In Jay Bertram’s opinion, and he wasn’t alone in it or the only one of it, the Cape was a great place for vacations, especially with children. Without them it was nothing, but with them it was great and he and Julia and the boys had some great times at the Cape, some wonderful times in retrospect. The beaches were the attraction. There were beaches everywhere on the Cape and they went to one of them every day, weather permitting, sometimes two of them, depending on the tides. They went to the ocean beaches at low tide, at high tide to those at the bay.
Coast Guard was the best ocean beach. The others, Nauset and Marconi, for instance, were full of stones and Jay didn’t like them. The bay beaches were all pretty much the same. They went mostly to First Encounter on the bay side. The boys called First Encounter the Big Fly Beach because of the green-headed flies that infested it. It was hell when they forgot the repellant. There was a sandbar at Coast Guard, Jay’s pleasure, and at low tide they waded out on firm bottom and got into the surf in water barely above their knees. The tide went out a mile or more on the bay side and when it came in again, in the afternoon, over sand which had baked all morning in the sun, the water was as warm as they were, or almost. It was beautiful.
On cloudy days or when feeling waterlogged, they went sightseeing. Julia put up sandwiches and they stopped for lunch wherever they were, whenever they felt like it. There wasn’t much worth seeing. They went to Rock Harbor and watched the fishing boats come in. They took pictures of each other at the windmill. They climbed the winding stair inside the Nauset Light and got a look from the top at a view hardly different from the view at the bottom. They went from Woods Hole to Provincetown, with stops in between. They couldn’t pass a cemetery. Julia got the shudders reading the old time headstones. There was a pond behind the house they rented, a good distance off for some legs. In the evenings sometimes, while Julia was busy in the kitchen, getting supper, Jay and the boys walked down to the pond, Jay to stand on the dock and watch, while the boys lay on their stomachs and peered between the planks. The pond was alive with sunnies that rushed at everything that fell into the water, especially breadcrumbs. Some had white edges on their fins and fringes on their tails and they were the best kind. The other kind, smaller, darker and quicker, got most of the bread. Once a little painted turtle appeared and paddled around and around, chasing all the fishes, and though shouted at and spat upon, wouldn’t go away.
