Book: Summer Shift (NEW July 2010)by Lynn Kiele Bonasia

Fried clams

Mmmmm, a basket of fried clams with some macaroni salad to carry down to the rocks along the shore sounds might good right now.  The main drawback to reading this book on a Cape Cod Beach would be the constant temptation to stop reading and have a fried clam break.

You see, the book’s heroine owns a restaurant in a small town in Cape Cod (redundancy alert–are there any large towns on Cape Cod?). She has run the restaurant for 17 years, and her alcoholic husband wrapped his car around a tree a short time after they were married, so she’s discontentedly single.

As you may remember, I’m not crazy about romances, but this one has the virtue of presenting a few serious issues along the way. Her aunt has Alzheimer’s, her neighbor has Parkinson’s disease, and a cook at the restaurant has synesthesia–which isn’t as scary as it sounds–he feels shapes in things he tastes. Then there is the problem of letting go of the past, reconciling with an old love, and accepting her own maturing.

Sounds pretty interesting, and I love the setting, but I couldn’t warm up to the main character. That creates a real problem. I really didn’t like her very much. And she didn’t go out of her way to persuade me that I should like her.

As you may recall, I’m not crazy about romances, anyhow. But I’m trying not to over analyze a book that probably will be read with sand between the pages and grease marks from the fried clams on the pages. Here’s a nice description of the sea, that also tells us  the main theme of the book. Time softens rough edges.

“She got out of the car and made her way down the narrow path that led from the house to the beach.  When she got there, the horizon was defined by a deeper shade of black. Covered by a thin veil, the moon threw off enough light for Mary to see something blue near her foot, perhaps a dried jellyfish that had gotten tangled in a clump of eelgrass churned up in a recent storm. Somewhere out there, a baby winter flounder had lost its home.  Mary bent down to examine the blue object, a shard of glass, Noxema blue, not officially sea glass yet, too clean and sharp at the edges.  She picked it up and tossed it out into the water, where it, like everything else in time’s cauldron, would be sufficiently pulverized.”

Saltwater Grille

Oh, yes, Bonasia includes some recipes from the clam shack at the back of the book. Although the clam shack is a fictional place, the recipes were developed at the very real Saltwater Grill in Orleans, Massachusetts.

Enormous thanks to Alexandra Grabbe for scurrying around the Cape and taking these nice photographs. If you’re heading to Cape Cod, I hope you’ll visit Alexandra’s web site  about a green B & B in Wellfleet on Cape Cod that she and her husband own. When her customers want something to read, Alexandra supplies a collection of books which she talks about in her blog, Wellfleet Today.

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Henry David Thoreau

Destination: Concord, Massachusetts

Site: Henry David Thoreau’s Home

“What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?“

So wrote American writer Henry David Thoreau one and a half centuries ago. Sounds like a bumper sticker from the present day environmentalists, doesn’t it?  Good old Thoreau continues to prove himself way out in front of the curve.

Thoreau, whose Walden Pond also provided us documentation of an early version of staycation (shudder!) wrote, if not travel books, certainly books that invite exploration of a place.

Our Great American Road Trip visited Massachusetts two weeks ago, so when I got this letter in the mail from the Thoreau Farm Trust, I just had to share it with you.

The non-profit organization has rescued the American pioneering environmental writer’s birthplace from destruction.  In keeping with the man’s “green” principles, the house has been restored with sustainability as well as historic values. A neat trick, since the house was built in 1730.

Thoreau House

I  like the idea that instead of being just one more historic house in a state packed with them (Emerson, Alcott, Whittier, Emily Dickinson, Longfellow, etc.), the Trust is creating a place for people to learn about Thoreau’s environmental ideas and learn what they can do to make a “tolerable planet.”

If you would like to keep tabs on the project, learn more details, or support their work, go to the Thoreau Farm Trust web site.

