After the Christmas holidays, there was a shuffling exodus of friends, family members, and acquaintances to points south and warmer climes. Predictably, a number left for Florida, others to Mexico, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic. An adventurous few went to Cuba, Nicaragua, and even Peru.
I have no quarrel with these hibernal ex-patriates, even though, given my northerly predilections, if I were to leave the Cape in the winter, it would probably be to Maine or Vermont, or even to that most wonderful of wintry cities – Montreal.
But I don’t blame my Cape friends for heading south this time of the year. Some, I know, go primarily for the warmth, and to escape the prospect of endless snow shoveling. Still others, I suspect, are just suffering from cabin fever, that sense that, even if we’re not literally snowed in, this is the “dead time’ of the year on the Cape and Islands, when there is “nothing to do,” or at least relatively little going on.
Granted, this is certainly the time of the year when the pace of life, both natural and wild, slows to a crawl. A friend of mine, here for the holidays, complained that she and her daughter couldn’t find any place in Wellfleet "to sit down and have a beer.” Another inventive couple, frustrated at the slim restaurant pickings on the Outer Cape in winter, organized a dinner club, hosting a dozen or so friends at their house with deliciously-prepared local organic foods and fine wines.
Still, there are compensations for sticking it out here during the so-called dead months, ones that go beyond such obvious perks as sparse traffic on Route 6 and miles of uncrowded beaches to walk. One of my favorite wintry pleasures is being able to go the Wellfleet Library on Sundays, a policy only in effect from November to April.
I have to confess, though, that even reading good books or watching borrowed DVDs by a roaring fire eventually lose their appeal as gray, raw, chilly, February days gnaw away at our professed love for “the changing seasons of New England.” By Presidents Day I can barely muster any sense of superiority at being one of the “winter people,” those few who stick it out here, who are, in the phrase of Truro poet Brendan Galvin, “place keepers.”
Still, if we choose not to or can’t escape the Cape’s winter bleakness, we still have a choice: we can complain about it, or we can embrace it. I prefer the latter. The other day I walked on the beach on an ordinary winter’s afternoon. The beach and the ocean were both utterly empty. Not a bird, not a seal, not a boat was visible on the steel-gray winter seas. Not another person or animal walked the winter-bleached sands with me. And yet something unexpected welled up in me. It was not exactly joy I felt, but something deeper – a connection with life pared down to its essentials.
In a swale in the dunes behind the beach I came upon a stand of bayberry and beach plum bushes. Their branches and tips were completely bare, but at their bases were mounds of their own coppery dead leaves, like piles of old coins. It was as if the plants themselves had gathered the harvest of last summer’s life around them for cold comfort.
