On Pluto (18 page)

So, why not Cestaro Way?

The street was a mirror image of Arty, as it was for my family: course, bumpy, potholed, with thin strands of oak attempting to reclaim the road. It was perfect in an old Cape Cod way, just perfect. Ours was the first house built on Cestaro Way. It was a two-bedroom cottage with an unfinished attic that served as a sleeping porch for most of the kids; we camped out on molded mattresses or in sleeping bags, some with a slight hint of urine, depending on a Friday night out. The attic had a natural alarm system for wake-up calls. On hot summer days, the sun baked the framing beams and sandy plywood floors to the point of driving a deep sweat. My dad had the house built as a family retreat and for retirement. Mom, abidingly along for the ride, enjoyed the view on Cestaro, particularly from the back deck that overlooked the dense scrub pines—a place, she often said, where she could lose herself. And ultimately did.

After a decade of summers renting a nearby Thumpertown Beach cottage complex, having a place now to call home on the Cape was like pouring Super Glue over the family. We all stuck together—sand, gravel, pine needles, sweat, and all. Mom and the siblings stayed for the summer, as was the custom for summer people, and Dad flew up weekends between vacation times. My parents were immensely proud of their Cestaro Way anchor, testament to family values they wanted to share:
Mi casa es su casa!
My father covertly, yet with benevolence, hid a spare key on a rusted nail under the back porch, then proceeded to tell Arty Cestaro, the North Eastham postmaster, everyone at Betty's Beach Box and Brown's Superette, vagrants at the laundromat, all those in line for coffee at Fleming's Donut Shack, the fishermen
at Goose Hummock in Orleans, and just about everybody he met on the Cape, Manhattan, Westchester County, and all along the way. Thank God Al Gore hadn't invented the Internet yet.

Trust was a maxim of the day. Life on the Outer Cape in the '50s, '60s, and early '70s was simple and quiet, like my mother, in a Norman Rockwell way. Creation of the Cape Cod National Seashore, signed into legislation in 1961 by John F. Kennedy, who summered in Hyannisport, saw to it that some of Henry David Thoreau's pristine vistas, 43,500 acres in all, remained undisturbed. The Cape was uncomplicated then. When Jack Kennedy, for example, stopped receiving his weekly edition of
The Cape Codder
delivered to the White House, the president phoned his good friend, Malcolm Hobbs, the paper's publisher, to inquire about his favorite local read.

“Let me check on that, Jack,” Malcolm said from the newsroom.

There was a pause on the phone, while Malcolm made his way back to the subscription office.

“Hey, Jack,” Malcolm replied minutes later, “your subscription has run out! Send a check, and we'll send you the paper.”

Kennedy laughed, fully relishing the moment amidst world convolutions. A check was dispatched, and Kennedy never missed an issue of
The Cape Coder
again.

That simple, that direct, an exchange that wholly defined the Cape decades ago, a far different place than today. The beaches were wider, ample room for the wooden playpens, sticky from apple juice, that the fathers of large families schlepped down a steep flight of wooden steps from the top of the bluff. Surfers and surf casters on the beach were as plentiful as shorebirds; beach bonfires were the proxy of a summer night on the town. We bathed with soap and shampoo in clear freshwater kettle ponds where you could see bottom 50 feet from shore; and on Saturdays just before sunset, we all raced to the sea to watch a
squadron of Navy planes from Otis Air Force Base line up in a mock carpet-bombing mission to drop live, pulsating ammunition on the “Target Ship,” the 417-foot U.S.S. James Longstreet, a decommissioned World War II Liberty Ship named after a Confederate general. It had been towed to a site in Cape Cod Bay a few miles offshore. The final run of the night was greeted with applause up and down the beach, as if Ted Williams had just hit another dinger. The Longstreet, rusted to submission, now lies in a shallow grave below the surface.

