Churbuck.com

Seventy years ago I’d be oblivious to what was coming. Now I know too much and what I know sucks. Starting Sunday I started keeping an eye on Hurricane Earl, a category 4 storm that is now forecasted to pass extremely close offshore of Cape Cod. Very close.

The last forecast from the National Weather Service put Cape Cod on a hurricane watch – meteorological speak that it’s time to consider the options and possibilities. With a 33′ sloop sitting on a 500 pound mooring less than half a mile away, I am definitely considering the options and none of them, with 48 hours to go, are great. So this morning I went to the firehouse and asked the chief for some old firehose, grateful when he cut me off a couple sections of 2″ hose so I could split them and wrap them around the mooring pennants where they rub in the boat’s chocks. My son and I brought the boat into the town down and took down the sails and the bimini awning, anything to reduce the windage and prevent the wind from picking open the sails and causing definite mayhem. I’ll return tomorrow to lash things down and fret some more.

My options now are:

1. Stay on the mooring, hope the forecast holds, go to bed and pray the mooring holds for eight hours of 50 knot winds and some gusts over 60 miles per hour.  The tackle is only two years old, I’m on the outside edge of the mooring field, and right now the wind direction is out of the north, over land, so I will get some protection in the lee, but not a lot. The worst direction, if we were in the northeastern quadrant of the cyclone, would be south or southeast, then the entire length or fetch of the harbor would kick up some very big waves.  The other fear is the storm surge, but thankfully low tide is at 2 am, so the peak of the winds will come as the water is falling, not rising.
2. Stay on the mooring but also stay on the boat. This means actually sitting out the storm with a lifeline wrapped around me, tied to the helm, with a pair of swim goggles to keep the driving rain from blinding me, and then using the diesel and the throttle to keep the boat into the wind and the pressure off of the mooring. This is the crazy man option.
3. Try to get it pulled tomorrow morning, but that is not a sure thing — the hauler has to be in the mood and he is sure to have an extremely hectic day. That entails a trip to the dock, a visit by the crane truck to pull the mast, then a trip up into Prince’s Cove to be hauled and then parked in the back yard by the trees on four jackstands. Hurricane Bob in 1991 did some massive tree damage and who knows if the jackstands would keep the boat upright anyway. Hauling means no fall sailing – once out, then the boat is out and the season is over.
4. If it comes ashore — well, it comes ashore and the damage will be bad. Nothing to do but shrug and hope it doesn’t.

I’ve got a 18′ motorboat to pull — that will come out right at the last minute on Friday afternoon. A friend needs to borrow it to get his catboat tucked away into a hurricane hole inside of Shoestring Bay on the west side of town in the next series of bays. To make things more interesting I just became president of the association of the Cotuit Mosquito Yacht Club, and tomorrow is going to be spent making sure the yacht club’s launches are taken care, of the dock is pulled, the kid’s boats are stowed, and then 50 Cotuit skiffs hauled and stored in the Ropes Field to ride things out.  Hurricane boat pulls are the Cotuit version of an old fashioned barn raising. Several cars with trailers, a couple crews on the beach to de-rig and pull masts, another team on the water in motorboats hauling in the boats, then another crew with 4″ x 4″s to lift the boats on the trailers and another in the field to lift them off. Tomorrow ought to be busy, especially if this heavy heat persists.

The phone has been ringing all day, and everywhere you go the question is the same: “Do you think it will hit?” Smart money says it goes east off of Chatham, putting us in the northwest quadrant where the counter-clockwise spin means the winds will come in from the landside.  Forecast has it 30 miles southeast of Nantucket . That’s 50 miles from where I sit. Way too close. Way, way too close. Let’s hope it stays out there. A short jog to the west and complete devasation is a sure thing if it comes ashore. Bob was barely a hurricane and we were without lights for nearly a week, the tree damage was incredible, every pissed off homeless yellow jacket on the Cape was out for revenge …. and nearly every boat in the harbor was trashed and thrown onto the beach. If Earl does the same it will not be a very good September. All the food will spoil. People will snarl at each other in the gas lines at the gas station. I guess i need to go buy a chainsaw and a new power washer. The first lesson learned from Bob is wash the house as soon as possible given that every green leaf in the neighborhood gets shredded to confetti and pasted to the paint with salt spray. Lawn furniture to stow away … badminton nets, hummingbird feeders ….. tomorrow is going to be a long, long day.

Here’s the wind profile: The little flags point in the direction the wind will come from and the small bars indicate the wind velocity. Sustained winds over 70 mph make for a hurricane. The forecast has us gusting with peaks around 65 mph. Sunset to 3 am … it’s going to be a long nasty night. And if the power goes — well, no blogging for a long time to say the least.

Think I’m over-reacting? Napatree Point – 1938

The deterioration of the estuaries, bays and harbors of Cape Cod has come to the point where action is demanded. The death of the region’s eelgrass beds, the rafts of vile slimy algae and “sea lettuce”, the closing of beaches and the general decline is probably only visible to someone my age who can recall the gin-clear waters of the early 60s which were destroyed by the subdivision sprawl that raped the Cape in the 1970s and 80s. The solution? Tax the heck out of the residents and build a massive sewer/wastewater treatment system. Even so, the waters will likely take decades to clear, and the likely impact of the sewers will be to encourage yet more development as they have on Long Island.

There’s no turning back now, but leave it to the Conservation Law Foundation (of which I am a dues paying member) to force the EPA and local towns to wake up and deal with the mess caused by ignorant selectmen and planning boards who let the locals cash in their land for quarter-acre zoning and acres of cesspool leeching subdivisions.

“Joined by the Coalition for Buzzards Bay, the Conservation Law Foundation has sued the federal Environmental Protection Agency for failing to “adequately permit and regulate the discharge of nitrogen into the Cape’s water.”

“CLF and the Coalition also sent EPA, the Cape Cod Commission and the Barnstable County Commission (board of county commissioners) a 60-day notice that it intends to sue them for failing “to implement an areawide Water Quality Management Plan, also in violation of the Clean Water Act.”

via The Barnstable Patriot – UPDATE: CLF sues EPA over Cape wastewater cleanup.

Okay, so the Fourth of July water fight was getting a little out of hand but the baseball team started it, or actually the EPAC Grotto’s peeing clam float started it, but that’s my theory. The local landscape company towed a trailer the size of a tennis court behind a big dump truck and loaded it with the best college baseball teams in the country. Young men at the peak of their capabilities, armed with SuperSoakers the size of Iwo Jima flamethrowers and an endless supply of softball-sized water balloons, wreaking havoc down Main Street from the Kettle-Ho to the elementary school.

