Arrive - July/August 2013

ARELY AN HOUR’S DRIVE
from metropolitan Boston,
it is technically an island—
connected to mainland
Massachusetts only by
the Bourne and Sagamore
bridges. I took the latter,
the sun hanging low over
the pine scrub along Pilgrims Highway. And
when I checked into the 1920s colonial-style
Winstead Inn and Beach Resort, nestled in the
dunes of Harwich Port, I got my first taste of
Cape Codder pride.

I picked up its famous “razzleberry”—which, as far as I could tell, loosely translated to “ impossible to not eat while driving.”

Chatham Style

Chatham itself is the quintessential Cape Cod town—with a majestically restored lighthouse (the Chatham Light), a sprawling Gatsby-esque hotel overlooking the ocean (the Chatham Bars Inn) and a main street lined with upscale shops and postcard-perfect white clapboard buildings. I skimmed the usual sea glass and candle purveyors and then found myself scratching

“If I never go back over those bridges,” the
smiling desk clerk told me as she handed me my
key, “I’ll be a happy woman.”
I poured myself a glass of malbec and wan-
dered out to the back porch, past manicured
Japanese rose shrubs and brown rabbits nib-
bling at the lawn. Then I found myself on a
nearly deserted private beach, staring out past
the white sand at the infinite Atlantic—feeling
like I knew exactly what that woman was talk-
ing about. I went to sleep that night with my
window open, the lull of the ocean and crickets
drifting in over the dunes with the breeze.

The next morning I left the Lower Cape and started my drive to the Upper Cape—the narrow strip of land that curls northward into the Atlantic like a fishhook and terminates with Provincetown in the north. But I didn’t get far. Just west of Chatham on Route 28, there’s a little cedar-shingled house with a big reputation for baking the best pies on the Cape: Marion’s Pie Shop has been doling them out for decades.

my head over a sign that read “Blue Water Fish Rubbings.” As it turns out, the proprietor, Jenny Bovey, is skilled in the bizarre ancient Japanese art of gyotaku—a process that involves painting actual fish with color, then rubbing them onto fabrics and papers by hand. The end result is a beautifully realistic rendition of sea life—and a gift you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere else. I picked up a print and headed to the Fish Pier on Shore Road at Bar Cli; Avenue to watch the local fleets unload their daily hauls of lobster, haddock and cod—a great, frenetic scene that happens between 2 and 4 p.m. At night, the town takes on a magical air that can transport you back in time a couple of hundred years. I ended my evening at the Chatham Squire on Main Street, a noisy bar/restaurant whose mascot is a seagull dressed up like an old salt, and whose clientele seems to comprise the full socioeconomic spectrum of the Cape, from dock worker to hedge funder.