Cape Cod’s World of Summer Delights

A gull’s view of Cape Cod, that famous sickle-shaped peninsula off eastern Massachusetts, shows it to be a patchwork quilt of marshes, beaches, heather, forests, salt ponds, bogs and sea. Small, tidy, without flash, it is only 70 miles in length and, at its widest point, a modest 20 miles. But it has about 560 miles of lovely shoreline.

With its clapboard houses, bobbing boats and eel ponds, Cape Cod has always been a popular resort. In summer, it holds a world of alternatives: dunes and seashore; cranberry bogs and cruises; and restaurants, none of them far from the buoyant smell of salt air. The diversity of the Cape encourages the photographer, the fisherman, the golfer, the beachcomber. And there is the happy family on holiday: husband, wife and kids all zooming down to the beach with their white putty-ball bodies, dropping in their excitement a trail of pails, towels, lotions and chocolate Yoo-Hoos.

This lure of the beach is, in fact, partly responsible for how I came to be here. When I was a child, my family often visited the Cape, where I would fall into the beach-pail-and-learning-to-swim routine. When I moved here years later, the place seemed a perfect corner to be near cities (New York and Boston), the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the sea, primarily the sea.

The Cape’s year-round population of 200,000 swells to nearly 600,000 in the peak months of July and August. Locals call the tourists “sea gulls,” and being born on the Cape counts for a lot. I have lived here 25 years and am still considered an outlander. Cape Codders, however, are among the kindest--if wariest--people on earth. They have time for anyone. It is the relatively recent citizens who are closed, taciturn and of the type who would consider me a “wash ashore.” There is also among the natives an unbudging lack of interest in going anywhere else. “I have to go off-Cape next week,” a local recently told me. I asked him where. His reply, sighing: “Seattle.”

There are 15 separate villages on the Cape, but there is a marked difference--a style, if you will--between one small town and another. The southern end has such posh places as Osterville, Wianno, Cotuit and Hyannis, where the Kennedys play during summer and which has a hip, even wild, side. At the northern tip is Provincetown, the Cape’s liveliest town, popular with the gay crowd.

I live “mid-Cape,” in West Barnstable, still very much a village. Even it, alas, has suffered from recent spates of overbuilding, in which bulky and perfunctory new houses are slammed together in mere weeks. My house is an old Victorian with eight rooms, built in 1895, and is now worth at least three times what I paid for it.

Cape Cod was so named in 1602 by the adventurer Bartholomew Gosnold for its “great stoare of codfish” in the Atlantic waters. The historical significance of the Cape, though, has long been connected with the Pilgrims. They arrived at Provincetown in 1620, before landing at Plymouth. In this very place they ate their first seed corn, saw their first Native Americans and began whaling. Soon the area’s square-riggers were carrying American products all over the world.

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Early Spring on Cape Cod can be rainy and cool, but around May, just as the quinces are turning red, the sun seems never more lovely and young women begin appearing, looking for jobs as waitresses. There is such a rich and general reverie of fresh sea air and wide blueberry skies that it takes your breath away.

Memorial Day officially opens the season. People from Boston drive down to air out their summer cottages. In local markets, it can be great sporting for tourists to hear Cape Codders asking for “steamers” (clams), “cawn” (corn), “slush” (sugared ices) and “tonic” (sodas).

Traffic jams on weekends on both sides of the Sagamore and Bourne bridges, the two main crossings onto the Cape, are legendary, and on Memorial Day, July 4th and Labor Day stopped cars can stretch for 12 miles. If bridge traffic leaves you hungry, stop at the Sagamore Inn in Bourne for unpretentious decor and superb seafood. The inn is busy in season, with long lines. Still, the 36-year-old restaurant, owned by the Pagliarani family, is my favorite on the Cape.