Someone was sure to get hurt. Some toddler diving for a piece of penny candy was going to get crushed beneath the trailer wheels like a fanatic hurling himself under the wheels of the legendary Juggernaut. Old ladies in lawn chairs were being rudely entered into a bad wet t-shirt contest that no one wanted to judge. We had to defend ourselves, and over the years the sidewalks were lined with garden hoses, pressure washers, water cannons and the war was on, escalating to the point that finally reason had to step in and say enough.

The Cotuit Kettleers sat out the 2010 Cotuit Fourth of July parade and the village was upset.

Would we take out our aggressions on the Mason’s Mariner Lodge, and do away with a dozen old men wearing white shirts and natty little aprons? Would the librarians get it next? What could be done? The omission of the boys of summer was the talk of the counter at the post office. We were mad. A ritual had been taken away from us.

The season had already opened in early June, when snowflakes still could be imagined in the rickety wooden bleachers in the shade along the third base line at Elizabeth Lowell Memorial Park, the gem of all the Cape Cod Baseball League’s ballparks, an oasis carved out of the pines and oaks a few hundred yards away from Cotuit Bay. Was this our year? Had coach Mike Roberts (UNC Chapel Hill’s coach from 1976 to 1998 and father of Oriole second baseman Brian Roberts) recruited a dugout full of superstars? It was impossible to tell. June was a difficult month, of rosters churned by the College World Series, the Super Regionals, Team USA try outs, and even the Major League scouts knew not to come with their radar guns as the college freshmen and sophomores made the wrenching transition from metal to wooden bats. The scouts would come, trying to answer the question we all asked:

Who would be the next major league superstars? They were out there, on the dusty basepaths and achingly green outfield. We knew they were out there, every summer revealed them to us. Chase Utley. Ron Darling. Mo Vaughn. Jason Varitek. Kevin Youkilis. Nomar Garciaparra. All had once stepped up to the plate, dove for liners, fumbled and stumbled for our ticket-free enjoyment on the hallowed grounds of Lowell Park. But who were they? We wouldn’t know for a few years, not realizing that the tanned pitcher who sold us our 50-50 raffle tickets in the stands would soon be standing on the mound at Wrigley or Petco or Fenway heaving heat on national television. What was clear was how blessed we were to be living in the town with the team that had won the most championships in the country’s most prestigious amateur baseball league, the league where the best of the best came to learn how to swing wood and get noticed by the scouts.

As the season progressed one learned to pick one’s place in the bleachers very carefully, to arrive precisely 45 minutes early while the basepaths were being hosed down and the coaches spraypainted new baselines. The musical cliches of the game blared through the PA – a weird playlist of country music, jump-around fist-pumping hip hop, and hair band anthems that we wished would just stop — and we all snickered at the interns behind the microphone who mispronounced “Cotuit” and referred to Cape Cod as “The” Cape Cod. Top row, back corner, brown paper sack of popcorn from the Kettleer’s Kitchen and a bottle of Poland Springs. Layout the scorecard, fill in the teams, the date, the names of the umps, the start time, and wait for the announcer to list the lineups. A few rows down, the founder of the dynasty, Arnold Mycock, for whom the Cape Cod Baseball League championship trophy is named, dean of the scorers, always presented early with the coaches’ lineups by an intern sent from the press box. Avoid sitting near the bozos — cell phone man who loudly calls his friends and always repeats the same silly cliches “…it’s the best wooden bat league in the country …,” anyone with kids under the age of ten, the Fountain of Misinformation who plaintively repeats over and over the obvious plea to the pitcher to “Throw Strikes.”

Rise for the National Anthem, cap over heart, as Nicky Chevalier takes the microphone out to home plate and we all look out to centerfield, the maroon (or is it Cranberry) uniformed Kettleers standing in a long line in front of their dugout, everyone’s eyes on the flag waving flaccid in the summer southwesterly breeze.

Play ball.

The pitcher superstitiously skips over the third baseline on his way to the mound. The umps and coaches swap line ups at home plate. The announcer reads the same script he’ll read at every game. The first pitch it thrown out by some account manager from Wells Fargo Private Wealth Advisors LLC. Their picture is taken with the catcher, they are handed the ball as a souvenir, the only one that will be given out as balls are too precious to give away blithely like they are in the majors. Shag a foul ball and return it to the red tent for a coupon to the Kettleer’s Kitchen.

And so it goes for 22 home games. The same routine, the same script, the same vista, the same rules, the same nine innings. But the players are all new. Few ever return for a second season. Yet instantly they become Our Team, their names gradually memorized through rote and repetition until they are as familiar as nephews at a family reunion.

Would this be the year? Cotuit hadn’t won the champs since 1999 and Coach Roberts didn’t have a title on his mantle yet. Bandy legged from years of hitting of swinging a fungo bat during batting practice, he gamely rises from the dugout and takes his place before us in the third base coach’s box, semaphoring hand signals and truly coaching his new charges in the art of Roberts Small Ball, a game of bunts and steals, and devious tricks like the mythical Hidden Ball Trick. His temper is wonderful to behold, a mixture of ferocious indignation and bewilderment over the genetic stupidity of umpires and the appalling rudeness of the visiting team’s fans, all philistines who should know when to sit down and shut up in the presence of his righteousness.

My scorebook gradually fills with the record of games won and lost. Exclamation points cryptically marking moments of greatness, moments uncaptured on film, lost in a park with no replay, no statisticians, no grotesque mascot dressed like a kettle. Sweat stains mark the heat waves. Mustard the hot dogs. Every page has a dogeared greasiness from the popcorn butter.

The girls in their summer clothes parade back and forth behind the dugout trying to catch a ballplayer’s eye. Vacationing bozos in Yankee caps self-consciously preen. Every foul ball into the parking lot where only a fool would park is greeted with a warning of “Heads Up!” and cheers as yet another windshield gets smashed with a spidery thunk and the line at the snack bar cowers and holds their hands over their heads.

The sailors from the yacht club arrive in the fourth inning, salt stained, barefoot and sunburned. “What’d I miss?” they ask. And I dutifully read back the highlights from the scorecard. “Bushyhead lined to third into a double play. Coach intimidated the visiting Meat into a balk. Yaz hit a dinger to center. And there’s a yellow jacket nest behind the the bathrooms that just attacked a herd of anklebiters and made them cry.”