My mother felt safe in Eastham. We all did. The place felt to her like Rye in the '60s. There wasn't much crime on the Outer Cape: a few fisticuffs here and there and a botched drug drop or two. Nearby, Wellfleet and Truro police cruisers in those days often marked time by playing tag with spotlights in the woods; a Wellfleet police officer once had to pedal his bike to work after receiving a DWI; selectmen fought in bars after disagreeing over town business; and the kindly Wellfleet watchman, always willing to offer a helping hand, once unwittingly assisted drug smugglers unloading bulky burlap bags of marijuana off a sailboat, named
Mischief
, moored in the harbor to a waiting truck in the parking lot for flight off-Cape. When the watchman finally discerned the nature of the cargo, he called the Wellfleet police, who came screaming down to the harbor with sirens on full alert from miles away to avoid a possible gunfight. The smugglers fled; nothing was ever found, other than an embarrassed watchman. I covered the scene as a cub reporter for
The Cape Codder
. Alec Wilkinson—a gifted writer for
The New Yorker
, a successful author, and a Wellfleet summer cop in his youth—chronicled the antics, and more, in a remarkable book:
Midnights: A Year with the Wellfleet Police
.

The Outer Cape, over the years, has always attracted its share of eccentrics, and square foot by square foot, some of the finest intellectual, artistic, and writing talent in the world, who shaped the culture of a generation. Among them, writers like Eugene
O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Sinclair Lewis, Norman Mailer, Mary Oliver, Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Annie Dillard, and Marge Piercy, to name a few, along with some of the most notable artists and therapists of the last century, not to mention the sweet oysters here. It's still said that you can't find a shrink in Manhattan in August because they are all vacationing on the Cape.

Hidden deep in the Wellfleet-Truro woods, not far from the Great Outer Beach, is one of Cape Cod's best kept secrets—remnants of a summer colony that once housed some of these gifted architects, diplomats, and critical thinkers from the 1930s. These homes on stilts—designed by the brightest and most inventive modernist architects in Europe and America—were functional, yet radical; sort of floating boxes, oriented to capture views and breezes, perching lightly on the land with flat roofs that often rise to gradual pitches. The buildings are as significant to the region's built environment as any antique Cape or saltbox, all part of the allure of isolation in the Outer Cape woods, a place of intense privacy for creative inspiration and low-impact buildings that were “green” long before there was such an environmental color.

And then there was intriguing Charles Flato, a hunch-backed intellectual writer who had suffered from polio as a child, worked later as an investigator reporter for the civil liberties subcommittee of the Senate Labor Committee, served under Nelson Rockefeller in the Latin American division of the Board of Economic Warfare during World War II, lived in retirement in the Wellfleet woods, and oh, yes, was a Russian spy. Flato was outed when KGB files were opened to researchers after the Soviet Union collapsed. His codename in the Gorsky memo, written by Anatoly Gorsky, then chief of Soviet intelligence, was “Bob” and in another Verona transcript, cryptanalysis of Soviet intelligence dispatches, Flato is believed to have the codename of “Char.”

I thought of him as Charlie, and he was always willing to talk. He was a good local source in my early reporting days. My mother liked him as well. Charlie and I shared a plantation of coffee beans over the years on his back deck. I just thought he was a guy with a brain and a cane.

“I couldn't think of a better place to get lost,” Charlie once told me.

The isolation, stark natural beauty, and anonymity of the Outer Cape drew many—the famous, infamous, and regular people, like my folks—to dead-end streets, and held them captive here.

****

The early retirement days for my parents were blissful, but the isolation finally resonated with my mother about three weeks into her first winter here, as the reality of year-round residency on this patch of sand, jutting 60 miles into the tempestuous North Atlantic, settled in with the starkness of a whiteout in a coastal storm, a place where the major highway, Route 6, resembled a walking trail in February. It never snows on the Cape, the locals promote, and you can play golf here year-round. But grab the Dramamine and check the map. “The bared and bended arm of Cape Cod,” naturalist Thoreau wrote, is where “a man can stand there and put all of America behind him.” The remoteness in winter on the Outer Cape, while inspiring and cerebral, is no place for someone who is losing their place. My mother never got the memo.