Cape Cod restaurants are famous for their seafood. Most serve scallops, East Coast clams called quahogs (pronounced “KO-hogs”), bluefish and scrod. Scrod is a euphemism for the catch of the day, and can be codfish or haddock. Old hotels came up with the catchall name to save having to reprint menus, and scrod is now laughably thought by many people to be an actual species of fish.

Fried clams like the ones served at the Sagamore Inn are a true Cape Cod specialty. The soft, chewy belly contains the essential taste of the shellfish, but many places outside the Cape trim the bellies and serve only the necks, which don’t offer much flavor. There are plenty of clam shacks on the Cape, with a quart costing about $20.

Cape Cod means many things to many people, and I have devised interesting itineraries for visitors with various interests, not always beach-related.

A tour for history lovers: This itinerary might begin in Sandwich, just over the Sagamore Bridge. A walking tour of the town would include three historic landmarks. The Sandwich Glass Museum on Main Street--site from 1825 to 1888 of one of the nation’s major glassmakers--has rare examples of fine glass in jewel-like colors. The Dexter Grist Mill, built about 1650 next to a pond, has a restored mill still in operation that, with a water-powered turbine, produces freshly ground cornmeal. The Hoxie House is a saltbox house restored to its original 1675 interior. There’s also the Heritage Plantation, on 76 acres with renowned rhododendron gardens. Here you can see a restored 1912 carousel, cigar-store figures, a collection of Currier & Ives prints and some classic cars, including Gary Cooper’s Duesenberg and President William Howard Taft’s White Steamer.

In Provincetown, at the Provincetown Museum and the Pilgrim Monument on High Pole Hill, one gets a tremendous overview of the Cape. On a clear day, you can walk up the 116 steps in the 252-foot-tall granite tower and get a glimpse of faraway Boston.

A tour for science buffs: One must begin with the Oceanographic Institution complex at Woods Hole on the southwestern tip of the Cape. The aquarium here is the oldest in the nation, founded in 1871 and operated by the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Then there is the Cape Cod National Seashore, 44,000 acres of conservation land that make up 11% of the Cape’s total area. The park stretches through six towns--Chatham, Orleans, Eastham, Wellfleet, Truro and Provincetown--and includes some of the finest seashore on the Atlantic coast: sandy beaches, bike trails and nature paths (with guided walks).

In South Wellfleet, in the neck of the Cape, is where Guglielmo Marconi, the Italian who developed wireless telegraphy, sent the first transatlantic message to the King of England in 1903. There’s a model of the station, along with the remains of a few giant antennae. During the summer, Wellfleet has an interesting weekday flea market at its still-functioning drive-in movie theater. Here I’ve bought 45 and 78 rpm jazz records to add to my collection.

For sporting types: I enjoy clamming, for which you need a license. Old Cape Codders are notorious for not divulging their favorite spots. But more often I go fishing with my 9-foot rod and #105 Penn reel down to the Sandwich docks by the Cape Cod Canal, which separates the peninsula from the mainland, or on a boat when I can persuade a friend to take me. In summer, not far offshore, I catch bluefish, bass and occasionally cod. Cape fishermen I know pan-fry bluefish in pure gin. Bluefish has a dark flesh, and the gin neutralizes its fatty, oily taste.

The Cape Cod Summer Baseball League is fantastic, with semipro teams such as the Cotuit Kettlers and the Hyannis Mets. Famed players such as Carlton Fisk and Nomar Garciaparra started here.

The literary Cape: There is the Cape of painters and writers, and the Cape of thinkers, of nature mystics and solitary brooders. They tend to hide out in remote, romantic places like Eastham, Outer Brewster and the wind-swept parts of the Cape’s outer arm, where the surf comes in with loud crashes.

You can walk the very streets in West Barnstable where Herman Melville courted Elizabeth Shaw, his future wife. Or see the train station where Henry James disembarked to take a buggy ride to Cotuit (“a delightful little triumph of impressionism,” wrote James of the Cape). On a visit here in 1849, Henry David Thoreau set out to walk the Cape, and did so once again in 1850. He turned his notes from those trips into a wonderful book, “Cape Cod.”