The lack of a parade concerned us. Would it cast a dark cloud of bad luck on the home team?  Cotuit baseball fans fight all change. “The day they install lights is the day I stop coming.” But no parade? It was wrong. Something would happen and it wouldn’t be good.

It did happen. And it was good. Yesterday the Kettleers won the championship in a beautiful post-season run that saw them sweep their way into the finals against the Yarmouth-Dennis Red Sox. I missed it, obligated to attend a meeting, but the game played on my phone, a little window of video that suddenly saw a flood of cranberry colored uniforms rush the mound, silent with the audio muted, a clutch of bouncing hopping happy young men surrounding a weathered coach with tears in his eyes.

There won’t be any parade this year. In the 70s, when the Kettleers won a consecutive string of championships, the fans would drive up and down Main Street for an hour blaring their car horns. But last night the village was quiet, chilled with a harbinger of the fall to come, silent except for the emerging crickets.

There won’t be any parade this year. The players have scattered back home or back to college. Soon the Volvos and Range Rovers will file out of town, pink children’s bikes on their racks, back to what seems to be an earlier and earlier start of school every year. The skiffs will be hauled. The yacht club dock dismantled and stacked in the bushes. And the town will go quiet for nine months, waiting for them to return.

I’ve quoted it before, but I must quote it again, Bartlett Giamatti, late President of Yale, former commissioner of baseball, quoted in this summer’s baseball sermon by my friend (who also has sadly moved away) the Reverend Jeremy Nickel, quite possibly the saddest obituary of summer and baseball that I know:

“ [Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”

Upstairs, disconnected for years, is an old Western Electric wall phone. Dark green, the kind with a bell that woke that dead. Rotary dial. Stick a finger in a number, crank it over to the metal stop, and wait for it to return before doing it again with a different hole. In the center of the dial is the number – the same number this house has had since it first received phone service lord knows when. GA8-6948 a throwback to an era when numbers had names to denote the exchange. Our was “Garden Eight”

As a kid I recall two things about the phone. First was the inviolate rule of the party line. We shared the line with three other houses and our ring was one short and two long. I was banned from ever answering until an adult confirmed the ring was ours. Of course that didn’t stop my brother and me from listening in to George and Millie or Fred and Betty or the nice old lady next door.

The number was simple. Massachusetts had a single area code — 617 — and all we needed to dial were five numbers. 8-6948. The boat yard in Osterville, Crosby’s, was 8-6958, so we got a lot of misdials looking for one of the Crosby uncles.

Five digits went away in the 70s as the switches were upgraded and the population grew. We had to dial all seven digits: 428-6948. Then the 617 area code that covered the state was overloaded and in came the hated 508 area code. And before long we were a touchtone house.

But the old phone still sits upstairs, screwed into the wall above the laundry folding table.

Yes, it has been a while since this church project has shown any progress. Trust me, there are two posts in the draft queue awaiting publication, but today I had to mark a significant event: the second annual baseball sermon at my village church here in Cotuit.

The Reverend Jeremy Nickel, my neighbor and friend and baseball buddy, pitched a gem of a sermon last summer at the Federated Church, preaching (to my ears at least) that Dave Roberts, the Red Sox pinch runner who sparked the greatest comeback in sporting history with his steal of second base against the evil Yankees in 2004, opening the door for the Red Sox’s first World Series championship in modern memory, should be canonized and given sainthood for his courage to step off of the bag and fly like the wind into the unknown and future greatness.

This morning Jeremy pitched his final baseball sermon, sadly on his way to California and a lucky congregation in the San Francisco Bay Area. The topic was, “The Imperfect Game”, and with artful elegance and insight the Reverend Nickel recounted the tale of Detroit Tiger pitcher Armando Galaragga’s tragic reminder that there is no perfection in the human pursuit, only the Daedalusian drive to try, always strive, to find perfection only to see it lost, robbed, by human fallability and fate.

Baseball is indeed a sport of awesome precision and regularity, yet also a pastime rife with errors and the capricious wiles of bad luck, misfortune, and emotion. The distance between the bases, the beautiful geometry of the lines, the time it takes for a catcher to throw a ball to second to try to catch a runner stealing the base …. it all fit beautifully, played out over a numeric routine of innings, outs, strikes, and plays that while tightly prescribed and timeless, is ultimately chaotic and as subject to entropy as anything can be.

The Church:

This is where Churbucks are married, where they are buried. I was married here. I have stood on the altar stairs twice — once as a sweating groom, then before that at my father’s funeral, stammering to choke back tears as I read these lines from Melville in memory of his imperfect but brief  larger-than-life life, and his unrealized dream of sailing around the world:

“”Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings; but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that we left behind secure, were all the time before us.

“Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.”

Those were sad words to say, words I always think of when I see the little shingle chapel in my comings and goings from the post office. I am not a parishioner of the church, but it remains my church, and while I planned on saving it as the last and final church in my rounds of 52, it had to happen today, out of respect to Jeremy and his wife Nicole, who are leaving later this summer for their new parishes in California.

The Service:

Fortunately I checked the church website for the time of the service, having mistakenly assumed a 10 am service when in fact summer hours called for a 9 am start. I popped upstairs, put on my 2007 Mike Lowell Red Sox jersey (he was the World Series MVP that year and is to my mind the ultimate Red Sox for his abilities, his good humor in the face of injury, and his solid performance in the clutch), and my battered and sweat stained Red Sox cap.  The walk across the park takes all but three minutes, past the library and down the shady bower of Norwegian Maples where the hippies congregated in a noisy tribal mob during the late 1960s. Up the little hill and into the chapel, steamy in the July heat.

I took the back pew, in the corner under an open window and started to sweat. In the pew before me sat Cotuit Kettleers Michael Faulkner, the fantastic centerfielder from Arkansas State and his teammate Chad Wright who also stands in the outfield and is also batting over .300 so far this season. To my right, politely standing so the women and children filling the church could have a seat, was the Kettleer’s coach, Mike Roberts, father of Baltimore Oriole Brian Roberts. It felt good to be surrounded by talent.

The pastor, Nicole LaMarche, opened the service with announcements, a bell-choir rang the introit, and Reverend Jeremy (@PeaceNick) was given a Barnstable Bat and an old framed map of the village from the grateful congregation.

He began the call to worship with these words:

“To worship is to stand in awe under the hot sun in Fenway, to smell the fresh cut grass, the peanuts being freed from their shell …”

Then he and his wife read, one after the other, some poignant quotes about the religion of the game. Including my favorite from A. Bartlett Giamatti, president of Yale during my days in New Haven, and perhaps the best commissioner of Major League Baseball of all time:

“[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.

