A Cape Cod Notebook: Recent Episodes
Robert Finch
A Cape Cod Notebook can be heard every Tuesday morning at 8:45am and afternoon at 5:45pm.It's commentary on the unique people, wildlife, and environment of our coastal region.
Painting a boathouse turns out to have a lot in common with yoga: stretching, balance, and the patience of proper prep work. A meditation on ladders, primer, and the quiet satisfaction of a job done right.
Turns out empty nest syndrome doesn't require actual children. Susan Moeller follows a gray catbird family that set up shop in the viburnum by the kitchen window, from sloppy first nest to turquoise eggs to a six hour screaming fit from an anxious dad. Then, silence. And a lot of feelings about it.
Nantucket wakes most summer mornings wrapped in fog, yet the island is deep in drought. With a sole-source aquifer and no neighboring town to lean on, water restrictions have divided the island between lawns left to go golden and lawns kept impossibly green by private wells. A meditation on scarcity, privilege, and the strange beauty of a place learning to live with less water.
From "Happy as a Clam" to "Squeezed Inn," a Cape Cod cottage-naming saga full of bad puns, a 92-year-old sign-maker's wisdom, and the realization that some things resist a name.
After a long winter on Cape Cod, Mary Bergman laces up her boots and heads to Portugal's rugged Atlantic coast to hike the Fisherman's Trail. She travels through the last stretch of undeveloped coastline in Europe, where ancient cliffs, turquoise water, and fearless local fishermen offer a world apart from home.
A dog's unblinking vigil at a Cape Cod window becomes a quiet reflection on attention, perception, and all the things just outside the frame of human awareness.
From hydrangea fun facts to backyard storytelling, Tom Moroney shares a charming and humorous vision of what he calls “The People’s Stop” on the festival tour.
One of many mysteries that attends living on Cape Cod manifests in an unlikely location: Route 6, Harwich, around what most people still call Exit 10 at Route 124, now officially Exit 82.
A quiet nighttime journey to count horseshoe crabs becomes an exploration of Nantucket’s seasonal transformations. From blooming lilacs to shifting shorelines, Mary Bergman reflects on the beauty, fragility, and resilience of coastal life.
In the middle of a snowy Cape Cod winter, a dog, an opossum, and a pair of neighbors create an unforgettable moment of surprise, humor, and connection.
Tom Moroney explores the efforts to protect the herring population on the Cape and the volunteers and infrastructure that make its recovery possible.
Nantucket writer and historian Mary Bergman talks about the sounds of wildlife reemerging signaling the return of spring.
Walk around the cranberry bogs of Cape Cod – cranberries.org says about 11,500 bogs in southeastern Massachusetts – in mid-winter, and it’s quiet. Desolate. Frigid. Filled with life.
Nantucket historian and writer Mary Bergman speaks on the practice and tradition of scallop harvesting.
Isn’t everything we make temporary in the grand scheme of things? My day to day work is to promote historic preservation on Nantucket. We talk about preserving things in perpetuity. But on an eroding pile of sand, perpetuity is a relative term.
Bob McKeon, a 78-year-old retired state trooper, splits his time, as many do, between his primary residence -- his is in North Attleboro -- and his place on the Cape in South Dennis. A favorite activity is going out to dinner, and when he started posting restaurant reviews on a popular Facebook page years ago, he gained more and more friends -- many of them touched by his endearing references to his singular dining companion: The Bride.
What is it that pulls so many of us to a Christmas Eve service, even if we are nonbelievers or haven’t stepped foot in a church since our cousin’s wedding in 2019?
With all the ongoing controversy about whether a machine gun range should be built on the Upper Cape, it seems fitting to go back in time and revisit some history that in retrospect seems all but impossible, but true:Cape Cod once was home to an arsenal of nuclear weapons, 56 bombs located about 600 feet from a residential subdivision, in what was then called Otis, now Joint Base Cape Cod.
I am a genuine birder but a somewhat old and lazy one, with limited ability and ancient binoculars. I have some idea what is out there- soaring, skulking, or flitting about- but it is woefully incomplete compared to the information possessed by the array of gifted and obsessed observers that roam the Cape on a regular basis with powerful optics and awesome cameras.
The dark comes early. At first, I fought it. Disoriented, dazed. And doesn’t it feel like midnight, the moon pooling on the ocean, spilt milk reaching for the shore? At least the clock in the stove, the one I cannot figure out how to reset, is right again.