For the young and restless: The college student wants none of this literary business. His or her Cape Cod reaches just about everywhere, notably Falmouth, teeming Hyannis and roughly any large beach. Sex! Beer! Parties! It is still the old hunter/gatherer population, old as time, a gaggle of jughead guys in Bermuda shorts, ragged sweatshirts and Topsiders with no socks. (“So preppy it hurts,” was Lisa Birnbach’s breezy judgment about Cape Cod in “The Preppy Handbook.”)

Either they watch with unconcealed delight the gluten-smooth girls walking along the beach, or they throw footballs back and forth until it’s time to drop what they’re doing, grab some girl or other, and kerplunk her into a gulping wave. It is a merry hell, a gathering of bright young things, pop-topping cans and blaring radios and stolen kisses.

The Cape for families: They also have a Cape Cod, as mine once did. The station wagon--probably from Boston, frequently from Connecticut, often from metropolitan New York--wobbles along, packed with picnic baskets and a beach umbrella sticking out of the roof hatch like a bruggioli. Commonly heard: “Dad, can we rent a beach-buggy?” “I swear, if we go on a wildlife tour, I’m jumping out into the traffic!” “Look, whale-watching!”

For yammering kids, red-faced from the steam heat, howling for a cold drink, a vacation is touch-and-go. No place suits for long, and so what follows is a gypsy round of animal farms, go-carts, trampoline-bouncing, miniature golf, jeep rides, pedal-boating, bike rides, and endless runs of appeasement for gooey double-decker hamburgers, Twinkie fixes and restroom stops.

For beach lovers: My favorite is Dowse’s Beach, a beautiful stretch of sand in the town of Osterville (snobs hated the old name “Oysterville,” so they changed it) on the southern ocean side of the Cape. I also recommend Sandy Neck Beach in West Barnstable, on the bay side. An entire library has been written on the ecologically unique Sandy Neck area, where beach, dunes, forest and marsh are all marvelously contiguous. I often jog there, or take nature walks into the dunes, where on a July afternoon you could be in Egypt. I’ve mentally marked areas full of blueberry bushes to return to at some other time for al fresco tastings.

Sandy Neck is 15 degrees cooler than Dowse’s Beach, though they are only six or seven miles from each other. A lot of people think that the bay side, because it seems like a harbor, should have warmer water, which is not the case. With the Gulf Stream warming the outer arm of the Cape, it is much more refreshing, on a 100-degree day in July or August, to go to the appreciably cooler bay-side beaches.

Where to Kennedy-gawk: Hyannis (the place was named after Iyanough, the Native American who was sachem of the Wampanoags) is an oddly average city, and except for the area down by the docks, where the ferries leave for Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, one has virtually no sense of being in a resort area--or even near the water.

Here a popular subculture revolves around Kennedy watchers--aim, focus, click, got it!--who troop in to see the Kennedy Memorial on Ocean Street. Dedicated in 1966, it consists of a huge but unprepossessing brass plaque of JFK on a wall and offers a wonderful view of the ocean on which he loved to sail. On Irving Street in adjacent Hyannisport, tourists like to hang around the Kennedy compound (once the summer White House) even though there is a 10-foot palisade around it. Some even take the boat to Martha’s Vineyard to walk the bridge over troubled waters at Chappaquiddick.

A great Hyannis breakfast place is the Egg & I on Main Street, which offers a vast array of omelets. I have two favorite breakfasts here: the Back Bay (two pieces of cod or smoked-trout cakes, topped with two eggs and hollandaise sauce and served on an English muffin) and the Southern (home-baked biscuit halves, lean ham, two eggs and sausage gravy).

