Installment #2 – The Downeast Chronicles

The second of my 2001 bike trip letters:

Hi, everyone. I’m starting this in the Newburyport Public Library on a beautiful Friday morning. Hands down, it has the best public access internet I’ve encountered along the ride — a large, sunny room, scads of terminals, no waiting, no time limits. But lucky for you I am eager to get to Plum Island this morning — just off Newburyport, five miles of hiking trails and beach — so I will keep this brief, or at least put it aside and come back to it once I get to Maine, sometime tonight.

I last wrote from Nantucket, which, like a lot of the posher beach communities — particularly the islands –is a strange combination of natural beauty, grizzled locals who endure the summer influx, and overprivileged visitors from various East Coast centers of power and culture. Such that you could be taking your evening passagiatta down the cobblestoned sidewalk, licking your coffee ice cream cone, watching the sun set over the harbor, and come across a tense Armani-clad New York type screaming into her cellphone, “my lawyers can keep you tied up in court for two years, you bastard!”

But I enjoyed Nantucket a lot, spent Saturday morning biking out to the beach at Madaket and then, on the ride back to town, walked a while in Ram Pasture, which is a big nature preserve privately bought and maintained for public access (like a lot of properties on Block Island). Also spent a little time at the Whaling Museum.

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Change of scenery: I did put this aside for a day, and am now in Ogunquit, Maine, at the Captain’s Daughter Cafe, whose sign advertises internet access –fifteen free minutes with an expresso, then $2.50 every fifteen minutes afterward. I have an egg timer in front of me. Very comfortable place, I am the only one here at 9:30 in the morning.

Anyway, last Sunday morning I took the high-speed ferry from Nantucket to Harwichport on Cape Cod. It was my first high-speed boat — I took another one to Boston the next day — and quite a nice way to travel.

Very smooth ride, train/plane type seats. I biked up the Cape to Truro, where my friends Woody Kaplan and Wendy Kaminer lent me the use of their house on the bay. I’ve been on the Cape only once before, and the earlier part of the ride — Harwich, Eastham, Orleans — is definitely a few notches down on the class meter from the islands I’d been hanging around in. Kreem n’Cones, motor inns, modest smaller houses — well, Capes, actually. There is a great bike path running along the old railroad line from Eastham to Wellfleet.

From Wellfleet, I took back roads to Wendy and Woody’s house in Truro. It’s a huge place, only water visible from the various decks, stairs leading down to the beach, where I had a late afternoon swim.

Spending the night there all alone, watching the sunset and sipping some of their Scotch, I felt a bit like William Randolph Hearst paddling around at San Simeon.

Next morning I biked to Provincetown along 6A, which surprised me a bit by its funkiness — tiny guest houses along the prime oceanfront, all named after flowers. None of the exclusivity I had expected. I had forgotten that Provincetown was a gay mecca, and I parked the bike and walked around for a while among the many shirtless nipple-ringed men. I popped into a cybercafe and there was a Tinky-Winky doll atop my terminal. After lunch, I rode out in the Province Lands, a nature preserve ribboned by a bikeway for five or six miles, one of the most beautiful drives I’ve done.

Landed in Boston Harbor by dinnertime, and biked way out on Huntington Avenue, in medical-land, to the apartment where Una was staying with Wes (it’s his sister’s apartment; he is working as a waiter in Boston this summer). Since I was taking them out to dinner in the North End, and didn’t feel like biking out late at night to Newton, my next stop, I suggested I crash on their couch. When, on the phone, Una was resistant, worrying that I wouldn’t have enough space, I took this for an understandable desire not to have your Dad hanging around during your rare time with your boyfriend. But it turned out that the one couch in the apartment was about 3 and a half feet long, so I ended up sleeping –quite well — on a yoga mat on the living room floor, several steps above the wooden board that was my bed for the night I spend in the Suffolk County Jail in 1974. But that’s another story.

