A Cape Cod Notebook

In a twinkle-lit pizza place in Provincetown, the regulars argue over measurements, trade facts about the side streets, and remember the houses that once stood there. One man’s claim of a “working knowledge” of the town becomes a meditation on the seasonal workers who keep the Cape running.

Dennis shipbuilders with empty clippers heading home from China found a shocking cargo: bird dung from the Pacific. The Pacific Guano Company turned Woods Hole into a stinking industrial powerhouse, and then it vanished, replaced by the gated mansions of Penzance Point.

Born blind in Hyannis and raised in Harwich, Paul Pena went from Perkins School for the Blind to the San Francisco blues scene, where Steve Miller turned his "Jet Airliner" into a hit. A shortwave radio broadcast from Moscow then led him to teach himself Tuvan throat singing and earn an Academy Award-nominated documentary.

A childhood of six houses in four states left one writer craving the continuity other kids took for granted. Only after retiring to Dennis Port did he see that the Cape summers of his youth had been his home all along.

A swim alone off Surfside on the Tuesday after Labor Day becomes the starting point for a meditation on scale: how a tiny island and an endless ocean can hold the same feeling as a highway through the desert. The season is turning, and this essay sits in that turn a while before letting it go.

Twice a week, the Family Table Collaborative's donated food truck pulls into Cape Cod parking lots, offering meals to anyone who shows up, no questions asked. What began as a pandemic stopgap has grown into a weekly lifeline serving up to 700 people, built almost entirely on volunteer labor and local generosity.

New fishing restrictions on Nantucket extend protections for great white sharks that began on Cape Cod Bay and the Outer Cape. Tom Moroney connects those rules to the lasting damage Jaws did to the species' reputation, and to his own past coverage of a now-defunct shark tournament on the Vineyard.

A tiny, weathered gravestone in Sandwich's Old Burial Ground may be the oldest on Cape Cod, but its inscription was deliberately chiseled away centuries ago. Gravestone historian Steve Broker explains the competing theories, from anti-Quaker sentiment to Puritan objections over sacred imagery.

On Nantucket, the height of summer means being outnumbered by tourists two to one. A meditation on Augustitus, the exhaustion and thrill of a place at its busiest, borrowed from a phrase coined nearly a century ago.

A pizza order gone slightly sideways sends Tom Moroney down a rabbit hole of restaurant surcharges, tip-shaming, and the economics behind why your cheeseburger costs what it costs.

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.

Building a stone wall