Tom Myers November 27th, 2011
Project 3
Cape Cod is not like a pristine beach. Our beaches when left untended are populated by blunt guts, needles and the occasional homeless man. It isn’t uncommon to find a dead fish or seal washed up on shore and even a human body isn’t that big a surprise. Tourists leave and filth starts accumulating again left by your corrupt businessman, his nose powdered, when stopping with his mistress to take another hit or your homeboy wannabe in his blacked out suburban peddling pot to kids in middle school. I have spent many a late night here in these illicit lots, but for none of the base reasons listed above. I’d drive by cars keeping a respectful distance from each other, about six empty parking slots and eventually I would park with my current girlfriend on the way home from dinner and a movie or rehearsal. Although I was always more occupied with how to take off her jeans in the cramped confines of my vehicle than the other cars around me it always lingered in the back of my mind what was going on under the safety blanket of darkness that enveloped each set of taillights as the motors were cut and the crashing of the waves returns to its dominant reign over background noise. Often a police car parked in the far corner; always lurking like a crocodile with just it’s bright eyes watching for any prey stupid enough to make a run for it. The other drivers only run if they are guilty.
When the tourists come, the Cape becomes a place of sun lotion and beach balls. Colorful kites populate every beach’s sky along with seagulls. The occasional biplane will soar by with a banner advertising the newest iced coffee from Dunkin Donuts or the newest of Captain Morgan’s Rum. The normal Cape vacationer drinks coffee to keep them up, and booze to keep em down. The sun will shine and shine but the breeze keeps the temperature bearable. The ocean skyline always has boats. Whether they are wianno seniors on a Sunday race or a power yacht lazily churning up the surf, boats can always be seen. The Wianno Senior’s captains are all drinking buddies at the end of the day but during a racing series they are more alike to pirates than comrades. The old sea dogs know the area well and use their decades of tricks to constantly baffle the younger sailors home from college. It is all in good fun, the cursing, the beer guzzling and the taunting as the boats round the marks. It is hard to imagine the stressed shouts these sailors have over a few silver bowls on pedestals when you stand on the beach. You hear the ring of the ice cream trucks and the calls of the gulls much alike to those of mother herding their small clan of eight year olds to wash off their feet to get in the car. The crash of the surf is always in the background, like a constant reminder of a presence that is hard to explain. The sea is a powerful entity, one to be feared and respected. Rip Currents can easily pull even a strong swimmer out farther than intended. On the Cape, you can always drive far enough and run into the ocean. Despite this there are still those who live on the Cape who don’t know how to swim.
Cape Cod is essentially one giant sandbar. Its edges are constantly changing due to hurricane tides and the will of the moon. Thus the beaches change from year to year, which is a good thing since it keeps the tourists coming back year after year. That is the bread and butter of the Cape, tourism. Many adolescents become lifeguards or Ice cream truck drivers. Many shops advertise your average boogie board or inflatable whale. These tourist traps snag even the resident occasionally. Down by the wharf of Hyannis, it is just as easy to book a pirate cruise on a mock ship around the harbor, as it is to take a ferry to Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket. Walk up Ocean Street far enough and you come to the Kennedy Memorial. The Cape uses these tributes of royalty to attract your average sightseer. You can take tours of Hyannisport, hoping to glimpse a Kennedy or go to the Kennedy Museum. It’s ironic some peoples fascination with this somewhat ambiguous presence. Many natives wouldn’t know a Kennedy if they bumped into them on the street.
Towering over all Hyannis is the new addition to the hospital. It’s 8 stories, which is a big deal on the cape where zoning laws can prevent you from planning an extra petunia plant in your garden. You can see this structure from the bay and the High school. When they did safety checks they pulled highschoolers to splash some blood on their faces and pretend to be patients, firefighters carried them all the way down the stairs strapped to beds with neck braces banning all opportunity to actually see what was going on. The School itself is interesting. Remodeled in the late 90’s it still contains traces of my father’s time when he sat imprisoned in the same walls that hold students today. Other things are much newer. The 1400 seat auditorium with a lowering orchestra pit is constantly fought over by the Cape Cod Symphony orchestra and the school. When the orchestra has a show an ambulance comes because the average age of audience members is at least 80. The drama club has won awards and puts on aesthetically beautiful shows that draw big kid-friendly crowds such as Beauty and the Beast and the Wizard of Oz. A recent addition to the school is a new track despite its recent disfigurement. Last years powder-puff football game turned into a brawl suspending students and teachers as well as sending students to the hospital. The football coach refereed and some girls upset with the calls decided to mar the new track by running with cleats on a couple of laps. Then the coach was fired for swearing at the football team. Sports in Barnstable have a hard time keeping coaches. The girls hockey coach left a after death threats were sent to her on facebook and the sports director didn’t back her up by removing the threatening students from the team. He sided with the bully parents. In the Barnstable school department if you raise a big enough stink you’ll get what you want.
To find out the real stench of the High School your nose could follow the cigarette smoke to the bathroom. The bathrooms are like an ancient library with each stall wall a stone tablet recording ancient myths. Many of these were “I’m a foot long when hard” or “Johanna likes it in the butt”. One person decided to write “Big Dogs Rule” on every stall door in the school. I always wondered why there was so much graffittti in such a private place. Above the urinals some hobby-less individual had even scrawled into mortar between the tiles, “Santa isn’t real” If you have the compulsiveness to scrawl that into an area so thin and unnoticeable as your way to exhume your rage against the machine than you seriously need to see a doctor. These grimy cubicles were often the location of bomb threats and cigarette smoke. Many deals went down there as well, for drugs or the answers to a test.
Cape Cod “spirit remains a mixture of pride and provincialism”(Lopate) due to its history of pilgrims. These same pilgrims are often thought to be the ghosts that haunt the north side of the Cape. Cape Cod might be like a civilization. Social hierarchy is rampant. The politicians, inheriting money from ancestors of crime and fame from assassination, the retired who drive slow just like they’re ways and the minorities, who the town tries to hide in affordable housing. That leaves your middle class, taxed enough to never be able to move up but making too much to ever move down. The children of these groups follow in the footsteps of those before them, Politicians daughters marry movie stars, The retiree’s children have kids of their own and the minorities’ kids grow up in a never ending cycle where they will never get anywhere due to their own chains of addiction and abuse. The children of the middle class run off Cape unless they to have fallen prey to the vices of self-indulgence.
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