A captivating place, unspoiled by time
The mention of Cape Cod sends me into a reverie: As you cross the Sagamore Bridge spanning the Cape Cod Canal, you lower the window and smell the salt air. You notice that your shoulders are lower and checking your phone doesn’t seem that important anymore. You drive down the gravel lane to the house, and the crunch of tires on crushed oyster shells in the driveway is the best sound you’ve heard in months. You’ve arrived at 5:30 p.m., so friends and family are gathered on the sun porch and lawn for a crisp gin‑and‑tonic with just the right amount of lime. No one asks about your work. Instead, the conversation revolves around sailing races, the latest book on the Vichy government, or children and grandchildren, second and third cousins. Dinner is local corn and tomatoes, cod from today’s catch, and blueberry pie from Marion’s Pie Shop. After dinner, you walk down to the beach with a plastic cup of white wine, bemused at piping plovers darting in and out from incoming waves, just as Thoreau described them in Cape Cod 160 years ago. The gentle crashing of the waves feels like a hug. You sleep deeply as the wind wafts over you—we call it the Cape Cod coma—lulled by the faint moan of a foghorn miles out in Nantucket Sound. In Brooks’s young years, when it was his grandmother’s house, he would awaken before anyone else and hear the call of a bobwhite in the backyard. For Brooks and his siblings, there was never any TV, and they never missed it.
Our Knoxville friends Maxi and Seth Frank got plenty of Cape magic on a four‑day trip on the Cape Cod Rail Trail recently, biking past pristine ponds left by ice blocks in melting glaciers. In the village of Harwich Center, the Franks took a side trip two miles to Harwich Port for a lunch of leek soup and sandwiches with members of Brooks’s extended family and Knoxvillians Jeff and Lyn Johnson. Brooks took Maxi and Seth through his family’s house, built in 1891. He showed them paintings and lithographs by his mother, Charlotte. We walked down a path between wooden fences to a view from atop our bluff of Nantucket Sound, then walked down Snow Inn Road past Wychmere Harbor, a perfect circle filled with all manners of boats. Until the late 1800s, it was a pond, with no outlet to the Sound. Its circular shape made it ideal for horse racing, to the dismay of pious ladies of the town. This was one incentive for legions of men to dig out a channel, creating a home to fishing boats, the one‑sailed cat boats, broad at the beam and seaworthy.
Maxi and Seth then pedaled back to the Rail Trail. “Per your recommendation,” said Maxi, “we stopped for a dip in the clear water of Hinckley’s Pond.” They went on to Eastham, where they stayed at The Inn at the Oaks and walked to dinner at Arnold’s Lobster & Clam Bar. Eastham is home to the First Encounter Beach, where the Pilgrims first landed and stole some corn. During Todd Helton’s summer in the Cape Cod League, he stayed with a family on that beach. For UT players from Helton to Jordan Beck, the Cape Cod League is a throwback to a world gone by—living with a family, swinging wooden bats, playing in tiny hometown fields as flocks of kids chase fly balls into the woods, and selling raffle tickets in the stands.
Seth and Maxi pedaled to the tall dunes and dramatic ocean views of the Cape Cod National Seashore, then on to the arts haven of Provincetown, on the tip—the hand if you will—of the Cape’s arm. “I discovered Provincetown in 2002,” says former Knoxvillian Gary Belis. “It was a magical week in this quirky community where fishermen, drag queens, leather men, lesbians, painters, writers, and just plain ordinary folk mingle freely. It was true love, and I fell hard. I have returned every summer. The arts scene was first established over a century ago by the painters who were attracted to P‑town’s exquisite light—said to rival that of Provence or Venice—and then the playwrights and other writers followed.”
Eugene O’Neill’s first play, Anna Christie, debuted in P‑Town 110 years ago. In 1947, a young Marlon Brando hitchhiked with a girlfriend from New York City to Tennessee Williams’ rustic P‑Town dune house to read for the part of Stanley Kowalski. He arrived to find the kitchen floor flooded, the toilets blocked, and the light fuse blown. After fixing the lights and unblocking the toilets, Brando did Stanley. “A new value came out of Brando’s reading,” wrote Williams. “He seemed to have already created a dimensional character.”
“Today there is a thriving art gallery section in the East End of town,” says Belis, “and the theatrical tradition of O’Neill and Williams continues with new works at the Provincetown Playhouse.” You can also hop on a boat and go whale watching.
Families fortunate enough to inherit beloved vacation homes tend to have origin stories. We love to tell ours: In the late 1920s, Brooks’s grandmother caught pneumonia while ice skating near her home in Exeter, New Hampshire. To help with her recovery, his grandfather, an English teacher at Phillips Exeter Academy, wanted to find a warm summer destination. He recalled a student’s essay about swimming in the warm waters off Chatham, on the elbow of Cape Cod. Visiting Chatham, they found it “too fast”—that is, too expensive—and headed west on Route 28, the old Wampanoag trail that winds along the southern shore of the Cape, to the next town over, Harwich Port. As it happened, Brooks’s grandmother’s uncle George Ichabod Rockwood, at 60 with no heirs, was selling his ceiling‑sprinkler business in Worcester and looking for a spot to retire. He bought an estate with a gatehouse, tennis court, and beach, and in 1930, he bought a house across the dirt lane and pretty much gave it to Brooks’s grandparents. (“A check for $5,000 that was never cashed,” said his father.)
Brooks’s mother remembered hopping into the rumble seat of Uncle George’s Rolls-Royce to go to the Cape Playhouse, where they saw a young Bette Davis, Jimmy Stewart, and others. Founded in 1927 in an old church to give actors work when Broadway closed for the summer, the Playhouse still oozes the charm of a bygone era.
Uncle George helped found a yacht club that still hosts sailing school and sailboat races. He liked to sit on a bench atop a bluff and watch the races, especially when the colorful spinnakers popped up on the final leeward legs. Brooks’s parents met at a 1940 wedding reception at the yacht club. Now more than ever, the Cape is a magical place for weddings. Down our dirt lane and toward the beach, a wedding venue hosts as many as three a day. (Adam Sandler filmed a wedding there for his 2012 movie That’s My Boy.) Many of our nieces and nephews, and our daughter Olivia, have been married at the grove and arbor among the pine trees of the Cape Cod Lavender Farm, which Brooks’s brother Rocky, a landscape designer, created a few decades ago. Last summer, Knoxvillians Lucy and Doug Tyler enjoyed visiting the Lavender Farm and owner Cynthia Sutphin.
Large family dinners are a longstanding tradition. Our Knoxville friends Chip and Tesa Finn came for dinner during a Cape vacation a few years ago and loved the family feeling. The next day at a local gallery, Chip bought Brooks’s mother’s paintings of a pier near our house. “It hangs in our bedroom and makes me reminisce about that wonderful evening every day,” he says.
Families blessed with beloved vacation homes often like to talk about how they manage to keep them, despite property taxes, upkeep, and family rifts. At a certain point, Brooks’s parents put the house in a trust, and he and his five siblings are doing their darnedest to pass it on to their 13 children and their families. Each year around July Fourth, they convene for a cousins’ reunion with many of their 27 children.
Sailing in the protected waters of the Sound can make you feel like a Kennedy. Last summer, our friend Michael Hershey took our Knoxville friends Lyn and Jeff Johnson and Lee and Bitsy Ingram out on the Sea Bird, a 26-foot wooden yawl that he built himself. In a stiff breeze, the boat heeled like the one in Winslow Homer’s Breezing Up. “That was my best day of the year,” said Lee.
Comments are closed.