The sermon was the best retelling of the Galaragga incident I have heard.

Then we rose as one and sang “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

Random Thoughts:

• We’re going to miss Jeremy and Nicole
• Baseball is one of the last great things in the world, a  place where children can stand on the field with their heroes, where youth displays excellence, where men like me can exult in the timelessness of the form.

Cape Cod Baseball

Originally uploaded by dchurbuck

This photo embodies for me the unique pink light one finds on Cape Cod in the summer, a lambent pink that infuses everything with a glow as warm as the waves of heat that roll over the peninsula from June through September. The photographer Joel Meyerowitz published a classic collection of his work, Cape Light, that managed to catch these skies, but last night, while watching Cotuit play Falmouth at Gov Fuller Field, I looked up from my third base seat to see this display out to the east, over the Atlantic, beyond Chatham.

Meyerowitz shoots with an antique wooden camera, a large-format device that does a far better job than my little Canon pocket camera.

The squirting clam, Milo the drummer, sports cars, kids on bicycles … but no Kettleers due to water fight mayhem in year’s past. A good parade, if a little toned down from years past.

Kettleers beat Falmouth 5-2 at home. Great game. Third in a row for Cotuit.

Three Bays, the non-profit established to improve the water quality in the Cotuit-Marstons Mills-Osterville area has an interesting history of the barrier island at the face of the three bays: Dead Neck/Sampson’s Island. I had seen some interesting development plans for the island dating back to the 1920s that showed an air strip, a polo field, and a bridge over to Oyster Harbors across the Seapuit River. But this article provides some fascinating details about how this important migratory bird nesting area was turned into an island by the people of Osterville (with somewhat negative coastal consequences 100 years later) and then saved from development by local philanthropists.

An interesting fact: my favorite spot on the Cape, a small cove that was once the primary point of entrance and egress for Cotuit Bay into Nantucket Sound is called “Cupid’s Cove” by people in Cotuit and “Pirate’s Cove” by people in Osterville.  Here’s what the article says about the impact of the Wianno Cut on the beach, something I’ve suspected for a long time.

“Again in the late 1980’s, he began another round of sand replenishment. It appeared that the jetty that had been built to create a gateway to Nantucket Sound was causing the island to lose much of its sand every winter.”

via ThreeBays: Dead Neck Island.

I’m a dues paying member

The Cape Cod Times has posted its annual preview of the Cape Cod Baseball League season. Opening Day for the Cotuit Kettleers is at Wareham Sunday afternoon and I will try to be there. This is a strange time of year for the league — lots of players are tied up in the Collegiate Super Regionals, Team USA tryouts and the MLB Draft. Cotuit’s top player — Zack Cox at Arkansas and last year’s All-Star game MVP went in the first round of the draft to St. Louis. So it’s hard to really preview or prognosticate for another few weeks until the rosters settle down. These early weeks are interesting to watch because the players — most of whom are college freshmen and sophmores — haven’t played with wooden bats before, so it’s “small ball” with tons of errors and struggling batters.

“Outlook: The Kettleers hope the third times a charm, having fallen in the Cape League Finals the previous two years. It looks to be an entire new cast in Cotuit with 3B Zack Cox (Arkansas) drafted in the first round in this week's MLB draft. Cox was the All-Star game MVP for the West last year and hit .344 in 23 games for Cotuit before being sidelined before the playoffs with an injury. The Razorbacks sophomore was selected 25th overall by the St. Louis Cardinals, which leaves his status for a return doubtful.”

via Cape League Western Division preview | CapeCodOnline.com.

Is the arguing over the Cape wind farm over? I doubt it. Let the lawsuits begin. The Feds blessed the decade-old project today, but the Wampanoags are claiming interference with sunrise worship and ancient-once-dry-burial-grounds. I am in favor of it by the way. Here is my post from 2007 when I changed my mind.

From the Cape Cod Times:

“US Interior Secretary Ken Salazar approved the proposed Nantucket Sound wind farm today, a move proponents herald as a giant leap forward and opponents decry as a dangerous misstep.

“His approval is the culmination of nearly a decade of review by local, state and federal agencies of the plan to build 130 wind turbines on Horseshoe Shoal in the Sound.”

via Salazar approves Cape wind farm | CapeCodOnline.com.

Update: a day later the Cape Cod Times demotes the windmills in favor of local hero Siobhan Magnus.

As I draw close to the six-month mark of this amazing and humbling experience, I find myself not so much losing interest as losing my motivation to make a move on Sunday morning to the next church. This is understandable given last week’s stint of five churches during Holy Week, and I have to admit there was no way I was going to consider another Christian church this fine morning.

So off I turned to my local guide, a page on the Cape Cod Times website that lists, in some detail, the local worship options. Today I found, after months of wondering if I would ever succeed on the Cape, a Buddhist service, the Cape Sangha; a small gathering who follow the teachings of the Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. This was my first Buddhist service, and my prior education in the faith has been limited to a reading of Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, and a viewing of Bernardo Bertulucci’s Little Buddha starring a trippy recreation of Buddha’s life by Keanu Reeves. I have never visited a Buddhist temple nor worshipped/meditated in any formal sense of the concept.

I emailed the organizer of the Cape Sangha, Jim, and asked for permission to visit. He replied in the affirmative and so off I went for the 4:30 pm meditation session at the Unity Church of the Light Spiritual Unity Session in Hyannis near the Cape Cod Mall and the BMW dealership. I arrived a few minutes early, saw some others in the parking lot and followed them into the nondescript building and onwards into a nave-like space with about 100 chairs and an altar at the south end. I dropped my offering into a box, signed the guest book behind a large man with a big bushy white beard and a spring jacket with an eye painted on the back.

At the front of the “pews” was a small table covered with a cloth. On it was a candle, two framed photographs (of Thich Nhat Hanh I assume) and a small statue of Buddha. Around the table/altar was a ring of pillows for sitting in the lotus position. Around that collection of floor seating was a ring of chairs. As I cannot contort myself into the Lotus position I took a chair and sat and smiled at the two men in brown robe-like jackets sitting in the positions of prominence. I assumed one of them was Jim. By 4:30 there were 19 people gathered at the front of the church. A bank of candles flickered in the apse. There were no Christian symbols such crucifixes, but some potted plants and two tapestries which expressed sentiments along the lines of “Celebrate Community.”

I shed my jacket. I was dressed in jeans, clogs, and a polo/golf shirt — correctly assuming back home that a pair of grey flannels and a blue blazer with a bowtie would not be part of the Buddhist dress code.