Great Island in Wellfleet is a beautiful pearl on the Cape Cod National Seashore’s necklace, the most dramatic of a handful of islands strung along Cape Cod Bay, linked by sandy strands.
They appeared suddenly one night on our patio, four young raccoons, a quartet of rumble-tumble trouble. They pressed their little bandit faces against our glass sliders, scratching to get inside our tiny cottage.
It started with the lupine.Last spring, I started taking the hound to Thompson’s Field, a 57-acre conservation area off Route 137 in East Harwich managed by the Harwich Conservation Trust.
I’ve always thought Nantucket was rather flat — elevation-wise, that is. Our highest point is the Madaket Landfill, and after that is Altar Rock in the moors.
We all mark seasons in different ways, often using holidays like Labor Day past, Thanksgiving upcoming. For me, the circle always wheels around the constellation Orion.
I was leading a tour out in ’Sconset the Thursday before Labor Day when a local eyed us warily and said, “Summer’s over, it’s time for you people to leave.” Ouch! Now Labor Day has come and gone, the curtain falling on summer.
My chum, who these days walks the Outer Beach more often than I do, commented that “high tides are reaching further up the beach than they used to.”
Where do you seek the soul of Cape Cod? The pounding surf on the Outer Cape? The stalwart beacon of Coast Guard Light? The broad stretch of the Great Marsh?
It’s August on Nantucket, and to find a place where you will be alone and undisturbed, you need one of two things. You either need a four-wheel drive or a boat. The other Saturday, thanks to a good friend and some borrowed kayaks, we set off from Barrett’s Pier and headed for the Madaket Ditch.
Among Cape Cod’s remarkable attributes is a way of surfacing when and where you least expect it – associations, affiliations, allusions, connections, a single degree of separation among strangers.
We all mark time in different ways. For me, it’s the dry cleaner.I have been dropping off clothes to the same dry cleaner in Hyannis since a week or so after I moved here fulltime in 1974 – that’s 50 years ago.
People say half-facetiously that we should accept reality and change the name of this sandspit to Cape Dog.
The air is so thick, there’s little difference between walking and swimming these days. High summer fog brings a certain relief to the island.
This is embarrassing, but maybe making a public admission could save me hundreds of hours of expensive psycho-therapy:I have a thing going on — with a tree.
Lady Slippers are in a class of their own, so strangely shaped, with their pink pouched petals.
Birdsong, five in the morning. A sign that my neighborhood — a relatively new affordable housing subdivision — has matured. My neighbors’ trees provide plenty of places for songbirds to perch.
About six o’clock one evening, as we were about to sit down to dinner, there came from the other end of the house a loud thunk, as though something had hit a window. I stepped outside to see what the noise was.
During the third week of May, when the oak leaves are still just pink flickers in the forest canopy, and the pitch pines had not yet begun painting the landscape with their dry yellow swaths of pollen, then the lowly huckleberry spreads its emerald scarves far and wide throughout the forest floor.
A white postcard showed up in the mail the other day. I had been summoned to Barnstable Superior Court – for jury duty.My immediate response? Great! Hope I can do it!
The other morning, I woke up early after a sleepless night. Luckily, we have reached the moment in the year where the days stretch on, if not quite forever, then pretty close to it.
Over the past few weeks our local snowbirds have been returning from their annual winter sojourns in the south.
Nantucketers take pride in our long history of stargazing and astronomy. Maria Mitchell, the first woman to work as a professional astronomer, was born here and discovered a comet in 1847 from the roof of the Pacific National Bank at the top of Main Street.
People come to live on Cape Cod for a variety of reasons. I came because its landscape and history spoke to me in such a compelling manner as a subject for writing.
People thought Luther Crowell was insane, but he wasn’t. He was the greatest inventor in Cape Cod history.
This week Bob concludes his account of the stranding of a large fishing boat on the Outer Beach last month.
If you live on Cape Cod, you likely have sand in your car. And if you live on Cape Cod and don’t have sand in your car, I might question if you are really living life to its fullest.
I’ve never thought of any beach before as my beach. Maybe that’s because all those other beaches already had names. I thought this beach was nameless, marked only by it’s “Emergency Beach Location 21” sign.
A few weeks ago, I had the occasion to visit my daughter and her family in Portland, Maine. I decided to go by train and booked a seat on Amtrak’s “Downeaster,” from Boston to Portland.