I made my date at the Isabella Stewart Gardiner Museum in Boston the next day. A bit like someone’s attic, but some great stuff there. A few years ago there was a spectacular heist of some Rembrandts and Vermeers that have never been recovered. The places they occupied have been left empty, no explanation. I was intrigued by various cases covered by cloths with signs saying “visitors may lift.” So I did, occasionally, and uncovered a great collection of letters by U.S. Presidents, including some of the more obscure, like Fillore, Taylor and Tyler. I was impressed, passing through one of the rooms, by a late middle-aged, unnaturally blond guard — full uniform –who was excitedly and knowingly annotating the paintings and objects for an elderly woman and her daughter.

Spent the evening with my friends Annie Fishel and Chris Daly at their house in Newton on Crystal Lake, where we had an early-evening swim. These Boston suburbs can be great places to live — there’s nothing quite like them in New York. They still feel like towns, even though they’re only 20 minutes by the T from downtown Boston. It had been years since I had encountered their two boys, Gabe and Joe, and they were terrifically intelligent, engaged and engaging.

Unusually for teenagers (other than my own, of course!), they evinced some awareness of other adults as other than the person who drives you to the movies or puts food in front of you. Next day I had breakfast and lunch with friends, strolled around in the Public Garden and made a nostalgia trip to Fenway Park, then headed out to Arlington, where I stayed with Alice and Dave Denison (and their frisky new puppy, Frannie).

Thursday morning, since my plans to ferry to Gloucester had been scotched by the discovery that it runs only on weekends, I braved the suburban byways around Boston and made it to Gloucester by lunch, which I had at the Bass Rocks Beach Club with Peter and Karen Bell. Peter, the President of CARE, grew up in Gloucester, where his brother is running for Mayor and his father is President of the Cape Ann Historical Society, so, in between talking about Haiti and what it is like to negotiate with the Taliban about relief work, I got a lot of good local tips, and was steered to a remote beach on Eastern Point where I had a very bracingly cold swim.

Continued northward, on this 65-mile day, through Rockport, Essex (where I made the obligatory stop for fried clams at Woodman’s) and Ipswich, arriving at the Morrill Place B and B on the main street (which happens to be called High Street — there are about six street names that recycle through these New England towns: High, Main, Commercial, Wharf, Water,Harbor) at nightfall. A sweet, if somewhat Quasimodo-like woman named Pearl showed me to my room in the immense 1806 house, complete with widow’s walk.

Next morning I biked out to Plum Island — like the Province Lands, mostly wildlife preserve, full of wildflowers and birds (and nettlesome green flies).

And that brings me more or less back to the beginning of this again too-long letter.

Yesterday I crossed the borders of two states, stopped only by two drawbridges raised to let tall-masted ships pass. New Hampshire has an eighteen-mile, mostly tacky coast. Southern Maine is lovely. I made it to York Harbor, Maine (about 340 miles of road from Westerly, where I started) in late afternoon, but with no place to stay, my plan to mooch my way up the New England Coast having hit a snag when my two friends on the Maine shore were not in town. So I looked for a vacancy sign, and ended up at the Grandview Motor Inn, across from the beach and with a nice view — from my shabby little room — of the Nubble Point Lighthouse in Cape Neddick. I’m off to Kennebunkport for lunch and a swim, then will turn west, leaving the coast, biking across New Hampshire and into Vermont, where I will, mid-week, arrive at Sheila and David Rothman’s in Woodstock. After a night or two there, I will get the one Amtrak train that takes bikes — the Vermonter — from Windsor, and get to New York in time to hook up with my family for the drive to Block Island on Saturday. How I will get to Woodstock and where I will stay along the way, including tonight, I have no idea.

Sorry to tax your patience again with such a rambling letter. Not sure there will be another one on this trip, but it’s been even more fun to do than to write about.

Stay well, and to all of you who have asked after my tailbone, it’s quite a bit better.

Gara