What is the Cape Sangha? Let the website do the talking:

“The Cape Sangha is a group of folks who meet weekly to practice mindfulness meditation in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, teacher, scholar, author, poet and peacemaker. Our members are interested in numerous types of meditation, including Vipassana, Zen, Tibetan and nonsectarian mindfulness. You don’t have to be Buddhist to practice with us.”

The Service

I hesitate in calling it a “Service” per se, as there was no liturgy or rite aside from a benediction of sorts, the ringing of a handheld bell (in the shape of a brass bowl), and the prayerful hand gesture of namaste. Jim, the leader of the Sangha, welcomed us, encouraged us to move around and be comfortable, and then explained that there would be 20 minutes of meditation, followed by introductions and discussion, then another period of meditation before finishing in 90 minutes.

Shoes were shed, people sat very upright on the floor and in their chairs. Some sat with their eyes closed and their hands resting on their knees, palms up and fingers together. Jim recommended a deep breath to empty the mind, and then to focus on breathing — “Now I am breathing in. Now I am breathing out” — telling us that our “monkey-like minds” would think of the past and the future, but to focus back on the here and the now and the breathing.

I followed his advice and for 20 minutes found myself thinking about the bird outside (I believe it was a robin), the traffic driving past, and the sound of the airplanes taking off and landing at the Barnstable Municipal Airport just a mile or so away. I was conscious of random itches, and found myself speculating on the cause of a random itch, and how thinking about itching engenders further itching. A person coughed. I heard an occasional deep breath like a whale breaching. I heard people readjust themselves. My left buttock fell asleep. I fidgeted. I opened my eyes and looked around at the other people, freaked one of them would open their eyes and catch me peeping.

After 20 minutes the little bowl was tapped with a wooden rod, we opened our eyes, made the namaste sign, and then Jim asked us to introduce ourselves and give a “personal weather report” saying he himself was “partly cloudy.”

The others did the same — all saying their first names and hometowns (which were nearby: Mashpee, Centerville, Osterville, Cotuit, West Dennis), and delivering a little weather statement. There were a few “sunnies” and “clearings.” I introduced myself as “Dave, also from Cotuit. Visiting 52 churches and temples this year and today marks the exact half-way point.” Which I now realize was a statement in error, I am not at 26 yet. Today was 25 — but wait, actually, I haven’t written up second Orthodox church in Istanbul, and nor do I count St. Mary’s in Fall River ……

Then there was discussion of a recent PBS broadcast of a special about Buddha and Jim — who does not own a television — asked those who had watched the show to talk about it. This sparked an interesting discussion about Buddhism, historical evidence, the concept of the “middle-way” and the ecumenical nature of Buddhism which does not pray to a higher power, nor which makes any ecclesiastical demands on its practitioners to do anything or eschew anything in order to be saved or part of the program. I enjoyed that discussion very much. I thought about the surge in interest in Buddhism in the west, and remember my old mentor Bill Ziff scoffing at it. One of my favorite novelists is a Buddhist — Peter Matthiessen — as is Leonard Cohen.

A good number of people spoke — more than half of those in the room — and then we meditated again. This time I realized that like the Quakers I visited last fall, Buddhists put great stock in meditative prayer or silence and that the one thing that really appeals to me in the church/temple experience is the few moments of silence and reflection that worshiping affords.  At the end of the second mediation I definitely felt a little more relaxed and “emptied” than when I arrived, and I think I might try some meditation in the future to cut back on work stress and other psychic baggage.

At the conclusion I thanked Jim, put on my shoes and coat, and made the usual early exit. Before I could leave a lady stopped to ask me about the project, expressing her enthusiasm and encouragement.

Random observations:

• Women slightly outnumbered men.
• The Sangha is 14 years old.
• The group was mostly over 50 years old.
• It was a very refreshing experience after last week’s solemnity.
• The parking lot demographic showed a lot of foreign imports and some liberal bumper sticker sentiments.

Next week: I fly to Beijing on Sunday, so I may seek a Brazilian evangelical service some night this week, or a Jewish service on Saturday. I may try to get in a visit to the Lama Temple in Beijing, though I understand from my step-sister that it is more of a tourist thing than a religious experience.

The more I cook the more I realize I have never gone wrong with Marcella Hazan‘s cookbooks, especially my well worn and falling apart copy of  Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. On Saturday night I found myself with a lot of quahogs and about four dozen beautiful littlenecks I dug with my son on the falling tide. Littlenecks generally get opened and eaten raw on the half-shell, but I wanted a white clam sauce and some pasta so I turned to Marcella’s bible of Italian and made her version of the classic spaghettini con vongole.

The clams came from a very special spot that I won’t disclose because it’s my go-to spot for littlenecks. Quahogs are graded by size. and the most delicate and tasty are the small ones, about the size of a silver dollar, called littlenecks. A step bigger, the right size for clams casino, are cherrystones, and above them come a sort of neither here nor there middle ground that really doesn’t have a name — save perhaps “clams” — and at the high end, for stuffed quahogs or making chowder are the eponymous “chowder” clams about as big as a big man’s fist.

The smallest clams have to  be run through a steel gauge to make sure they are legal. The basket on my Ribb rake is also allegedly spaced correctly to let juveniles drop through, but I use the gauge just to be sure. Any babies get tossed into deeper water where the gulls can’t forage them and they can grow up to become chowders.

The spot is good because it is a small river — a stream really — that has a lot of water velocity with the rising and falling tide and that means the clams are fresher than the ones in stagnant water. They live in sand, not black mud, and are easy to clean and usually deliver a chewing experience without sand or grit. I also have a respect for funky clams, the kinds that give you 36 hours on the toilet or a permanent case of hepatitis. Let’s just say I don’t eat August littlenecks.

We took all we needed in 10 minutes, coming up a few times with rakes filled with six, seven littlenecks. These are not littlenecks in the picture below, but cherrystones.

We wore waders because it is April after all and waders made a day on the water a lot more enjoyable — no filling of boots, no shivering in the windchill of the speeding motorboat, the air temperature on the water in the early spring feels at least ten degrees colder than it does on land, in the yard, out of the wind. We took our littlenecks, measured them, then set off for another spot to look for bigger clams for an Easter Clams Casino and some chowder base to freeze up for the summer when there is company.

The bigger clams are a little harder to harvest, but in 15 minutes we had our limit, coming up with multiple clams on every pull of the rakes.

