The Virtue of a Rainy Day

Showers were promised the entire month of April, but with the exception of a Nor’ Easter that swept through, any chance of rain has blown over until a late spring deluge that didn’t stop for five days.  New England weather lives up to its reputation in its stubborn refusal to be definable at all.

Tomorrow, the parking lot will be rife with surfers in wetsuits, eager to ride the storm's aftermath, but this morning, the ocean is roiling, almost white with salt and waves breaking over each other. Within 100 yards, my basket is full of plastic caps from soda and water bottles.  The ocean has hiccupped a kind of shutter, square with rusty hinges and empty eyes, which I figure once kept it open by hooks hanging from a window sash somewhere. 

Pepper runs right at the waves but stops on a dime, just letting his paws get wet. I love a good rainy day, when the roof sounds like there are ten workers up there pounding nails and you know that when it’s over, the air will smell fresh and clean, but today, I think if I could stand the cold, I would walk right in and disappear like Pepper disappears against the sand.   This is the mood I wake up in.

This intemperate climate has me unsettled. I have been pacing the cottage, picking through almonds and sunflower seeds and the two pounds of Cadbury Milk Chocolate Easter Eggs my mother sent me, listening to Fresh Air, which repeats three times daily on the WCAI, the Cape Cod NPR station. I never thought I'd get sick of Terry Gross. 

SIDEBAR: 

Look at all these links about the goodness of Cadbury mini-eggs!

Wiki

Thick Egg Whites Blog

Not Entirely Arbitrary Review of Food

Cyberpunks

BakingBites.com

NZ Girl Reviews

4 The Love of Feasting Blog

YouAreMyFave.com

Candy is Awesome

Later in the day, I force myself to join my neighbor at the Senior Center's community garden. This will be good for me, I think. I need to get my hands in the dirt. Trisha has offered me seeds and a small space in her plot if I help with the watering and some of the maintenance. I will be here through the end of July, and she thinks peas, lettuces, kale, beans and beets will be good, but I will probably not get one of her watermelons or any eggplant.

The latter I can live without.  It is one of the few foods I don’t eat. Along with tunafish salad, large roe that pop open in your mouth, mortadella and for that matter, anything labeled "lunch meat".  We brave the chill and pull back the black plastic that has been protecting the soil over the winter months, mixing in mulch, seaweed and fertilizer.

I'm leaving town for some much welcomed work. Pepper will stay at the Ark Animal center next door.  Hopeful for a change in the weather, I am having him shaved down, which I will discover is not their forte. When I pick him up three days later, he looks he’s been given a buzz cut courtesy of a five year old. 

The threat of rain looms, greeting me on the other side as I emerge from Penn Station with a downpour. There is a bitterness that a chilly late spring rainstorm can send through your bones. (Oy! My kingdom for a bathtub!) This somber mood is fitting for the infamous location we are shooting at, an empty floor at the Manhattan Psychiatric Center on Ward's Island. "It's the last place you want to be sent on an insanity plea", a lawyer friend tells me.

Our final day on set, afternoon sunlight bursts through the dirty institutional windows. A few crew members take their bikes out of production trucks and ride home.  Back in the city, people have shucked their rain gear in favor of sandals.  You would have thought the streets were wet down for a movie shoot.  The ice cream cone I get at the Hagen Daaz counter just about melts in my hand. It is steamy inside the station but cold on the train.

I collect Pepper early in the morning and we drive out to Nauset Beach, where the Outermost House once stood.  The day is so glorious; I have tears in my eyes. Truly. 

Everyone on the beach greets each like old friends.  We are all giddy in soaking up the warmth of the sun.

As soon as we hear the waves, Pepper's ears pop up, alert. A smile breaks out on his face and I let him free. He tears towards the water. This is really the only time I see him smile, when he is by the beach. He can run around for hours. Me, I look for stones. Sometimes a color will strike me and I'll  pick those. Today, I choose perfect circles. 

When we finish our meet and greet with the other revelers, I spot a park ranger waiting at the top of the stairs.  I click Pepper's leash on him as we begin our ascent.  

