Great Island, shot from a town way to Lewis Bay at Hyannis Park, West Yarmouth. Probably still the most exclusive and restricted location on all of Cape Cod.  The first white guy to find it (except for maybe the vikings) was an Englishman named Bartholomew Gosnold, almost two decades before the first Mayflower came in 1620, and he is the cat credited with giving Cape Cod its name.  Wampanoag natives met him in the shallows with copper-plated earrings and armor on their chests but he seemed more impressed with their fondness for tobacco. Go figure.

This is also where Point Gammon Lighthouse was built around 1815, to protect ships from the nasty glacial outwash plain, morainal minefields kicking the asses of seafaring vessels with anything from massive unmarked igneous boulders to entire sunken islands, strewn and spread for miles into Nantucket Sound by the last Ice Age.  If you weren’t a seasoned sailor, best to stick to land trades like cobbling or blacksmithing!

For most of the 19th Century, the island’s only inhabitants were the lighthouse keeper and workers at a smallpox hospital, but that would all change when famed ornithologist Charles Cory inherited his family’s fortune and purchased the entire island from Samuel Payson. I wish he was still around – there are cranes and loons and all sorts of other cool seafaring birds aloft this year on the salty Southeastern winds of the bay and I have no fucking idea what they’re called. My children mock me.

Anyway, Cory used the old lighthouse for obsessive bird watching, but he should have been watching his investments instead, since he lost his entire fortune in the all-but-forgotten Financial Panic of 1914. This caused him to sell the land to Malcolm G. Chace, a banker from Rhode Island, and the property containing the old lighthouse has remained with his trust-fund heirs ever since, with a worth of well over $1 billion.  Think Berkshire Hathaway board of directors. Think Bancorp Rhode Island. The tower still stands today as a private residence of some sort, but who the hell really knows? Maybe ask Warren Buffet?

This pic was shot from the beach in front of our rental on Malfa Road, which used to be called Monroe Street back in the day (possibly named after Leith Duncan Monro, a Scottish immigrant whose home at 1 Malfa still stands today). The area was prospected for development right after the Civil War and a company was formed to market the area to summer folk, but the 1873 Depression crushed the project like an overripe tomato, and it wasn’t until 1893 that an investors’ group from Brockton bought the land and tried again, with limited success. They carved the bluff and surrounding area up into about 300 lots, touting sandy gravel beaches well calculated for bathing, warm waters, good anchorage for boats, fine groves of young pine (some still standing), unsurpassed ocean views and those cool southeasterly breezes – a big deal in the days before AC – to serve as “a comforting balm to all dwellers” according to one brochure.

Unfortunately, the only balm the boys from Brockton found was for their whipped rear ends as another depression in 1907 beat their development plans like a cheap carpet for the next 40 years.  Only around 35 of those 300 lots had homes on them well into the 1930s, although some of these owners bought adjoining lots to enlarge their property. You can still see some of these double and triple lots here and there, which blows my mind, because – of course – capitalism does eventually barge in like a drunk stealing a taxi from an old lady. It sweeps in like a flock of seagulls on weapons-grade LSD and its new-money proponents obnoxiously gobble up prime spots and construct the most garish, Picasso-esque high rises and hang nauseatingly pithy, proletariat-masquerading-as-upper-middle-class placards like “Love Ashored” or “After Dune Delight” above their doorways. In fact, it’s happening right now, everywhere on the Cape. People with the ways and means, snatching up the housing stock in an effort to isolate against the pandemic. Not you. Not me. Not yet anyway.

But Hyannis Park, while not immune to this affront, has a feisty civic association that has protected its history vigorously over the years from developers and even the federal government, embracing a paucity that for me tastes like home. And after all, here we are, which is a miracle. Of course because of this year especially, but I mean historically too because we sort of just landed here all those years ago. Heather is no fan of beaches – her mother for some god-forsaken reason let her see Jaws on the big screen soon after its release in 1975 (she was only six!) – so it wasn’t until we had the kids that I persuaded her to come to the Cape and just test the waters, pun intended. I literally did the internet version of throwing-a-dart-on-a-map to pick our destination that year and booked this wonderful home owned by the Pignetti family from Trumbull, CT. Classy, vintage period home with remarkable woodwork and only necessary upgrades throughout. The boys can sink a rock in Lewis Bay from our deck. They have grown up here – each year’s photographs document how much they’ve grown, and remind us that soon, they might want to be off doing other things in the summer (hard to say – they’re pretty loyal and almost as much slaves to nostalgia and tradition as we are). In this same house, at this small, little-known beach, right on the bay, where many of the homes built here during World War 2 are still standing. In this pocket of timelessness, this familiar spot. Dumb luck. There are a lot of year-rounders in the neighborhood and we’ve come to know and love a lot of them and their families. Our kids know their kids and they look forward to seeing each other after the obligatory day or two of shyness subsides. You can have your destination sunset beaches, your Mayflower, your Nauset. Your Coast Guard and Old Silver.  I’ll take this little crescent over all that any day.

With any hope, we’ll find a nice little spot for ourselves down here and buy it. Soon. Who knows?  Maybe it will be this one. Our kids have never known anything else. Maybe not. That’s OK. We can’t wait for that retirement thing, what fun will that be? I’m already stooped over like marmot. It doesn’t have to be Great Island. But will be great just the same.