We packed it in, climbed back onto the boat and went for a brisk spin around Grand Island to see if Dow Clark the mechanic had success in clearing the clogged carburetor jets on the old Honda. We flew through West Bay, under the drawbridge, and past the boatyard, still in hibernation under a shroud of shrink wrap.

So the recipe? Steam the clams on high heat until the shells pop, then pluck them out and shuck them into a bowl, saving the clam juice. Saute in 6 tbsp. of olive oil about six big garlic cloves sliced very thin and a big shallot. Throw in two diced plum tomatoes, a cup of dry white wine,  two tbsps of red pepper flakes, three tbsps. of chopped parsley and reduce it down. Turn that off, boil a big pot of salted water, cook a box of thin spaghetti until it is almost done — drain, throw in the saute pan with the tomatoes, garlic, oil, etc., toss over high heat until all the liquid is evaporated. Turn off the heat. Throw in the clams and their juice, a dozen torn up basil leaves and eat. One of the better uses of four dozen littlenecks I’ve ever tried. Tomorrow – clams Casino and chowder before the Easter feast.

As the grandson of a boat builder and the great-great-grandson of a whaling captain, boats sort of go with the territory around here and verge towards a sort of floating genetic disorder that can’t be helped. With the spring peepers peeping in their vernal pools and the ospreys circling the harbor, it’s time to get ready for the season ahead.

A couple weeks ago I played hooky one morning and did the most important errand of the year — the annual renewal of the mooring permits. If I miss the March 31 deadline the mooring is lost forever. These things are arguably the single most valuable part of a Cape Cod maritime lifestyle. No mooring. No boat. Or at least, no easy boat, just a lifetime of trailers and boat ramps. Twas not always this way. Prior to the great landrush of the 1970s the locals just tossed in a mushroom anchor with a length of chain and spliced rope and buoy and that was that. Then the tragedy of the commons occurred and the regulators stepped in. I nailed three moorings. One for the motorboat, one for the sailboat, and one for the skiff.

That’s just the beginning of the ordeal. A couple weekends ago I climbed onto the big boat with a box of razor blades and cut off the white boat condom. This was like opening King Tut’s tomb. I left the hatches open for the winter air to circulate through the bilge and cabin and keep the stench of mildew down. All was well. No water in the keel well. Batteries were run down. So I hooked up a trickle charger and started the process of bringing the thing back to life.

Oh the length of the to-do list for a fleet of boats. The motorboat needs a new registration, the engine is idling weird, the steering is tight and binding. The skeg of the dinghy needs to be re-epoxied and the transom is delaminating. A block of ice trashed the stern of my scull, the Empacher and that means peeling off the deck and getting inside with some Fiberglas and resin and then going through the tedious act of filling in the gel coat on the outside of the hull. Rigging needs replacing. Winches need to be broken down, repacked and greased. Do I want to drop a few thousand on a GPS chart plotter mounted on the binnacle? Do I really need that nice Edson destroyer wheel on the motorboat? (I bought a stainless steel knock off and all is well).

Bottom paint, that great toxic mess that I’ve breathed in and out for forty years, accounting no doubt for my short term memory issues and onery children, is now easily $100 a gallon and rising. Out come the rollers. The Tyvek painters suit. My son get deputized and winds up getting so much blue on him that my other son observes that he looks like he has had carnal knowledge with a Smurf.

The dogs get paint on them. The shell driveway gets paint on it. Paint on the iPod dock. Paint everywhere.

Hands stink of paint thinner.  Making a roast chicken and realizing as it is eaten that the dominant spice is not thyme but ablative bottom paint and thinner. Going into business meetings on Monday with green fingers is a very professional statement. Trashing every pair of pants I own with two part epoxy and gel coat repair goo means I look perpetually trashed.

Then there are matters mechanical. A decade of use on the old Honda four-stroke and its multiple trips to the local mechanic who shakes his head and advises me “that engine doesn’t owe you anything, time for another.” Well another costs $7,000 and I’d rather invest that in other things: like mortgages and taxes. So back the old Honda goes for another round of organ transplants and resuscitation.  If it was a human there would be picketers standing around it urging me and the mechanic to pull the plug.

Aside from the mechanics, I do most of the work myself. Boat yards are evil expensive, so when it comes time to  change propeller shaft anodes, repack stuffing boxes, sand and varnish rub rails — I do it and I don’t mind it. I fire up the Grundig YachtBoy radio, tune into a Sox pre-season game, and listen to Joe Castiglione call a game that doesn’t matter far away in Fort Myers. Son comes out and wants to listen to his weird electronic trance music. We bicker. I feel old……

Dinghy needs a new rub rail and the transom is delaminating. Need clamps. Need WEST epoxy. Need new NiCADS for the cordless drill. Weekends are an endless round of trips to the hardware store, marine supply, mechanic and PC for yet another Amazon order…..

But it’s spring and I am back in the water. The rowing machine is about to fall silent and the scull will live again. The motorboat is back on its mooring, bobbing off of the landing, and the big sloop awaits the completion of the town dock project so the riggers can drop the mast into the step and send me on my way.

Now to find that sail cover and get it to the local canvas guy …..

While we’re on the theme of demolished gas stations; the Cape Cod Times reports the National Seashore is about to demolish a dilapidated old filling station on  Route 6 in Truro. That got me to thinking about this painting by summer resident Edward Hopper. I had a copy hanging on my dorm room wall in the late 70s. It evoked something about the old Cape that I caught a glimpse of in the early sixties before the building boom of the 70s wiped away most of the peninsula’s character.

This building may not be the exact filling station. Another further to the north burned down in 2003 and also may have been the model for the painting.

“It was the kind of filling station you see in old movies.

“The owner, with a rag stuffed in his pocket, would come out to check your oil, wash your windshield and pump your gas. There was a big stock of candy bars inside — Mounds, Milky Ways and Old Nicks. Gas was 23 cents a gallon, and they gave away dishes to boot. There was the “flying red horse” sign for Socony Mobil brand gas.

“And at this particular station, Indian Filling Station on Route 6 in Wellfleet, it was often a chance to glimpse a famous city slicker or artist such as Edward Hopper”

via Seashore aims to raze iconic gas station | CapeCodOnline.com.

Add to the storm damage from the past weekend the new wind turbine at Peck’s Boats. This is a novel design where the blades are on the trailing edge of the nacelle, or generator pod, permitting them to flex back and away from the mast in a strong gust.

Well, two blades are gone now. I hope this doesn’t set back the cause as I remain a fan of wind power. From the Cape Cod Times:

“This weekend, the gusting winds, at times measuring over 60 mph, prompted Conrad Geyser to check in on the turbine he owns at Peck’s Boats Inc. on Route 28 in Marstons Mills.

