS (even a Brewster cop had to use a satellite to find a cartway a half-mile away from him), and gave us precise directions.

We then made a couple of hairpin turns on black-black black-top, went straight downhill into the woods, passing Hiawatha and Queequeg, and ran up against two No Trespassing signs which I, as a gun-toting Southern girl, was loath to pass. At that moment, I saw a light in a window up yet another, lesser stretch of cartway, and made my way towards the house, hallooing as I went. “They’re less likely to shoot a woman,” I said to Dean, optimistically.

People on the Cape are not exactly all warm and fuzzy, I found.

Mr. Crane (an alias) and his wife welcomed me warily into their mosquito-infested yard. I was not invited into their home. Southerners will blanch at this sin of omission. I mentioned the name of our hosts. They lowed as how such folks did live up the way. Well, where, exactly, I pressed. Oh, just a little farther, they said. Ichabod added, after a long pause: “Made his money in sandwiches, I believe?”

“Umm.” I paused. “In fact, Mr. Crane, our host is a world-renowned jazz pianist.” Which he is.

“Oh.” Exit Ichabod, yard right.

Back in the driver’s seat, and fuming, I still had no real idea where we were going, but I forged on, between two ponds and deeper into the Massachusetts woods. At last, another lighted window, and we were there.

Need I add that Dean and I got out of the SUV hollering at one another like banshees, our utterly gobsmacked hosts looking on in horror, and only falling asleep as my head hit the pillow prevented me from filing for divorce on the spot—from both men involved, if possible—or murdering my spouse before he woke.

Cartways. Floridian cell phones. Ichabod Crane. Cape Cod!

So, we had arrived.

The next morning, I awoke to cardinal song, sunshine, late hydrangea blooms, hazelnut coffee, two adorable-looking Pekinese (one of whom persisted in treating me like a visitation of shingles for the duration of our stay) and Nature, capital N. I was no longer in New Jersey, it appeared.

Now, I have a problem with New Jersey. I loathe it in its entirety. Countless times in my long life, I have said aloud that there are two places I would never live: North Dakota and New Jersey. Ever since moving to Teaneck in the year 2000, Fargo has looked more and more attractive.

When I walk around the park in front of our house, just for example, I never clap eyes on a native speaker, nor anyone who, like myself, descends from eight to ten generations of North Americans. Given the one-fourth Cherokee I contain, some of me has been “American” even longer than most of me.

But New Jersey has become, for all intents and purposes, a sort of super-sized, 21^st-century version of Ellis Island, without all that first port of call’s negative connotations: It’s a state of very recent immigrants, completely and blissfully unassimilated. I, who just occasionally might welcome running into someone who speaks my language or resembles me in some superficial way, have given up on such possibilities in my now-home-state.

If my husband has his way, and we live out our lives in this benighted part of the world, my obituary (yeah, I know: newspapers will have gone the way of the 8-Track by then) may read: “Last Purportedly White-Anglo-Saxon-Plus-Cherokee-Protestant Expires in Bergen County, Run Down By Student Driver From ______”: you fill in the blank with any conceivable foreign country.

On Cape Cod, however, I had just the opposite experience, and it was equally unnerving.

Once daylight hit, and Dean and I could actually see where we were driving and had got our bearings, we lit out to explore the island, cartways and all.

And the island may as well have come slap out of Norman Rockwell’s 1955.

I have never seen so many white people in one place in my life, Scandinavia included, and I spent my first ten years in Pasadena, mind you.

Over the course of our stay, Dean and I located only three African-Americans and three Asians on the Cape. Everyone, but everyone else had just walked out of an 80’s Ralph Lauren ad, or the 20^th century. And, for a resident of Ellis Island, this was an exceedingly strange experience.

I found that, once I’d been amongst all these white people for four or five days, I felt as disoriented as ever I do in Teaneck, but for diametrically opposite reasons.

It’s not that the hordes of immigrants in New Jersey are hostile, stand-offish, rude or uncivil (well, no one in the state can actually drive, but one expects that); and it’s not that all the Tommy Hilfiger Preppies-of-all-ages with their Cape-Tans on Cape Cod are hostile, stand-offish, rude or uncivil (well, there are the Ichabod Cranes, but they’re an aberration). It’s just that I find I’m most comfortable with, what? With a population that neither looks like me-times-8,000 or utterly-not-like-me-times-8,000.

The number of Romney bumper stickers and porch signs on the Cape were distressing, but I’m sure The One Percent in Teaneck fly the same colors.

It was just so, so white on Cape Cod as to be downright weird.