To read more about some of the writers of Thoreau’s day and place, see this article by R. Todd Felton, and his second about New England writers,  and this one about Emily Dickinson.

Did you know that Thoreau’s house was being opened to the public? Will it be on your list of places to go?  Have you read Thoreau? Love him or not?

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

Dogtown, the book

Destination: Cape Ann, Massachusetts

Book: Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town (2009) by Elyssa East

Here we are in a wild, wooded 3,000 acre area next door to Gloucester MA. It may come as a surprise that we are not visiting Gloucester, a tourist mecca and authentic fishing town, or Cape Cod, or the historic and charming city of Boston.

I picked this new book because when I read it I was hooked from the very start. And it makes a good first step on our Great American Road Trip, because it reminds us of the great variety to be found in any state. You want to know about the whole state? Buy a guidebook. Here, we look for good reads that will also give you a sense of place.

Elyssa East, the author of [amazonify]1416587047::text:::: Dogtown [/amazonify] goes looking for the inspiration reflected in paintings by Marsden Hartley. She seeks a place of peace and healing. She finds a ghostly deserted colonial village, witches and warlocks, a cultivated wilderness, words of wisdom carved on immense boulders and an eerie landscape. And she follows the tracks of a gruesome murder and its impact on people’s feelings about Dogtown.

In this extensively researched literary non-fiction, East weaves together her many different tales in the way that underbrush tangles around the base of those glacier-tossed dolmens that dominate her thoughts and the landscape.

Does it make the reader want to go there? Depends.  I am willing to state that the next time I go to Boston, I’ll head north to Cape Ann and explore not only the usual tourists destinations of beach and quaint fishing village of Gloucester, but also hike into the woods of Dogtown.

The only fault I can find with the book is that I longed to see the paintings that inspired Elyssa East’s journey.  They probably are restricted by copyright so that they could not be reproduced. And heaven knows we can see plenty of them on Google images. In addition to his painting, Hartley wrote poetry, and here is what he had to say about Dogtown and its rocks.

Hartley, whose story gets buried (excuse the term) by the murder and subsequent trial, has words of wisdom that all travelers might well ponder. East says, “when he found a place he wanted to paint, he said that he ‘did as I always have to do about a place–look at it–see–it–and think of nothing else.’” He also quote T.S. Eliot:

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still

Even among these rocks.

Those words strike me as more inspiring than those preachy ones Roger Babson, economist and philosopher, had carved on the boulders. “When work stops, values decay,” “Keep out of debt, “Help Mother.” …Well, on second thought, I might carve that last one on a rock outside my door.

East does a good job of recreating this sometimes scary, sometimes peaceful landscape, but she also knows that you cannot comprehend a place without understanding its people. She talks with and introduces us to a fascinating parade of personalities. All in all, it makes wonderful travel literature for a road trip to New England.

For another view of Dogtown, you can read Anita Diamant‘s (author of The Red Tent) novel [amazonify] 074322574::text::::The Last Days of Dogtown (2008)[/amazonify] See a clip here of an interview with Diamant and some scenes of Dogtown.

You can always strike up a conversation with Elyssa East, author of Dogtown, on Twitter where she is [twitter]elyssaeast[/twitter].

MUSIC FOR THE ROAD

Get the music to go with a road trip visit to Cape Ann over at Music Road, where Kerry Dexter has some fisherman’s chanties and maybe more waiting for us.

MORE ON THIS STATE

And, if you want more of Massachusetts, see our post on Jaws at Martha’s Vinyard, Wellsfleet, Transcendental New England, France in Boston, Spenser’s Boston and the Pilgrims. See, didn’t I tell you? A lot of variety in one small state.

And thanks to Free Press, a division of Simon and Schuster for providing me with a review copy.

Did you know about Dogtown? Have you visited it? Or is this all new to you?

