Growing Up Cape Cod
Learning to Live in the Season
A long, sandy hangnail attached to Massachusetts, Cape Cod was my cradle. Jutting into the Atlantic, the beckoning finger of land boasts postcard-rugged windswept marshes and beaches, and harbors with working fishing boats. Ghosts of Pilgrims wandered among moss-covered headstones in ancient cemeteries, while we rubbed their names and dates in charcoal frottage on school trips. Lighthouses and wild cranberry bogs and seabirds digging for crabs are the wallpaper of coastal life. Living within the confines of very distinct seasons instills appreciation for every temporal moment: for July’s butter and sugar corn, for January’s bitter greens.
U-pick strawberry farms and found pinecones for Christmas ornaments were my initial foray into foraging, identifying plants, and harvesting food. In summertime, between waitressing gigs and internships, I’d fish with my father from a tiny, one-lane bridge on a lane lined with saltbox houses, dropping hooks for bass at high tide. We surfcast August waters for flounder from an empty beach at sunset, their flat, whitish and mottled frames like catching crescent moons. There were blueberries to pick for pancake stacks, and beach plums to pluck from thorny bushes to make sour jam. In winter, my sister and I went clamming before school, trudging flats at low tide in too-large waders, feet layered in several pairs of itchy, wool socks. We filled wire baskets with quahog clams the size of my prom corsage, salivating in anticipation of my mother’s baked stuffed clams, complete with random bits of crunchy shell. In fall, I roamed the shrubby autumnal woods, mostly alone but for my curiosities, collecting leaves and fungus for up-close inspection on a gifted microscope.
Springtime brings bluefish to the Cape’s beaches; the fish chasing the May herring run into shore. Putting up a good fight before being hauled into the skiff, we honored the oily fish by coating their dark-fleshed fillets in herby mayonnaise and grilling until the meat just begins to pull away from the bones. There were thin-shelled steamer clams to be carefully dug from the muddy flats of Barnstable harbor, their moniker their preparation. My parents popped raw cherrystone and littleneck clams like M&M’s, the hard calcium carbonate shells opened with an old carbon steel knife while kneeling next to the dug hole, slurping and sucking the unadorned bivalves from their homes.
These experiences continue to inform how I want to eat, how I want to live. Buying a second-hand, double barrel shotgun and collecting old butchering tools, I learned to hunt bird and game, using every precious ounce of the animal in the kitchen, a serious responsibility once you’ve taken a life. Raising pigs with friends, we butcher and cure the meat, tweaking ancient techniques, keeping notes tucked into bloodstained cookbooks. Foraging mushrooms in the mountains and on the coasts means understanding which varieties make a decent soufflé and which will melt the liver.
Wildly thoughtful and highly conscious mentors guide my understanding of ecology and ethos: beekeepers and farmers, bird and game hunters, cooks and chefs, winemakers and brewers, mycologists and fisherman. These life-forces have taught me a well-lived life includes fruits and vegetables grown from seed and pulled from the garden bed at the correct moment; a finely turned-out terrine from a hunted bird, its layers glistening with good fat; a jar of rillettes made from a Chinook salmon, excitedly reeled in and slowly smoked over Japanese coals. Like navigating by a night sky, these encounters map the distinct connections from nature to land, from animals and agriculture to our kitchens, and then finally, to each other and to ourselves.
No matter how quiet, there is no silence in the forest; no matter how calm, there is only white noise at the shore, but there is peace enough to contemplate the intricacies of nature. Listening to wind and weather and honeybees in the hive, the caw of crows and falcons high in the boughs, the spout of a whale near shore, or the whisper of a mushroom forcing its way up through the forest floor, I am connected and plugged in. Their language speaks of our sacred interconnectedness to every living thing on the planet. From the tiniest and most fragile organism to the most tenacious, countless webs bind us to the deep forest and mountaintop, to depths under the ocean, to the densely populated cities.
As a mortal, I most often glimpse these gossamer threads in the heavenly body of nature. She salvages my world-weary self with the gift of new discovery on each outing, encouraging a joyful intuition of my place in the daisy chain of our larger ecosystem. And, if I’m even more fortunate, I might just bring home dinner.