Ah, well. When it came right down to it, I decided, we had come for the peace, the novelty and, I found, the food.

Good God-a-Mighty! Cape Cod in August is full of produce! Our hosts brought double-crusted mixed-berry pies into the house from Feretti’s Market in Brewster (http://ferrettismarket.com), and I ate pie three times a day. I had pie for breakfast. I snuck downstairs for pie in the middle of the night. (That’s where all the pie went, Laura!)

We stopped and picked up local tomatoes, which we’re still slicing up for tomato sandwiches in Teaneck, and loaded the SUV with plums, sweet corn and pluots from the Satucket Farms produce stand (http://www.satucketfarm.com) in Brewster.

One morning, having smugly driven up and down 6A a while (we did that a lot, just to prove we’d figured out where we were) looking for and then at the Cape’s various sub-par Yoga studios (I know, I know: some people actually think Hot Yoga’s good for them), we noticed a line of people snaking around a seemingly B-flat roadside eatery in East Dennis: a sure sign of great vittles within.

No joke!

We made a leisurely U-turn and, by the time we got back to “Grumpy’s, etc.” (well, I did say Cape Codders aren’t exactly brimming with bonhomie), the line was even longer, but not very grumpy. We brought up the rear; we talked a long time to a bunch of people as white and hungry as we. They were all locals. Real locals, as opposed to summer locals. Oh, this was going to be good.

And it was. Grumpy’s (http://www.grumpyscapecod.com/breakfast.html) has a menu a wall wide, when we finally saw it, after about 45 minutes of inching our way towards the door, there was within a huge dining room full of Cape Codders being served gigantic trenchers of nosh by fellow Cape Codders.

I believe Dean ordered the “Genuine Cape Cod Breakfast: homemade fishcakes with two eggs, toast and a choice of home fries, hash browns or baked beans” . . . plus linguica.

What is linguica, we asked our waitress (who, by the way, had won the Best Legs at Grumpy’s Award the previous Christmas). Well, turns out linguica is definitively not a Ralph Laurenish edible. Instead, it’s a form of smoke-cured pork sausage seasoned with garlic and paprika and usually served in Portuguese-speaking countries. So there had been other sorts of folks on the Cape besides the Anglo-Saxons. And they could cook, too.

Having seen Chatham—“a quaint Cape shark village with a seal problem”—we decided we did not want to pay $25. apiece for tiny lobster rolls, despite the exhortations of the nice man at the Chamber of Commerce’s information booth. Instead, we went straight down to the Chatham pier and found one of the three Asians we encountered, manning a fresh fish shop. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/11/cape-cod-shark_n_1664469.html)

“Oh, if you’re looking for something actual people can afford, you want Cobie’s Clam Shack,” he said. Which just happened to be on the other side of the Cape (again), right in Brewster, on 6A. No matter. We now knew how to get there.

So, to Cobie’s (http://www.cobies.com) we repaired, and often.

It, too, like Grumpy’s, we always found jam-packed with white people, but they came in various disguises. There were grandparents with their grandkids, in for a Cobie’s soft-serve cone (all the size of Bichons frises); cyclists (and the Cape abounds with bicycle trails) in Lycra, scarfing down burgers; local Townies there with their local Townie dates; us; some rude tourists from Manhattan, also in Lycra; and two Asian girls, cleaning up after all of us, retrieving fallen napkins before they hit the deck. One of them I took aside.

“You are working way, way too hard,” I told her. “Slowwww down. Do the words ‘minimum wage’ mean anything to you? Slowww down.” The place was almost too spotless for an outdoor, roadside “clam shack,” and ran like a Rolex. Dean had a lobster roll, and we didn’t have to pawn anything to purchase it. I had fish and chips: divine. We came back the next day for two Bichons frises, one with chocolate swirl.

And that is how my tale ends: with two enormously well-fed white people, at Cobie’s, another eight-hour drive home ahead of them, but as yet unaware that the way back will be as tortuous as the way there.

I hope to visit the Cape again one day. But in February, or March, I think, taking a New Jersey friend or two along to introduce some non-local color.

PS Here’s a summer recipe I copied off a chalk board at the Satucket Farms produce stand. Simply yummy.

“Before You Go To The Beach”

Chop tomatoes; add olive oil and crushed garlic.

Leave in bowl on counter; stir a couple of times.

After the beach: cook pasta; add cold sauce; top with fresh basil and Parmesan cheese.

A salad and a bottle of wine, and dinner’s ready.

Note: All photos by the author.