Not included in the blockbuster J. Robert Oppenheimer movie is how a Cape Cod connection played a crucial role in Oppenheimer’s early life, including his eventual move to Los Alamos to build a bomb that can destroy the world.
Beginning a new year in the middle of winter has always seemed ridiculous to me. But then no one asked me. I know, I know: it was Caesar’s doing, 4,000 years ago, to honor Janus, the god of new beginnings.
At the end of December, one of the Cape’s newspapers ran a special nostalgia issue. On the front page was Joel Meyerowitz’s iconic photograph of one of the Days Cottages on Beach Point in North Truro.
One of the most beautiful spots in Wellfleet, or for that matter, on the entire Lower Cape, is Old Wharf Road. It is one of those headlands that, along with Indian Neck and Lieutenant’s Island, thrust out into greater Wellfleet Harbor.
Whenever I have occasion to go to Boston and don’t need to rush home, I often avoid the divided highways and take a different route back to the Cape. One of my favorite alternatives is to take Route 58 south from Abington to Carver just before the Bourne Bridge.
Late Sunday afternoon — it isn’t all that late, but now that it’s dark at 4:30, late is all relative. Landmarks change in the winter light. The boarded-up Surfside snackbar where teenagers spent the summer scooping ice cream haunts the empty parking lot.
It looked old. It looked like something that was ready for retirement, though it still worked, still functioned.
Seth Rolbein, a journalist living in Wellfleet, talks about an 1820 fire that had a major impact on the Cape’s 20th-century development boom.
In the pale morning light I began to notice that the wooden wall of the shower was in motion: in fact, it was crawling! A closer look revealed dozens and dozens of pillbugs roaming about, exploring the surface, bumping into each other, and apparently having a fine old time.
Over more than a half-century of observing Cape Cod’s Outer Beach, I have seen many things thrown up by or coming out of the surf: seals, seabirds, jellyfish, a dead humpback whale, even, once, a live deer,
Bob has been spending a few days at one of his favorite vacation spots in Vermont. And he has a thing for spiders.
Have you ever wondered how Stellwagen Bank came to be named?Seth Rolbein did a little digging and brings us the answer.
This week Bob dips into the archives to pay tribute to Tony Bennett, one of the master singers of The Great American Songbook, who died on July 21 at the age of 96.
Seth Rolbein, a journalist living in Wellfleet, thinks back to the day a young lady special to him met the Governor.
After some forty-odd years of observing the natural world, one of the few universal conclusions I have come to believe is this: Nature has no shame.
The other day, when the wind was coming out of the south, Becky and I set out for Coskata Woods. We left the car along the side of the road near the Trustees gatehouse, past the Wauwinet Hotel, one of the few remaining grand resorts built in the Victorian era, as Nantucket redefined itself as a summer destination.
This week Bob concludes his recollections of time spent in the Provincelands dune shacks in the fall. Such experiences may no longer be allowed under new regulations recently promulgated by the National Park Service which will limit stays in the shacks from June through August.
The Cape Cod National Seashore has been in the news recently after announcing a set of new criteria for leasing eight of the eighteen dune shacks that it owns in the Provincelands.
I keep track of the lilac bushes on my way to work, tiny buds as tight as a fist start to slowly unfurl as the calendar turns to May. The peeper frogs have been at it for weeks now, their electric chorus ringing out in the night. Lengthening days are our reward for an endless winter.
This is about crows. Or rather, this is about a crow. I stress the singular, because if there’s any lesson in the incident I’m about to relate, it’s to caution us against generalizing about other animal species. We’re all too quick to talk or write about “owls” or “woodcocks” or “whales,” as though each one we encounter is totally representative of all owls, woodcocks and whales, and that individuality is purely a human trait.
I hadn’t been out to the South Shore since last December, when weeks of high wind revealed the bones of an ancient shipwreck.
We drive down Hummock Pond Road, where a concrete Jersey barrier marks the end of the asphalt and the beginning of the sea. It’s a shorter drive from town than all the way out to Madaket, and besides, there isn’t really a parking lot at Madaket Beach anymore, the erosion has taken big bites out of the pavement.
I spent my teenage years in Parkersburg, West Virginia, a small city on the banks of the Ohio River. There’s not much about the town that would strike a visitor – or a resident, for that matter – as noteworthy.
February 10th marked the 25th anniversary of the great fire at Whaler’s Wharf in Provincetown.
