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.