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Trips

Cape Cod 2021, Life on the Edge

Show of hands, please – who wants the window on car rides, goes for an aisle seat in the theatre? Me too! That identifies us as the brave people, the ones who enjoy life on the edge. (Click to enlarge/slideshow)

Instead of peering down the rabbit hole of psycho-genetics, I’m content to declare that my inner-edgieness is a birth-effect, the natural result of being born on the edge – the southeast edge of Lake Ontario, in a place that once also graced the northwest edge of these United States.

The shore of that lake would be the locale of most summertime adventure, all the way until 1960, when I was eleven and my family vacationed on Cape Cod, which is as edgy a place as you could imagine!

This is the northern terminus of the Cape Cod Canal, in Sandwich, home also to the Shawme-Crowell state park. Where I’ve parked my chair is the last patch of shade before the Canary Islands!

Peeskawso Peak, Monument Mountain, July, 2021

Matthew and I visited the ancient and the brand new at the same time, Saturday July 24, 2021 when we summited* Monument Mountain on the northern outskirts of Great Barrington, MA. With a contour as identifiable as Mount Greylock’s, Monument Mountain is about as ancient a thing as you’ll find in the broader neighborhood of the Berkshires. (*At my age, to ascend higher than a few flights of stairs, without a nap break, constitutes a summiting.)

And now it’s own most distinguishing characteristic, which was called Squaw Peak for at least a century and a half, has been re-branded as Peeskawso Peak, in a token nod of apology to the Mohican people, who are due much more from the descendants of the Williams family that dispossed them of so much of their land and forced their emigration to Wisconsin. (Yes, same Williams as set up the town and college).

Poet Dave Read takes the waters at the literary Lourdes of the Berkshires. Matt Lavalette photo.
Poet Dave Read takes the waters at the literary Lourdes of the Berkshires. Matt Lavalette photo.

When I got wind of the re-branding, I wrote this poem, to replace this one.

Peeskawso Peak

Come along William Culllen Bryant,
let us beckon Melville, Hawthorne to convene,
along with Umpachanee and Konkapot – all the best

Shall meet at Monument Mountain, and follow
Mohican Monument Trail, through the seasons
of the soul, to Peeskawso* Peak, and there to rest.

Dave Read

*Mohican for “virtuous woman.”

Read “Monument Mountain,”, by William Culllen Bryant.

Read good books club at Fair Haven, June 2021

Kate and Mike Halpin, and Caitlin and me convened the first gathering of the book club and never said a word about Harper Lee books, the conversation was so good! It was a beautiful day, rain free in an otherwise rainy week.

This shows that, while un-civil war tears at the fabric of the nation, relatives can travel to Fair Haven from Virginia, Massachusetts, and nearby Fulton – primarily for the joy of family, secondarily for chin-wagging on an Olympian level, and thirdly to partake of picnic cuisine! (Also, plenty fun photos at the book club page!)

This gathering took place a few days before Caitlin’s 50th birthday, which was my father’s 106th – July 2. That is the day the Declaration of Independence was approved by 12 of the 13 colonies – New York hadn’t made up her mind, yet!

These pictures (click ’em) show that there is plenty of room for you and your crew next time!

And here, Caitlin captures a sublime sunset from the Bluff the night beofre:

Cape Cod August 2020

A week camping in Sandwich, near the Cape Cod Canal was a nice change of pace – and place, after spending the previous twenty such at Tanglewood, now silent and still in Trumperica. It was sixty years ago that I first saw the cliffs near Truro, in the time before the National Seashore was instituted. Marconi Station is a must see for anybody visiting Cape Cod. No crowds, mind-blowing vistas, dunes, birds, seals…

Fort Hill, Cape Cod National Seashore

Motorists on Cape Cod can become blind to roadside signs, such as the ones that identify Fort Hill; places with such dull names are easy to overlook! Next time you visit the Cape, look for it, because Fort Hill will blow your mind!

I visited on a 90 degree day, when the pre-fab-board-walked red maple swamp provided cool relief from a surfeit of sunshine. By the time you’ve made your way back to the hilltop parking lot, though, it’s time to find the next cool spot!

Cape Cod July 2020

Ten days after the trip to camp at the Fair Haven bluffs on Lake Ontario, I began a Monday-Friday encampment on Cape Cod. Being a perpetual student, lessons learned on one trip are likely to play out on subsequent forays. And so, in the immediate wake of the soul-crushing Coleman camp stove failure at Fair Haven, we are blessed with the triumph of the beautiful butane* breakfast of steel cut rolled oats, apple, cinnamon, and maple syrup, alongside a plastic tube of FrenchPress coffee!

Hearty one-pot breakfast - Cape Cod 2020; Dave Read photo.
Hearty one-pot breakfast

*Careful kids, it’s way hotter and way faster than the gas used in antique Coleman campstoves.

A few months ago, NY and MA cancelled all 2020 campground reservations; but I kept checking, then suddenly was able to book primetime/primesite in each state, which illustrates the random madness of the American zeitgeist in time of RepublicanTrump. Trump, by the way, exists in current form because RepublicanNixon wasn’t hung, as he should have been, for treason, by meddling in the secret Paris peace negotiations before the 1968 election, and thus extending the slaughter of Vietnamese, Americans, and others, until 1974.

Following LBJ’s quasi-abdication in March, 1968, secret negotiations to end the war were convened in Paris, which collapsed the day before the election.

From Smithsonian Magazine:
The notes were taken by Haldeman on October 22, 1968, during a phone conversation with Nixon. They include Nixon’s orders to “Keep Anna Chennault working on” South Vietnam, and also say: “Any other way to monkey wrench it? Anything RN [Richard Nixon] can do.”