Cape Cod

With Labor Day over, we feel an almost-imperceptible dwindling, a drawing-in. The light changes, the days end before we’re quite ready, the abundance of tomatoes, peaches, peppers will all too soon give way to more subdued fall and winter produce.

I used to always travel in September, feeling the wistful pull of things beyond—but this year I am traveling only in my memory, back through old journals and photographs and even recipes.

I remember the year shortly after my father died I went from Boston, where I’d had a book exhibit, down to Cape Cod on the ferry, against the tide of returns. I wrote nothing more than this, that charmed and stolen week, a kind of series of tone poems, though I took hundreds of pictures.

Sept. 8

And now the summer is officially over, and I have come to Cape Cod. I come on Labor Day, when everybody else is leaving. The ferry doesn’t return until Sunday, I am caught here. The beaches are lovely and empty, swept with rain.

I celebrate a rather melancholy Labor Day with orange margaritas and fresh grilled tuna salad with wild greens, oranges, onions, and black olives at Pepe’s Wharf in downtown Provincetown.

Sept. 9

I buy a stripy red sweater today at the Marine Supply—perfect for boating, though I don’t boat.

I’m at the east end of the east end, on a quiet stretch of beach. My walks to town (to buy cards or mail them; to check the Portuguese Bakery; to shop for cheese and wine and rosemary focaccia) takes me first past the lovely cottages, and then into the blocks of galleries, thick and richly colored (or one simple gray with white highlights: an almost screaming white); then into the merry mess of the town center and the wharfs; or up if so inclined to the tower stolen from Siena which inexplicably marks the Pilgrims’ first landfall.

Two women slide shingles down a roof heavily, in the rain.

Sept. 10

I watch the incoming tide reclaim the sand bars, and a retriever trying to retrieve a buoy.

In the end the sand bars take the whole harbor.

Sept. 11

I make a list of the Cape Cod colors:

bruised plum

rusted apricot

royal navy

pale watered turquoise

omelette yellow

burnt umber

muddy mustard

sail white

sand white

shell white

raincloud white

rope white

sneaker white

boatbottom white

lighthouse white

deckchair white

gull white

Sept. 12

The weekenders are starting to come in, which makes me sad because it means my time is almost up, and the week’s peace—meandering on long white sandbars at low tide, across the emptied harbor, sailboats further out still pale, as if imperfectly stamped on a wet page.

Sept. 13

I watch as a child comes to grief, late in the morning.

The heartbreak

of a forbidden

sack of black kelp;

a father’s betrayal

on a bright blue day,

archetype of loss.

Sept. 14

The tide has turned

inexorably after all;

the ferry comes remorselessly

around the lighthouse point,

straight for the shore

(ten minutes more),

heads straight for me.

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Sandbars, Cape Cod