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Cape Cod Beach

Destination: Wellfleet, Massachusetts, Cape Cod, New England, United States

Books: The Giant’s House: A Romance by Elizabeth McCracken

A GUEST POST by Alexandra Grabbe

Alexandra is not only a traveler herself, but runs a bed and breakfast on Cape Cod, in case you need a place to stay after this novel inspires you to travel there.

I met Elizabeth McCracken last year when she spent a weekend at my B&B.  Reading her latest book, An Exact Replica of a Figment of my Imagination, sent me off to the library in search of The Giant’s House: A Romance, published in 1996.

Provincetown Fine Arts Works Center writer's residence

Elizabeth was twice a fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Works Center on Cape Cod and worked as a librarian for a number of years.  She may have based the library in the book on the public library here in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.  Nobody but Elizabeth knows for sure and she’s not telling.

In her first novel, Elizabeth McCracken lets her imagination run wild, and we traipse after her down a quirky side street in a fictitious Cape Cod town, charmed both by the characters she has created and her skill at storytelling.

Here’s the plot:  Peggy Cort, a lonely twenty-six-year-old librarian heading toward spinsterhood, takes a personal interest in James Carlson Sweatt, a gentle bookworm, already quite tall at age eleven, who will grow into a gentle giant, eight feet seven inches, and become the tallest man in the world.

Peggy’s passion for James evolves from curiosity to admiration to love, which she does not express until 1960, a decade after their initial meeting beside the circulation desk. And, yes, there’s romance, as the title indicates.    Oh, I know.  The whole thing sounds highly unlikely, and yet it works.  James has gigantism, a rare disease, which happens to be fatal. Their unique friendship allows him to explore his feelings on being different.

The real Cape Cod I know and love is rendered with precision.  We see the Provincetown bar where James’ mother, abandoned by her husband, drinks a bit too hard, the quaint little town of “Brewsterville” where Peggy and James live, the strip malls of Hyannis where custom shoes are provided in ever-greater sizes in exchange for appearances as THE WORLD’S TALLEST BOY, a  gig Peggy sees, at first, as exploitation.

There’s even a chapter set in Wellfleet, my home town.   The pace on Cape Cod, in the off-season, is so different from the tourist rush of summer that it’s refreshing to find an accurate description, as if a photographer had focused in on the weathered face of a single shell fisherman working the flats rather than vacationers at play in the same picturesque harbor.

Cape Cod houses, with their low ceilings, are not ideal for giants, so it’s perfectly plausible that James’ family would move him into larger quarters in a back yard cottage, custom-built thanks to money raised by Peggy, during a campaign similar to one organized here three years ago to pay medical bills incurred by a favorite son, injured in a skateboard accident.

Soon the Brewsterville locals are dropping by, hoping for a glimpse of the greatest attraction in town.  Of course, the tourists follow.

Some people came out specifically to visit James; some came for the ocean and happened upon him, more impressive than the ocean because no philosopher ever wonderingly addressed him, no poet compared him to God or a lover’s restless body.  Moreover, the ocean does not grant autographs.  James did, politely, and then asked how you were enjoying your visit.

That James’s Aunt Caroline should turn his cottage, with its custom furniture, into a museum seems the logical conclusion, but it is the tender relationship between two misfits that we remember months after finishing this exquisitely rendered novel. The Giant’s House: A Romance has been called a “small masterpiece,” and I agree.

Alexandra Grabbe

Alexandra Grabbe raised three children in Paris, France, where she worked as a freelance writer, a talk-show host, and an editorial assistant.  She moved to Wellfleet, MA in 1997 to care for her elderly parents.  Six years ago, Alexandra started Chez Sven Bed & Breakfast.  She blogs about the experience of being an innkeeper and living green on Cape Cod.

Alexandra: Thanks so much for bringing this novel to our attention.  And I want to commend Alexandra for her support of books, independent book sellers and writers.  She buys books by the best new authors and places them in her B & B for her guests to enjoy. Way to go, Alexandara!

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