[For many up
here in New England, summer means a trip or twelve to the Cape—Cape Cod, that is (with no disrespect to
the beautiful Cape Ann). So this week, I’ll AmericanStudy five Cape Cod
stories—share your own summer favorite places and their stories for a
crowd-sourced weekend getaway, please!]
On what the Cape
isn’t any more, what it is, and what’s next.
The plentiful
fishing that gave Cape Cod its name (or rather that led Bartholomew Gosnold to give it
its name, as I highlighted yesterday) has been perceived as endangered for at
least a century. Take David Belding’s 1920 Report upon the
Alewife Fisheries of Massachusetts, for example, which dedicates much
of its attention to “causes of decline” in the industry (and, to be fair to
Belding, to proposed “remedial efforts” to reverse that decline). By the time
Billy Joel sang, as the fisherman speaker of “The Downeaster Alexa”
(1989), that “they say these waters aren’t what they used to be” and “there ain’t
much future for a man who works the sea,” those historical, environmental, and
economic trends were becoming clearer and clearer, and perhaps were already
irreversible. Cod may well deserve to be called “The
Fish that Changed the World,” that is, but the world has changed since, and
Cape Cod has had to change with it.
The Cape has
done so mostly through embracing tourism and all that it brings. As Thoreau’s
mid-19th century sojourns to the Cape illustrate, such visits have a
longstanding history of their own; by the late 19th century, it was
a fact universally acknowledged that wealthy Boston families like those on whom
William Dean
Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) focuses hadn’t achieved true
social prominence until they had a summer home on the Cape. Yet just as it has
on the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket to the South of the Cape, tourism to
Cape Cod has absolutely exploded in the last century or so, reaching a 21st
century crest that shows no signs of abating (just ask anyone who tries to
drive across the Bourne Bridge on any summer Friday afternoon; they’ll be easy
to find, as they’ll still be in traffic as of Saturday morning). It’s a fine
and arbitrary line to be sure, but I would argue that the Cape has in the last
half-century or so gone from being a touristed area, one popular with visitors
but with a distinct, longstanding identity and economy of its own, to being a
place defined by tourism, one whose primary identity is as a vacation destination.
Regardless of
how we narrate or define those historical and social stages and evolutions, the
more vital question is where the Cape goes from here. If tourism is going to
continue at such record numbers, preserving both the natural landscape and the
historic identity of the Cape will become more important than ever; the former
is especially salient given the striking and ongoing effects of global climate
changes. Entities like the Cape
Cod National Seashore offer a template for such preservation efforts, and
deserve the support of anyone who agrees with Thoreau (and me) about the Cape’s
amazing and unique treasures, human as well as a natural. None of these
challenges are limited to Cape Cod, of course; they are in many ways the
fundamental questions facing both the post-industrial United States and a world
dealing with climate change. But national and global challenges often benefit
from local frames and responses—and in this as in so many other ways, Cape Cod
offers a vital American setting and story.
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So one more
time: what do you think? Summer favorite places you’d highlight?
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