Senescence Capers

Funny how America is obsessed with being young.   TV shows and movies about high school and twenty year olds.  Songs about teens in love, etc etc…. What’s the saying?  Youth is wasted on the young.  The dreaded mid-life crisis brought on by an increased awareness of our human mortality. Death approaching, and our wish to be young again.  I never thought I would want to go back to my own youth.  Yet I find I do encourage similar experiences on my children that I had as a kid. Those places and things that made me, those People of my Pottery wheel.   Legacies I can pass on in tale and in new memories.  Some places that may one day become the resting place for my corporal ashes.

I have been spending a week of my summer on Cape Cod most of my life.  My mother has been doing the same since she was 12 years old.  There was a chunk of time in my teens and 20s when we instead travelled further afield to explore deserts, tropics, and scuba diving destinations.  These were exciting and memorable trips, but when my babies were small, we returned to The Cape. 

Yearly we have been caravanning ourselves along the Mass Pike, up Route 495 till we start to see the rise of the behemoth windmills; War of the Worlds spacecraft-like turbines, dotted along the blustery corridor before you enter the narrow spit of arm shaped land.  The Cape is a massive glacial peninsula that is a beacon to millions of visitors every summer.  The traffic can be bumper to bumper, and the beaches are a long stripe of peppermint candy color umbrellas and sunburnt sea lubbers. 

This sea-level, sodden, flexed bicep curl is surrounded by three bodies of salty H2O.  The Bay- marshy, with extreme tidelines; The Ocean – wild, changing, and shark ridden; and The Sound- warmer and tamer than the Ocean with far less sharks.  Of course, these are all just part of the world’s second largest and most salty ocean- The Atlantic.   The Atlantic, the sea of Atlas, my first love.  A deep graveyard of souls and dreams.  I relate to him. I might have sunk a ship or two as well. 

We always rent one of the small, older beach cottages along the Sound in an area known as “the Campground”, in a little town called Harwich Port.  Located on the triceps of the arm, The Campground is an 11-acre area packed with wooden framed cottages. The cottages were built in place of seasonal tents that occupied an area founded by the Spiritual Movement in the 1880s-1910s, known as Ocean Grove Campground.  Many of these cottages, or “wooden tents”; so described by a lawyer who was arguing for a renovating owner; have since been replaced by four- season residences that are now worth millions.  The historical society has made attempts to delay the demolition of the old cottages, but money continues to talk the loudest, as always.  (Cape Cod Chronicle, 2017)

The furniture in our rented wooden tent is probably from the 1930s, the mattresses feel older, and the house leans to the South.  Morning reading and coffee is best done on the screened porch out front. Days only begin after walking the length of the beaches (public and private) to the harbor and back.  The Central Avenue public beach houses ghosts of my favorite sandcastles washed away and my Mr. T action figure- lost to a game of “buried alive”.  

 The Harwich Port main street used to be a series of small stores and a few restaurants.  A bakery that sold a magical pastry called a “melt-a-way”, and an excellent used bookstore.  Only the bookstore remains of the two.  For some reason this quarter mile strip has become a hip spot to eat and drink in the last few years.  Trendy restaurants with gourmet this and that have opened and stay open to a slew of bargoers looking to dress up and mingle.  One of these boozy grottos is The Beer Garden. 

An excursion from our wooden tent to partake in the main street festivities is an easy few minutes’ walk. The Beer Garden is basically a tiki bar down an L shaped alley of an old house or store, which is now an indoor bar for overflow and colder, fouler weather.  This summer imbibing haven also happens to be a different beverage purveyor during the day- a coffee house called “Perks”.  A Clark Kent and Superman situation it would seem.  Caffeine dealer by day, Foamy hoppy goodness by night.  The signage was strange for a bar.  “Stroller only parking” and posting to keep children away from the firepit reminded us of the garden’s alter ego, and family friendly presence.

My brother, my niece, and I decided to go out on a Thursday night.  We span the gap from Generation X to Millennial. When we first arrived the stools at the bar were full, there were people playing darts and corn-hole around the corner, and many of the picnic tables around the fire pit were occupied.  For me, the beer names were not familiar, and I was not aware that there was such a thing as “organic hard kombucha”, though I have since tried and enjoyed such a thing.  My brother and niece happen to work in the restaurant and bar industry. I gave myself over to the experts and drank whatever amber beer they chose to get me.  We stayed and chatted for a while, feeling relaxed.  I would not recommend the bathroom inside on the right.  There was a profoundly confusing door latch and the signage to assist was less than helpful.  Never combine drink and delayed urination with a necessity to read directions. 