"Are you going to ticket me?" I ask him.  He takes a few minutes to consider this question, maybe mulling over if I am being a wise ass or not.  I size him up. Young. Probably a rookie. He says, 

"It wasn't the leash that I noticed. It was that basket."  This little thing that I purchased at the AIM thrift store on Main Street for a quarter is now filled with my bounty of circle rocks.  "Really? It's so small" I say.  Now he probably is sure I'm giving him a hard time. 

"You may not realize this, but you're disturbing the marine life.  I'm going to let you pick two, and then you're going to have to toss the rest back." "Really?" I repeat.  I start hemming and hawing. It becomes a difficult decision.  “I don't like that I have to choose but I guess it isn’t Sophie's Choice, now is it?” I tell him when he begins to look impatient. He doesn’t get the reference, taking my basket and dumping the contents into the rose bushes lining the curb. 

"What did you do that for? I would have taken them down to the beach. " We both look down at the 60 + steps.  

"You may not realize this", he repeats, "but marine life is existent up here as well."   

"Are you saying that someday this will be shore line?" sweeping my arm around the parking lot. He doesn't want to discuss global warming with me.  "I'm not going to ticket you, but I am going to give you a warning".

We walk back to my car so that I can give him my I.D. I'm grateful that he didn't see my New York plates before making his decision. By time he has finished writing a very detailed citation, officially notated with numbered codes, many of the cars have left.  

He hands me the original and flips the carbon copy behind the pad.  "What about those?" I point out the tell tale blue bags of dog poop people have left in the now vacated parking spots.  "Isn't that littering?"

I should just go, but warning in hand, I don’t have anything to lose.

"Well, we haven't put out the garbage cans yet, so people don't have a place to dispose … " and his voice trails off.

 "Hmmmm." I nod my head.  "Uh huh."

As I get into my car, I look back at him.  "Maybe the park service could get on that sooner rather than later, don’t you think?”

A bit of spring fever has gotten into me. No doubt - I am smug and sassy.

A canopy has spread over Route 28 in the days I have been away. Oak trees have burst lime-kelly-clover-green leaves.  The scent of lilacs mingles with newly mown grass. Purple bearded iris and pink heather edge wooden fences, off setting the sea washed clapboard houses with shutters painted bright yellow, turquoise, and fuschia. The effect is stunning and I am reminded of e.e. cummings’s beautiful testament to spring: 

i thank You God for most this amazing

day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

Without a little rain… I think… we would have none of this. 

Making Memories...Memorial Day Weekend

The energy started ramping in town up after lunch on Friday, and by 4:00 PM, it was palpable. 

Wooden sandwich board signs have been propped up along the traffic island, eye level with those waiting to turn left into downtown Wellfleet, with notices of the Wednesday Farmer's Market, the newly renovated Preservation Hall’s Annual Birdhouse Auction, the Flea Market’s boast of 300 vendors and an announcement of the Drive In's season opener: "Men In Black 3" with a "21 Jump Street" chaser. This is how I plan to spend Sunday night.

According to the town website, Wellfleet’s local population is 3,500, but that figure more than quadruples during the summer, starting Memorial Day weekend. This is when many of the second home residents begin their return, putting in their annual flower beds, washing down the lawn furniture, and locking in their lucrative rentals for July, and perhaps August.

The town grocery has extended its hours from 7 to 7, shelves have been stocked with Annie’s Organic products and the current New York Times best seller list, with multiple copies of Fifty Shades of Grey.   

As if to catch the wave, the owner of The Juice hurriedly posted an “Opening at 5:30 Today” proclamation as I was driving by.   At our own beach, Lecount Hollow, a little booth has been plopped down in the middle of the night, straddling the parking lot, waiting to check beach passes once we pass into June.

From the Lobster Claw in Orleans to Russ & Marie’s Marconi Beach BBQ to Moby Dick’s on the north edge of town, the restaurants on Route 6 have been scrubbed down, without a smidgen of dust lurking anywhere among the seaside décor of old bottles, nets, buoys and antique fishing lures. Tables and benches are thick with aqua paint and coats of lacquer; floors are polished to a high sheen.