Neither did the Pilgrims, who never “landed” in Plymouth in the strict definition of the term. They anchored instead off Provincetown on the Cape's tip on November 11, 1620 where William Bradford, the first Plymouth Colony governor, Myles Standish, and 39 other passengers commissioned the Mayflower Compact, the first governing document in the New World. They then explored the back shore from Truro to Eastham before
moving on to Plymouth Harbor for greater shelter. Plymouth Rock is merely an invention of the Chamber of Commerce. In fact, there is no official reference to the Pilgrims landing on a rock at Plymouth; it is not mentioned in Edward Winslow's eminent
Mourt's Relation
, written in 1622, nor in Bradford's historic journal
Of Plymouth Plantation
, published 20 years later. The first recorded reference to the Pilgrims landing on a rock in Plymouth, in fact, came 121 years later.

What is an undeniable fact of history, however, is that my mother's favorite Eastham beach, First Encounter on Cape Cod Bay, is where Pilgrims first encountered Native Americans in the New World in a hostile introduction. Arrows flew, shots were fired, and all safely scattered. Historians speculate that the Native Americans might have been responding to the starving Pilgrims' discovery a month earlier in Truro of a lifesaving cache of buried corn.

“And sure it was God's good providence that we found this corn for else we know not how we should have done,” Bradford wrote in his journal.

My mother loved First Encounter, a place of retreat, a refuge to gather her thoughts or watch a blazing red sun at dusk dip into the bay to be extinguished like a candle. She equally savored Coast Guard Beach in Eastham, my favorite ocean retreat—site of the old Life Saving Station whose courageous crews patrolled the stormy shoreline in the 1800s in search of shipwrecked sailors. Since the wreck of the
Sparrow-Hawk
in 1626, more than 3,000 ships have run aground in the treacherous shoals of the Great Outer Beach. The Pilgrims were a near miss here. On November 9, 1620, the
Mayflower
, 65 days out from Plymouth, England, made landfall off Coast Guard Beach, caught on the shifting shoals. Far off course from its intended destination of what is now Northern Virginia, a miraculous change in wind freed the
Mayflower
to sail north to Provincetown.

History abounds off Coast Guard Beach.

At my mother's bearing, during the spring, summer, fall of the early '70s, often after an ocean storm, I walked south along Coast Guard Beach about two miles to a snug, wind-blown 21-foot-by-16-foot, two-room beach shack with a frugal wooden writing desk overlooking the surf. It was called the “Outermost House” venerated in the classic Henry Beston nature book of that name, chronicling a lone year on the Great Outer Beach. A Harvard-educated writer and naturalist, Beston built the cottage in 1925 mostly from scrap drift wood, dubbing it the “Fo'castle,” given its ten windows and commanding presence atop a high dune overlooking the open Atlantic that offered the sense of being aboard a ship. In 1964, the cottage was preserved as a national literary landmark “wherein he [Beston] sought the great truth and found it in the nature of man.” My mother, after reading the
Outermost House
, first took me there. I was possessed, and returned alone often to peer inside at the crude, wooden writing desk, and to sit on the outside porch and contemplate the isolated nature around me. It was here that I decided to pursue a life of writing. My mom, as she had many times before and would again, led me to a solitary place in life.

In Beston's writing, you could hear the sound of the sea. “Listen to the surf,” Beston wrote. “Really lend it your ears, and you will hear in it a world of sounds: hollow boomings and heavy roarings, great watery tumblings and tramplings, long hissing seethes, sharp, rifle-shot reports, splashes, whispers, the grinding undertone of stones, and sometimes vocal sounds that might be the half-heard talk of people in the sea.”

Like my mother, I felt at peace here, a calm shattered by the Great Storm of February 1978 with sustained winds of close to 100 miles an hour and an overwash of nearly 15 feet that swept the Fo'castle out to sea. The loss was devastating, but a fitting burial for a place that had brought us closer together.

Our relationship wasn't always that way. I was close to my mother growing up, but distant over time. She clearly saw a lot
of my father in me, and often channeled her angst toward him through me, more as years progressed; then it turned to rage. Perhaps she felt comfortable directing it at me. In some ways, I was the embodiment of my father: male, selfish, and clueless. I was an easy mark.

By the 1990s, there had been a tidal surge in our relationship, as my mom's shifting moods were vented more and more in my direction. Looking back, I know now that she was reaching out in fear and anger over what was happening to her, and yet, I was pulling away, never grasping the moment.