The bar stools were now mostly empty and my brother moved us up there for better access.  He sat himself at the end where I noticed a full beer sitting on a coaster without an owner.  It wasn’t my brother’s because he had his in his hand.  My barkeep bro eventually reunited this lone beverage with its roving proprietor, when he saw a potbellied man in golfing clothes and a baseball hat looking around in search of something.  “You looking for this buddy?”, as he hands it to him.  My brother has the ability to make friends immediately with anybody.  He will often be approached like a best friend by people he doesn’t even remember and no one is the wiser.  They leave as they arrived- still besties.

Golf man was a business pro from Boston named Timothy.  He was some breed of Irish, several generations from the Island, and sported the harsh Bostonian accent.  Tim was so grateful for the return of his lost beer that he stuck around to entertain us with his rich white opinion on whatever topic was at hand.  Timothy asked what my brother’s main interest was, and since cars (pronounced CAAs) are my brother’s passion, a lively lecture ensued.  Apparently, Tim is adamantly against Subarus, so much so that he can tell you the life story of the company, their CEO, and something about Trump rallies that were hosted.  Subarus are manufactured overseas, and Tim only buys American made cars… Despite every stich of his golfing outfit likely made in China.

I wonder if his monologue offended the European (Romanian maybe) Tiki bar servers.  Was Tim even aware that the entire Cape is full of foreigners brought in on special visas to work “the season” on the Cape?  There aren’t enough locals to fill the jobs and too many tourists that demand service.  The commute is long from a town on the mainland and living on the Cape itself isn’t financially possible for Average worker Joe.  So, the young of Eastern Europe come here for their summer and cram into the shabby hotels and boarding houses that are designated just for them but are becoming scarcer every year due to the high demand to develop land for more rentals.  Tim probably doesn’t have or want any of this on his radar.  Eventually Timothy saw potentially more fertile ground for his politically charged orations and abandoned us for the greener pastures.    

Thursdays are apparently an early night for the Beer Garden and closing at 10pm saw the bartenders covering the cash registers with black plastic bags before we had even finished our drinks.  Feeling the call of continued revelry that drinking will give, we moved our party next door to The Port. 

The Port has been a posh restaurant with a large dining room, up against a bank of windows facing the street, for as long as I can remember; one of the survivors.  I assume they have expanded their offerings to keep pace with the rest of Harwich Port.  The restaurant had three separate bars; outdoor, main bar, and another in the side room, labelled “Oyster Bar”. All bars were choked with youngish yuppie types, talking at a dim roar.  We had heard the outdoor bar commotion earlier from the relaxed Beer Garden next door.  The main bar didn’t have any beer so we went to the smaller “Oyster bar”, avoiding the outdoor bar commotion.  We had to squeeze through a crowd of preppy sweaters and kaki to find a place at the bar to order, just to find out that this bar did not have any beer on tap except Guinness.  I was not about to change from beer to liquor, as the rhyme goes, so Guinness it is.  Been a while since I had this meal in a glass.  It weirdly tasted savory like BBQ or bacon.  My two bartender companions informed me that a change in draft beer flavor can come from an improper mix of gases when tapped, or unclean lines.  Miscellaneous beer trivia to save for a rainy day.   My niece was drinking only cranberry and tequila all night- and this bar had plenty of those.

The Port was full of seemingly every 20-30 something fancy pants on the Cape.  There was an oddly numerous amounts of women wearing white, at least one with a veil.  Some sort of mass bridal shower?  Maybe just getting in their right to wear white before Labor Day?  The crappy music was hard to talk over, but we managed to perseverate on life a while.  But as all good nights go, too soon it was time to sleep it off.

We took the back streets tent-ward bound.  Past the closely packed seeded lawns and aqua colored hydrangea bushes.  Past freshly constructed bright cedar-clad houses and scattered relics from a different time.  The Cape hurdles on towards its own sort of death.  The changing from one form to another, never being fully destroyed; the laws of matter applied… Like ourselves, dissolving in the wane of life’s tide.  

-Penny Rainmaker