“I was looking and listening, and I didn’t see anything off the chart,” he said yesterday. “The thing was going like crazy and moving around a lot, but nothing any more extreme than we’d seen already.”

Geyser said he believes sometime in the early morning Sunday a big gust may have hit especially hard and knocked the blade tips off. He’s not sure how far they landed from the tower. Wind turbine blades can be subjected to enormous pressures, especially in the Cape’s notoriously stormy weather.

“They’re light,” he said. “But anytime you have something falling from the sky, there is concern.”

via Turbine failures stir up concern | CapeCodOnline.com.

Atlantic white cedar is the perfect wood for boat building and is difficult to find these days with the price to prove it. I have four enourmous planks in the old sail loft behind my bedroom, leftover from the days when my grandfather Chat built Cotuit Skiffs in the boat shop. The wood is all but rot-proof.

On Sunday I took my son and the dogs for a walk around one of the best examples of a cedar swamp on Cape Cod, the Almy Cedar Swamp in Cotuit off of Old Post Road. There aren’t many left and winter is the best time to explore. Here’s a link to a site with some good background information. Interestingly, they aren’t technically “cedar” but cypress swamps.

Cedar swamps are unique biotropes found along the east coast from Maine to Georgia. They are true swamps that support a species of tree that is more related to the cypress than the cedar.  Chamaecyparis thyoides is a pretty tree, a definite break for the eye after the typical scrub oak and pines that carpet Cape Cod. The habitat and growing conditions are so unique that I went most of my life without ever seeing a cedar swamp. A few years ago the Barnstable Land Trust and some local conservationists pulled out the stops to preserve a big tract of open space in Cotuit around Cordwood Landing. Included in the parcel was the Almy Cedar Swamp. This is what it looks like from the air — note the definite difference in the foliage.

The swamp isn’t easy to find. One walks north on a dirt road across from the Cordwood Landing way to water, across Old Post Road, and north towards Eagle Pond. A half mile in, on the right, is a hidden path down to the swamp. Winter is the best time to explore because the swamp is frozen and one can actually poke around among the trees. In the barreness of winter it is is strange to step into such a green and verdant space.  The silence is amazing and the woods are cathedral-like.

Flickr Video

The trees are very tall and seem, gauging from their girth, to be a few hundred years old. According to one scholarly paper, the Cape’s cedar swamps are less than 4,000 years old.

Walking around the swamp is very cool. The ice makes it easy to poke around the frozen peat and see the moss knobs around each trunk.

These were valuable trees back in the day, but some have survived because they are so difficult to extract from the swamps. It goes without saying the swamps are endangered, filled in, converted to cranberry bogs, or just dammed up and drowned. The largest is on the outer Cape near the Marconi station — it is 11.8 acres. I have no idea how big the Almy Cedar Swamp is — but know of at least two other smaller ones hidden around Cotuit.

While it’s tempting to wonder if anyone would care if I dragged a piece of deadfall out of the swamp to turn into a new skiff, I guess I should first check the condition of the planks in the sailloft. Cool to think the boat that defines Cotuit is made from wood logged from Cotuit’s swamps.

Saturday and the sun was beaming down and melting the grey snowdrifts. The boat looked lonely. I put the battery on a charger, emptied last season’s remaining gasoline into a jerry can, and refilled the tank with three gallons of new gas and a shot of ethanol treatment.

Backed up to the trailer, connected the hitch, and 500 yards later was backing down a snow covered ramp into Cotuit Bay. I pushed off with an oar, anchored in deeper water, and for three minutes coaxed the dormant Honda back to life with the choke and throttle. When I was 100 percent sure it wouldn’t fart out when I was in the middle of the harbor I came back into the beach, loaded the two terriers aboard, and took off for Dead Neck, the barrier island at the head of the bay.

As my son said when he declined my offer to accompany me, “You are only doing this so you can say you are the first to do it.”

That was not the motivation. Anyway, there is a simple thrill to doing this in February:

I anchored near Cupid’s Cove, the ancient inlet (now clamming cove) out to Nantucket Sound, careful to keep the boat off the beach so I wouldn’t have to push it off if the tide went out. I offloaded the dogs (who went into immediate mania and starting biting my boots) and satisfied the boat would be there when returned, headed off for a complete circumperambulation of the Island.

I brought a garbage bag and scavenged all the plastic I could find from the wrack line where the moon tides had deposited it.   There was more man-made trash on the inside, bayside of the island, reflective of where the people are in the winter and where the prevailing northerly winds blow from

Around the Point of the island (which received a bit of a trim from the dredge this winter to widen the channel) and down the outside of the beach, flawless and without footprints, just the overwash signs of high tides and winter storms. After a half mile of walking with the wind in the sun I took off my coat. The trash bag was getting full. Halfway down the beach and I popped up on a dune to see if the boat was still where it was supposed to be. It was.

And onwards down to Osterville and the Wianno Cut, where the dredged spoils from the Cotuit end of the island were pumped to shore up the dwindling beach in front of Bunny Mellon’s house.

Without some beachgrass that too will wash away, thanks to the jetties built 100 years ago that now block the natural ebb and flow of the coastal sands.  I sat down for a second, patted the dogs on the head, and then headed back towards the boat.

The dogs and I crossed the island at Cupid’s Cove, where some ice still lingered, and with our bag of trash made it back to the boat. Which was now riding at anchor in much deeper water than I left it. The solutions were:

a. undress , wade out, start boat, return to beach and get dressed again

b. take off boots and socks and attempt to roll jeans up above knees

c. just wade out, flood the boots, and climb aboard and then cruise back home at warp speed before hypothermia set in

I opted for plan C and soaked my self right up to the belt line. flopped into the boat, emptying the seawater out of the boots and onto my face. I was very happy to be the only person on the water at this point as an audience would not have been appreciated.

I phoned home, told my son to meet me at the ramp with the trailer, and fifteen minutes was back home in the shower.

So ended a good beach walk and motorboat ride in February.

The plan last Sunday morning was to hit a “regular” church but on the way I saw a few people enter the Assembly Hall of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in North Falmouth on Route 151 near the Massachusetts Military Reservation. I turned around and casually slipped in for what may be one of the more novel religious experiences since I started lurking in strange churches last autumn.

