We are Cape people. Every year, for about the past 20, we’ve returned for a week to a shabby cabin with a galley kitchen, lousy TV reception, and a deck with the proverbial “distant water view” of Wellfleet Harbor. Like the bobolinks that return each year from South America to their favorite New England hayfield, […]
L.L. Bean: 4:48 a.m. It’s nearly 5 a.m. and you’re standing at the gateway to Maine’s North Woods. Well, actually you’re wandering through the hunting and fishing annex of the vast L.L. Bean retail empire in Freeport, joined by bleary-eyed, coffee-fueled hunters who have been driving all night from Connecticut and New York and have […]
Cranberries have a storied New England history: Native Americans are said to have combined dried cranberries, meat, and fat to make pemmican, a practically nonperishable (and not so tasty) wintertime staple. Revolutionary War veteran Henry Hall began cultivating cranberries in the Cape Cod town of Dennis in 1816. Today, Massachusetts is known as the premier […]
English Separatists, a wing of the new Puritan movement, had fled oppression at home and found refuge in the Netherlands around 1607. In 1620, part of the congregation decided to build a new life in the New World. Their pastor, John Robinson, stayed behind and did not live to join his flock in America. The […]
In the dunes between Race Point, Provincetown, and High Head in North Truro sit 17 dune shacks, originally constructed out of driftwood and found materials between 1935 and 1950. These shelters, which replaced even older structures used as rescue stations, are now part of the Cape Cod National Seashore. Two organizations have an agreement with […]
For two weeks last fall, photographer Alison Shaw lived in a tiny shack on Cape Cod as part of an artist’s residency. She had no running water, no electricity, and no heat; the nearest road was a 30-minute hike away, up and over the dunes. Heaven. At the remote tip of Cape Cod lies a […]
It happens often as you drive around Cape Ann, the rocky headland jutting into the Atlantic 30 miles north of Boston. You round a corner or crest a hill and wham! — suddenly you’ve driven into a painting. It’s something about the way the light refracts off the ocean on all sides, making ship masts […]
Yankee Classic from November 1983 Read about a 2008 visit to Plimoth Plantation. The little village hugged the cleared hillside under the crude wooden fortress and the one heavy artillery piece that faced seaward across the salt marshes. The defensive position told the visitor that this was wartime. The lone street was a long, unpaved […]
Boston is called Hub of the Universe. And that’s not a name given only in jest. As a Boston native, I can say that pride in the Bay State has always spilled over into what outsiders sometimes might consider to be, well, arrogance. (Hub of the Universe?) The Massachusetts image exported to the outside world […]