Back in late December, on Christmas Eve to be exact, the Cape and Islands were pummeled by a massive transcontinental storm that had plowed across the Great Plains from Minnesota to Texas, bringing freezing gales and blizzard conditions to much of the Northeast.
Last December, I hired a local tree company to take down some pines on the north side of our house. On the face of it, cutting down trees doesn’t seem to be the thing to do in this era of climate change, since trees are excellent “carbon sinks,” storing vast amounts of carbon dioxide.
Many of us have dog stories, dog relationships. One amazing thing we learn is that dogs live full lives within a compressed bracket of ours; we join them as puppies, share time as they mature, witness them grow old, then wish them goodbye.
Come winter, I want to live in the library.Imagine how cozy that would be! Spending a cold winter’s night exploring the tropics in the travel section.
In the winter, my island world, small to begin with, shrinks considerably. I’ve worn a path down Surfside Road, between town and home.
Stories in the natural world have no true beginnings or endings. In writing about them, we choose a place to start and a place to end, knowing that nature continues to write the story long after we have abandoned it.
My friend Ralph – as I’ve mentioned before on these broadcasts, has an uncanny eye for unusual things that most of us would overlook. But he outdid himself the other day when he showed me a picture he had taken of something that had washed up on the beach in Harwichport.
For all who welcome solar and wind as our energy future, the past proves that futuristic, breakthrough innovations can harken back centuries.
A few weekends ago, word got out that there was a shipwreck down on the South Shore. A man walking had posted a photo online, a few slanting poles in the sand the only indicator of exactly where on Nantucket’s 80 miles of coastline this shipwreck sat.
My father was a resourceful man. He had to be. He was the youngest in a family of seven. His father died when he was eleven, and he had to quit school to help support his family.
When I was a kid, my friend Jimmy and I would go to the Saturday morning matinee at the local movie theater. The main feature, usually a Western, was preceded by a short chapter from an adventure serial. Usually, each chapter would end on a cliff-hanger, sometimes a literal one, and we would have to wait to the following week to learn the fate of the hero.
The beach is greedy.The surf eats the sand. The wind carves out the dunes. The tide sucks shoes, hats, and iPhones out to sea.
The other week, I spent a few days with my five-year-old nephew and his parents in Truro. It was a trip we’d looked forward to all summer.
One of my favorite Jerry Seinfeld moments is not from his hugely successful TV series, but from a documentary entitled Comedian, which follows Jerry’s career after Seinfeld had ended.
Well, it’s late October again, and once more the Red Sox will not be in the World Series. Once again the Fenway Faithful will turn to the past for comfort – and the nice thing about baseball is that there’s so much past to turn to.
In the wake of another season of disastrous wildfires in the West, I‘ve been surprised that there have been relatively few forest fires on the Cape and Islands during our long dry summer and fall.
We all live our lives within routines, whether we are aware of them or not. Every morning, in my own routinized life, I eat a simple breakfast and then sip my coffee and read.
We all live our lives within routines, whether we are aware of them or not. Every morning, in my own routinized life, I eat a simple breakfast and then sip my coffee and read.
We all live our lives within routines, whether we are aware of them or not. Every morning, in my own routinized life, I eat a simple breakfast and then sip my coffee and read.
September is summer dialed down a notch. By the time you hear this, we will be just a day away from autumn. But if you are like me, you coax summer to stay as long as you can.
September is summer dialed down a notch. By the time you hear this, we will be just a day away from autumn. But if you are like me, you coax summer to stay as long as you can.
September is summer dialed down a notch. By the time you hear this, we will be just a day away from autumn. But if you are like me, you coax summer to stay as long as you can.
We arrived home last Sunday after our annual three-week escape to Lake Dunmore in Vermont. Already I miss that great, deep, five-mile-long northern lake, so different from the Cape’s modest ponds.
We arrived home last Sunday after our annual three-week escape to Lake Dunmore in Vermont. Already I miss that great, deep, five-mile-long northern lake, so different from the Cape’s modest ponds.
We arrived home last Sunday after our annual three-week escape to Lake Dunmore in Vermont. Already I miss that great, deep, five-mile-long northern lake, so different from the Cape’s modest ponds.
I never met Irene but I think I would have liked her.What little I know of her comes from the bench placed in her memory at Shawme-Crowell State Forest in Sandwich.
There is a neighborhood at the far eastern end of Nantucket called Codfish Park. Most of the cottages here are tiny—cozy, a realtor might say—shingles situated right in the sand.
