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A Cape Cod Notebook can be heard every Tuesday morning at 8:45am and afternoon at 5:45pm.It's commentary on the unique people, wildlife, and environment of our coastal region.A Cape Cod Notebook commentators include:Robert Finch, a nature writer living in Wellfleet who created, 'A Cape Cod Notebook.' It won the 2006 New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing.

Small Distances on Cape Cod Can Make for Big Differences in a Sense of Place

Graham Baker bit.ly/2a2khOS
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bit.ly/OJZNiI
Sunken Meadow Beach, Wellfleet

Cape Cod is a region that is usually spoken of, even by year-round residents, as if it were one fairly homogeneous place, with bigger or smaller waves, and perhaps some variation in traffic from season to season. I have lived here for over 40 years, and I am still learning about how different the various parts of this slim, sandy peninsula are.

This was brought home to me a couple of decades ago when I moved from Brewster to Wellfleet. It was a move only about 25 miles, but I was immediately aware, having lived so long and so locally in one place, that I was now in another place, almost another country.

Take geology, for instance. Cape Cod, as almost everyone knows, was formed by glaciers. In Brewster however, there is an abundance of stone walls, and large boulders stud both the hills and the shoreline. One of its small rivers, Stony Brook, is even named after them. In Wellfleet, by contrast, there is a dearth of both stone walls and any stones to build them with. The difference is due to the fact that the upper and mid Cape regions were formed by terminal and recessional moraines, that is the leading or retreating edges of glaciers – which dumped numerous stones and boulders, known as glacial erratics, when they melted. The Outer Cape, by contrast, was formed by what is called an inter-lobate moraine, or the side edges of two glacial lobes, which left relatively few erratics.

Even if I had not known of these geological differences, my arms would’ve recognized them when I came to dig my first Wellfleet garden. In contrast to the bone-jarring rocks my spade hit every spring in Brewster, digging in Wellfleet soil is like digging in pure sugar.

Sometimes these local environmental differences have personal, even gastronomical consequences. One autumn ritual I always looked forward to when I lived in Brewster was going out onto the tidal flats to gather quahogs. Brewster is said to have the largest expanse of tidal flats of any town on the East Coast, in some places extending over a mile out at low moon tides. Wellfleet, on the other hand, has a much smaller area of flats, and many fewer quahogs. It does, however, have oysters, and with a $10 senior resident shellfish permit I can pick up ten quarts of Wellfleet’s finest every week during the season. Compared to the long trek and arduous work involved in scratching for quahogs, the gathering of oysters is so easy it seems almost like cheating. This difference in shellfish populations is due to a number of environmental factors, including the particular composition of the mud flats in which the oysters grow and the infusion of freshwater from Wellfleet’s Herring River, which creates the peculiar chemistry of the local brackish marine environment that oysters seem to love.

Moreover, there are even those who claim a palette sophisticated enough to be able to distinguish the taste of oysters of one Wellfleet shellfish grant from another, much as some wine connoisseurs are said to be able to identify a bottle of fine Bordeaux not only as coming from a particular town, but even from a particular vineyard, recognizing the individual environment in the taste of the grape. I have not yet lived long enough in Wellfleet and tasted enough oysters to develop this ability, but I intend to keep trying.

Robert Finch is a nature writer living in Wellfleet. 'A Cape Cod Notebook' won the 2006 New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing.