Last November, on a Saturday before Thanksgiving, my good friend Emma and I made a day-trip to Cape Cod territory. Cape Cod has held a fascination for me long before I came to Bawston. Back in high school, I used to peruse the web for cool wallpapers of outdoor scenery and save them for future viewing, which, admittedly, is not the most heterosexual thing I've done. But anyway I once stumbled upon a Flickr album with Cape Cod's beach sunsets and in one of the pictures, there were these slender rectangular pieces of wood that formed a fence along sand dunes overlooking the water. I thought this, along with the water's strange immiscibility with colors of the sky, would be worth a look some day.
But for the purposes of our trip, Cape Cod was irrelevant. Emma had made an earnest suggestion freshman year that we go on an adventure at some point in college. It's a suggestion I entertained because an adventure designed and implemented with Emma's involvement, whatever the destination, could not disappoint.
Aside from being a great all-around friend and a loyal supporter of this blog, Emma possesses the incredible patience and aplomb of a thermophile - she can seemingly enjoy life at her own pace and on her own terms even when the environment seems inhospitable. Sometimes, a misfortune or insult may briefly raise the volume of her voice but her tone will have hardly changed. Then, her matter-of-fact acknowledgement of the event is the benediction of humor that blesses and forgives everyone in the scene. I should also mention that she, like me, has no discomforts about silence.
We ultimately chose our destination by determining the amount of driving needed to get there and comparing this to the amount of driving that would qualify as an adventure. The 2.5-3 hours to Provincetown, the most remote city in the Cape Cod proper, seemed just right. We would figure out the actual itinerary along the way.
To the gentleman who was handling our paperwork for the rent car at Enterprise, though, this must have been rather disconcerting. The sight of a young Asian male with corrective lenses should have been enough to cause a trip in anyone's actuarial mind. Add the natural shakiness of my hand manifesting itself in the signing of the paperwork and Cape Cod, we've got a problem.
Polite but sounding nervous about having to fish for information, he asked us twice where in Cape Cod we were going. I was slightly annoyed the second time. So I asked him to recommend a place for us. Then he brightened, losing the nerves, and confidently endorsed a place called Wellfleet. I don't remember exactly what he said, except that he enjoyed visiting the place quite often with his family, and that there were "a lot of different things" we could do. Then to my surprise, a lady sitting behind us, who was also looking to rent a car, seconded Wellfleet. Her statement was similarly cryptic, something along the lines of "I have a good time there, I enjoy the place a lot."
Anyway, we did succeed in renting the car and were on our way. The dashboard clock read a little past 10:30 a.m. when we left, and the rest is history:
-The trip got off to an inauspicious start, with me forgetting to switch lanes upon entering the freeway and Emma fumbling with the navigation on my phone. Oh yeah, I was the one driving. The result was that we circled an elementary school parking lot three times before registering positive mileage in the no-stoplight zone.
-The traffic dissipated soon after we escaped downtown Boston, and was replaced by rows and rows of foliage trees along the road. Except for some young'uns with their luminescent yellows and oranges, most of the leaves had begun to show tinges of mahogany and fulvous, which strangely enough, got me thinking about fatherhood at one point in the drive. Because I wanted to focus on safe driving, I didn't give myself much of a chance to look closely at the trees, but speeding along in that open road with the blur of fall colors stretching as far as I could see - that was the highlight of the trip for me.
-We did go to Wellfleet. It was a decision that had me uneasy from the outset, and Emma can testify. When the gentleman at Enterprise first handed me the keys to the car and Emma and I got in, the first thing I said to her was, "I'm not sure if we should go to Wellfleet." Why? The combined age of its two aficionados was about 80. This gaping intergenerational gap likely boded a dissonance between our definitions of phrases like "fun", "good time" and "a lot of different things." For all we knew, Wellfleet's appeal could have been a store that sells pastel-colored cardigan sweaters for cheap or a community softball league for women who've hit menopause and can still hit some more.
Wellfleet, as it turns out, was not altogether different from what I had imagined. A quiet town with a library and colonial church holding it down, and a vibe of close-knitedness wherever folks could be found. We had lunch at a place called Lighthouse Restaurant, which looks like it was built from a ship's wooden dock. The Yelp reviewer who describes it as a townie bar is correct, but Emma and I did not attract too many glances and enjoyed decent sandwiches.
-According to Frommer's, Cahoon Hollow Beach is "spectacular" and "on the rough, frigid Atlantic Ocean." The latter was right on the money, but I was rather disappointed that the huge dunes that slope down to the beach were not more picturesque. Blame it on the time of the year, of course, and of the day (most beaches in Cape Cod just have that barren look unless the sunset is going on.)
But a cool treat was the foray into the woods to and from the beach. Along the way, we encountered a road sign that explicitly warned us of a slow handicapped child. Whatever it takes to get the job done, I guess.
-If we compare the shape of the cape to that of a flexed arm that has horribly atrophied from the elbow up, the city of Provincetown sits at the curled fist. And aside from packing punches in the way of delivering quality seaside views all around and tersely named boutiques such as French Kiss and Market, it really grips visitors with its robust and lively gay community (the fist analogy will stop here.)
Gay couples, gay couples with dogs, and rainbow flags filled every narrow street. Emma was intrigued by a particular coffee shop that allowed pets and carried an impressive line of treats for the furry friends. I liked gazing out at the steely waters by the boardwalk because it was about the only thing I could do without getting amused.
The image I will always remember, though, came on our drive to Provincetown. After passing through the heart of Cape Cod National Seashore, we saw Route 6 give way to an alternate path to Provincetown, the 6A, which snakes closer to the coast. I decided to stay on the 6 for no good reason, and was almost regretting my choice when I was rewarded with one of the most magnificent stretches of highway I've ever seen.
To my left, there was a continuous line of these startlingly uniform and petite homes, almost like giant gingerbread houses. I couldn't tell what color they were because the sun was darting behind the rooftops and throwing their outlines in dark relief, but I'm pretty sure they were more colorful than the Bluth family home. And then to the right, there was this great expanse of yellow and brown grass, something you'd more likely see in an African savanna than North American prairie, except that the terrain was just shaped ridiculously. It was round and flat depending on where you looked, which is what you expect from hills, but there were also bulges and sagging tops and veins in the mix, like some cubist depiction of an old person. And driving a little farther along, I caught glimpses of a black pool of water, thick and heavy like tar, just stagnating along in the middle of all that yellow and brown. I admired it so loudly and repeatedly that Emma started cracking up.