At Hyannis, I sit down by the docks and watch the parade of tourists from all over the world. I find it enjoyable, even sociologically diagnostic, to stop in various clubs here and in Provincetown, to see people dancing in Marilyn Manson T-shirts and owl spectacles.

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But there remains the quiet Cape Cod, places where few people go. I love the Cape of the Pilgrims, where they landed, burrowed in, ate corn, dug out roads and settled down. And of the 19th century, when there were 75 wharves, booming brick and glass factories, grist mills, cranberry farming and whaling. There are remnants of this fossilized Cape everywhere: the one-family graveyard in Dennis, with seven generations of Howes; the pre-Pilgrim Indian grounds in Mashpee; the grave of Iyanough in Cummaquid; First Encounter Beach in Eastham, where the Pilgrims first fought the Indians; and all the lost hollows and tern rookeries and inland lakes.

Cape Cod is the land where our forefathers were able to carry out their dreams, a land where changes both grave and graceful teach the value of both. It is a land, in short, where one can look toward far horizons, as far as one can see.

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Guidebook: Exploring Cape Cod

Telephone numbers and prices: The area code for Cape Cod is 508. Room rates are for a double for one night. Meal prices are for two, food only.

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Getting there: Cape Cod is best explored by car. From Boston it’s about a 50-mile drive on Route 3 south to the Cape Cod Canal. One entry point is the Sagamore Bridge, then pick up Route 6, which runs east through the Cape to Provincetown. An older, prettier road, Route 6A, follows the northern side of the Cape. Another entry point farther south is the Bourne Bridge, which connects to busier Route 28 along the southern side. You can also fly US Airways Express or Cape Air from Boston to Hyannis Airport.

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Where to stay: Wingscorton Farm Inn, 11 Wing Blvd., East Sandwich; telephone and fax 888-0545. Eighteenth century farmhouse turned into an attractive B&B.; Rates: $125 to $150, includes breakfast. The Acworth Inn, 4352 Old King’s Highway, Cummaquid; 362-3330. Five elegant rooms, a short walk to Cape Cod Bay. Rates: $95 to $185. Bay Beach, 1 Bay Beach Lane, Sandwich; 888-8813. A B&B; on a private beach. Reopens in May. Rates: about $165 to $225. Handkerchief Shoals Motel, 888 Main St., Harwich; 432-2200. A half-mile to the beach. Rates: $45-75.

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Where to eat: Egg & I, 521 Main St., Hyannis; 771-1596; $20 or less. Sagamore Inn, 1131 Sandwich Rd., Sandwich; 888-9707; about $25 to $50. Brewster Fish House, 2208 Main St., Brewster; 896-7867. Seafood specialties, about $40 to $60. Cahoon Dining Room, Coonamessett Inn, 311 Gifford St., Falmouth; 548-2300. Semi-formal country inn; $50 to $60.

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What to see and do: The Sandwich Glass Museum, 129 Main St., Sandwich; 888-0251. Admission: adults, $3.50; children, $1.50. Dexter Grist Mill, Main Street, Sandwich. Adults, $1.50; children, 75 cents. Hoxie House, 18 Water St., Sandwich; 888-1173. Admission: adults, $1.50; children, 75 cents. Heritage Plantation, 67 Grove St., Sandwich; 888-3300. Admission: adults, $9; seniors, $8; children, $4.50. Woods Hole Science Aquarium, Water and Albatross streets, Woods Hole; 495-2001. Free admission. John F. Kennedy Museum, Old Town Hall, 397 Main St., Hyannis; 775-2201. Video narrated by Walter Cronkite, with pictorial exhibit showing Kennedy family in Hyannisport. Admission: adults, $3; children 15 and under, free. Pilgrim Monument & Provincetown Museum, High Pole Hill Road, Provincetown; 487-1310. Adults, $5; children, $3.

For more information: Various guides (accommodations, golf, etc.) are distributed by the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce, P.O. Box 790, Hyannis, Mass. 02601; 362-3225, fax 862-0727.