The other day I was walking through a small private cemetery full of 19th century gravestones when I came upon one for “Ruth Ann, daughter of/ Henry and Ruth Sears, / died November 19, 1836,/ aged 1 year, 8 mo.”
Seth Rolbein, a journalist living in Wellfleet, recalls his time aboard the fishing boat Miss Sandy and its Captain Louie Rivers.
My mother has spent the spring and the better part of the summer fixing up my grandparent’s house.
It was on a beautiful day in mid-July that I had my first and only experience with one of the rarest and most unusual habitats on Cape Cod: a quaking bog.
This summer is the 65th anniversary of the Wellfleet Drive-in, the only drive-in movie theater on Cape Cod.
The lilacs have come and gone, the American pillar roses out in ’Sconset, on the island’s eastern end, are just about to bloom. I’ve been canceling plans to go hang out with the horseshoe crabs, who troll Nantucket’s north shore under the early summer’s full and new moons.
About a month ago, just after the oak leaves had come fully out, I was walking out our drive to get the mail when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the gray form of a squirrel to my left, rustling around in last year’s leaves next to the wood pile.
Over the past several months, I’ve introduced several of our friends to an extraordinary property recently acquired by the Wellfleet Conservation Trust.
I do not understand the brilliance of the bright full moon in the sky tonight, though I stand beneath it on the beach. I have had its phases explained to me, but I do not fully grasp them.
A Yarmouth friend was recently worried about her aging grandmother.It’s hard, she said, she lives so far away.
I have, unwittingly, become instantly identifiable by my red knit cap. I have been wearing the cap each winter for more than a decade, and on days when I wear something else, I am invisible.
On the last day of April, a few minutes before 8 a.m., I stood in line in a chilly, light drizzle, waiting for the opening of Wellfleet’s most recent home-grown or home-made food purveyor, The Bagel Hound.
A lot of trees came down this winter, largely the result of two fierce windstorms in January. Most were pitch pines.
April is indeed the cruelest month – and it’s not just because Cape Cod weather whipsaws us into madness, with 65 degrees one day and 40 the next.
On the first day of spring, I went looking for it in the garden at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church.
I went out on the tidal flats yesterday about 3 p.m. on a new moon low tide, wearing hip boots and my new red suspenders.
The other day I stopped to see my friend Ralph. Ralph has an uncanny ability to find unusual things in unusual places.
I keep having dreams where I am standing in the School Street parking lot. There is nothing particularly special, certainly nothing beautiful, about the parking lot, located between Mechanic and School Streets in Provincetown.
I went out on the tidal flats yesterday about 3 p.m. on a new moon low tide, wearing hip boots and my new red suspenders.
We tend to associate imagination with poets, artists, composers, theoretical physicists, and other creative types. But the ability to imagine new things or ideas can play a part in more prosaic endeavors, such as, well – let me give you an example.
Not every public way is marked out here. I don’t worry about that too much. If you aren’t supposed to be someplace, there will most certainly be a sign warning you to keep off.
I have always taken a certain pleasure in the knowledge that a flock of finches (whose name I share with them) is traditionally known as a “charm.” “A charm of finches.”
“Where are the snows of yesteryear?” is the often-quoted opening line of a poem by the 15th century French poet Francois Villon.
I’ve always disliked the expression “bucket list,’ the phrase popularly used to describe those things one would like to do before one, well, “kicks the bucket.”
My wife Kathy is Jewish, and yet with few exceptions we have had a Christmas tree every year. Well, not explicitly a “Christmas” tree; rather, a Tannenbaum.
He was walking across the cracked road that military wheels rolled over for decades, alone, a Vietnam War Veteran hat worn with obvious pride.
It is just November. A few crickets still “sing” their nightly serenades. What they are chirping about, drawing wing over wing, is impulse and desire, although in a mechanistic, formalized mode, much like the peepers’ chorus in the raw months of spring.
There’s a friend of mine who is always chiding me about my failed garden: “You’ve got to do something with all that land,” she says. She has transformed the hemline of her little house with wildflowers, raised beds, and window boxes.
The afternoon is overcast but dry. It is already beginning to get dark at 3 o’clock as I take a walk along one of the dirt roads bordering the Herring River.
On a crisp, sunny, calm afternoon in late October, the Wellfleet Harbor parking lot is one-third full, this despite the fact that Mac’s Restaurant and Seafood on the Pier have been closed for weeks.