Bernard,
You are the only one alive I can relate to who has anything to do with the Cape. My father bought a plot of land overlooking Welfleet harbor in 1956, and I spent my early kid to teen years clamming at low tide, swimming in ocean and then Long Pond to clean off the salt, and eat my mother’s chowder, which was always on the table. The years went by; my parents stopped going, I only went a few times, and then they sold it for a rather enormous price. Very sad day, as I remember it. Some memories that remain are some interesting people we met and who became family friends. For example, one day I was playing in the dune below our house (the one that held old bones and indian arrow heads under the sand), and a boy turned up from the rentals below to play with me. He turned out to be the son of John Dos Passos, the writer who was there vacationing. We visited Dos Passos’ farm in Virginia outside of D.C. where we lived, and heard his stories of his adventures with F.Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and riding on a motorcycle with his lover and now wife recklessly through the mountains of Spain during the civil war then, and other stories I wished I had been able to record. He was fascinated by my mother, whose father was Charles Sheldon (“Wilderness of Denali”), founder of Denali National Park in Alaska (check out Sheldon in The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America by Douglas Brinkley), her ancestors were William Bradford, of the Plymouth Colony, and Israel Putnam Gulliver, famous general under Washington, and her brother William G. Sheldon, the first westerner to enter rural China in the 1930s to study the panda bear in their habitat in Sichuan Province (“The Wilderness Home of the Giant Panda”) long before those furry lovelies showed up at the National Zoo in Washington, To end my meandering and hopelessly trivial tale, the Cape is special and always will be, and this little note is just a way for me to remember it and know someone I admire–got all your books! Want ’em signed before I go!–is there now enjoying that sandy heaven on earth.
Regards,
Peter S. Lunde