Shiny menus mirror the usual seaside summer fare of fried clams, scallops, little necks, steamers and Wellfleet oysters.  The parking lots are packed at Mac’s Sushi, Winslow’s Tavern and the Pearl Bistro (sporting its newly restored “e”).  A line snakes around the front of the Bookstore Café.  A clamber of voices and live music wafts through the open windows,

Locals dread this time of year, and it’s easy to see why. All of the street parking is taken, sidewalks are full, the summer folk arrive, feeling entitled and the locals feel pushed out. To emphasize my point - the regulars’ plastic white chairs outside the package store have been removed.

My movie friend has offered to pick up lobster rolls & sweet potato fries from P.J.'s, waiting patiently among the crowd.  The take out counter has been mobbed three people deep all weekend.  

“Your people are encroaching the parking lot at P.J’s” he tells me when we meet in the parking lot of the South Wellfleet Post Office. I remind him that he was a summer boy himself before settling in to a family home seven years ago. 

It's hard to go to a Drive in and have a bad time.  Case in point: the Century Twin, Inglewood, California, 1997 where I rediscovered 5^th Avenue candy bars and fell in love with “Con Air” (and a Texan to boot), but sadly, this weekend's debut offering disappoints dramatically. 

It may have been that the large screen magnified both the absurdity of Tommy Lee Jones’ facial work and Jonah Hill’s character arc, (finding the courage to fire a gun at a perp, which he does following a Depp/DeLuise cameo where they die a slow, painfully written death).

It may have been that sweet potato fries get cold quickly, and by the time we decided on popcorn, the concession stand was closed.

But it is more likely that the experience did not live up to the last time I was in this same parking lot, thirty years ago, for the double feature of "The Blues Brothers" and "Poltergeist". My father spent most of the first movie awkwardly explaining the "adult" humor to my younger brother while, at 15, my friend Christine and I snuck Merits and tried to look super cool on the roof of my Aunt Ellen's primer black Camero.

On Monday, I walked through the Snow Cemetery in Truro. Plenty of old outer cape families are buried here, members of the Paines, Hatches, and Newcombs, names I recognize from beaches, roads and landmarks named for them.

Someone from The American Legion has marked Veteran’s graves with tiny flags and plastic medallions, most from the Civil War. It occurs to me that I don’t know where my relatives are buried or if anyone is tending to their graves. I only know that the last of my father’s ashes were released on Boxing Day, 2007, at Race Point, here on the tip of Cape. 

For Pep's last walk of the day, we head to our local. Splashes of sand pool through the parking lot of Lecount, evidence of the towels and coolers that were shaken out before loaded into trunks.  It is just before sunset, and straggling bathers are leaving, having waited until the last moment, and taking with them memories of the first weekend of summer before braving the traffic on Route 6.

I’ve been in that car before, the crisp feeling of sun burnt skin on part of the body that the lotion didn’t find, the sand you’ll see wash down the drain and the rolling dreams you'll have that night, of the waves you were in that afternoon.

The beach has been positively trampled, littered with footprints, paw prints, pieces of coal, disjointed and discarded grape stems, orange peels, another Mylar balloon careening back and forth from its entrapment on the shore line, and the inevitable size four pair of children’s Crocs, left, as if to make a statement, so obviously by the path.

Hundreds of scents pique Pepper’s nose. He doesn’t know where to mark his territory. Usually he is headlong towards the water racing up and down and chasing any stone I throw to him, but he is zig zagging back and forth back and forth like he’s had too much chocolate.  There was plenty of his kind here today too. I cannot smell anything, not summer, not even the ocean.

  

My sense of territory and smell is off, probably like Pepper feels.  The sudden emptying out of the town has made me tired, and I get under the covers to settle into a marathon session of GIRLS and wishing I had a bathtub and radiator to tie my laptop to.