I try to find a new denomination everyweek so I don’t fall into the lazy trap of repeating the tried and true. With three Episcopalian visits on the board and two more scheduled I could easily be accused of sticking to what I know when the point of this exercise is to check out the mystery religions I may never have cause to visit again.  With this entry I officially cross the one-third mark in my 52 churches and need to start seeking out the significant Protestant holes in my experience as well as the religions that are going to be tough to track down (Buddhism, Hindu, and Sikhism are the big ones on the list now).

My prior experience with the Jehovah’s Witnesses has been a few random door-bell-ringing-points-of-contact where well-dressed young men, travelling in pairs, come bearing pamphlets and prayers. The second was when I worked as an orderly in suburban Boston hospital and witnessed a drastic surgical procedure on a child who’s spleen had ruptured in a school bus accident and had to have surgery without the benefit of a blood transfusion which Witnesses prohibit due to a specific Biblical admonition against third-party blood. I believe, but can’t confirm, that one of my great-great-grandfather’s four daughters was a Witness, but that is based on faint hearsay and some found copies of the faith’s signature publication, The Watchtower.

Of course the Witnesses’  headquarters in Brooklyn is a familiar sight across New York City’s East River, and according to my brother-in-law Jim,  the Witnesses dominate the dry wall trade in NYC in the 1980s.  I have no reason to doubt his word on this, but at the same time I have no evidence that this is still the case today.

The Assembly Hall is a neat, trim single story building with no rooftop steeple or other overt religious contrivance. I parked and walked back around to the front of the building, up a few steps and into one of two doors. Two gentlemen dressed in suits immediately made me feel under dressed in my Merrill snow clogs, green corduroys, and blue blazer sans necktie. I scanned the tables for some sign of collateral (pamphlets, programs, etc.), saw none, but heard a man’s voice amplified through the sound system.  I said hello to the two deacons and entered the main room in the Hall.

It had three banks of chairs, about ten rows of 15 each, and was more than 75% filled when I entered. A man in a suit stood on the dais behind a lectern and was preaching on the topic of the Sabbath. As I walked to my seat in the last row of the farthest bank of chairs he told the congregation to turn to a specific place in their Bibles. Immediately I was at a disadvantage as I don’t own a Bible and none were furnished. I took off my coat, sat down, and started to take notes, not sure what I had missed as I obviously was entering late.

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I walked most of the eastern shoreline of Cotuit yesterday, breaking the hike into three sections. One at 7 am. One at lunch, and the last in the late afternoon around sunset. All told I covered six and half miles of mostly sand, with some Main Street pavement mixed in. The dogs accompanied me for half of the distance, their favorite thing in the world is a beach walk. Indeed, all I have to say to them is “Do you want to …..?” and they start bouncing off the furniture and assault each other in anticipation.

The new camera is a nice thing to bring along, especially its high definition video capabilities. I find myself very fond these days of Flickr’s video hosting for two reasons: the Flickr uploader application bundles the videos on the camera up with the still pictures so I don’t need to upload stills to one place and videos to YouTube; and second, Flickr is not normally blocked in China or Turkey — two places where YouTube is dead.

First, a video of some Canada Geese exploding off of the marsh when I surprised them at Handy’s Point. Good thing Captain Sullenberger was not on the ascent in the neighborhood.

I started at the town dock right at sunset — which at the start of this week at this latitude is 5:15 pm. By Sunday it will be 5:31 — so we’re gaining two minutes of daylight every day now. There’s still ice in the harbor — it comes and goes depending on the wind and temperature. This sheet stuck against the town dock makes an interesting ringing sound as the waves wrinkle underneath it.

Then along the beach to Lowell’s Point. Above is the abandoned home of the former president of Harvard, Abbot Lawrence Lowell, also known as the arbitrator in the Sacco-Vanzetti case early in the last century.  The cement sea wall and old wooden groins are disintegrating.

Then along the shore to the boat ramp at the foot of Old Shore Road, where this old sign warns people not to anchor on the submarine cable that runs across the bottom of the bay to Grand Island.

My father always advised setting the mooring of the family boats to the south of the cable, in the belief that in a blow they would drag through the black mud and fetch up and hook onto the cable. So much for warning signs. I think the old man was right though. Stay to the south of the cable.

Then around the fresh water springs at Hooper’s Landing where Conrad Geyser proves the best use for an O’Day Daysailor is to be reborn as a clamming catamaran named the Thermoplayae.

The rest of the walk is smooth sailing down the broad sands of the yacht club beach to Handy’s Point. Ducks cruise along, the winter sticks on the moorings look like crosses in a military cemetery, and critters rustle in the underbrush under the bluff. The dogs get freaked out by something at the same place along the beach. I think a coyote must have killed something there  because they sniff at the spot and then cling to me like something bad is going to happen.

Handy’s Point is where my great-great-grandmother used to live, before she sold the place to be closer to the village in the winter. Can’t blame her, husband at sea, infants, big drafty house on the beach. Her descendants may wish for the view, but the salty old timers wanted nothing to do with the beach. That’s where bad things happened during storms and where the lower class clammers and watermen made their livings.

I find myself needing beach time more this time of year than the middle of summer. It’s just me and the dogs and no pissed off waterfront property owners, few ticks, and a vacant harbor to gaze out on.

I would make a terrible Jew.

On Saturday I visited my first synagogue and attended my first Jewish services since Hiram Samel’s bar mitzvah in 1972, thus this is the first Jewish visit of the series.  It was a reform congregation in Hyannis, one founded in 1933, located on Winter Street in a contemporary building that is at most thirty or forty years old. I give my participation a C minus at best, but throughly enjoyed the service, particularly the warmth of the congregation and the high degree of communal participation by all in attendance.

This was the most confusing service for me to participate in, with some serious revelations into the depths of my complete ignorance of the Jewish tradition. Example: I did not know the Jewish name for God (Adonai) I certainly do not know how to read Hebrew, let alone pronounce it. I am not used to reading from right to left. I could go on, but let me forge on first. I approach this entry gingerly as good mensch friends like Uncle Fester are sure to howl at my Judaic Ineptitude.

There are not a lot of synagogue options on the Cape.  The other synagogues I’m aware of are in Falmouth, a “Chabad” in Hyannis, and of course the oldest in the country, the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island. When my eldest son was in third grade he  participated in a “Local Heroes” project which paired him and his classmates with local leaders — his “hero” was the former Rabbi of the Cape Cod Synagogue — and so he shadowed the man for a term, visiting the synagogue on several occasions.   Of the religions I hope to learn the most about in this project, Judaism leads the list due to its venerable age and traditions, and  its commonalities and differences with Christianity (shared geographical locus, Old Testament history, etc.).

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