CAPE COD Is A Number of Things [Illustration] ALLAN NEAL The selections in this book have appeared in different form in the column Soundside of the Yarmouth Register. PRINTED AT THE REGISTER PRESS YARMOUTH PORT CAPE COD DECEMBER 1954 _We had been driving along in the full glory of a September afternoon on the Cape. It was a wonderful world of deep blues and green pines, of gleaming white sands and of sunshine singing over everything. I had been pointing out things, afraid she might miss them, or not see all there was to see in them._ _She said, “I wish you could hear yourself as you sound to others. When you talk about the Cape it is as if you owned it, all of it,--and you treat everyone else here as your guest.” There was nothing to say to that because I knew it was the truth. Still, I knew that there was a better than even chance that, given a year, more or less, she would be irritating some newcomer from the Mainland with her own possessiveness. She said, “It is really a very nice place you know, especially on a day like this. But you have been everywhere and everywhere leads you right back here. You never leave the Cape except under protest, and you rush back as if it might disappear in your absence. What is it between you and the Cape?”_ _So I thought I would try, anyway, and I began_: “_Cape Cod is a number of things, and it means a number of things to me...._” _First of all there is the land, the bounteous and the beautiful land, and then there is the beautiful and bounteous sea that surrounds it. And there is the special way in which the land and the sea respond to nature and her varied seasons. There are a thousand colors and a thousand variations of each; there are a thousand moods and you never know which one to expect. You only know that the land and sea are there and that there is no dullness in them._ AT THE RISING OF THE SUN It was the strange half-light between yesterday and today. From an intricate network of twisting, turning roads you could follow the headlights of the cars as they moved from all points of the compass toward the dark outline of the hill. The moist air formed diadems of light around the headlamps and their beams sparkled from the gleaming, rain-washed street. Sometimes the cars swerved to avoid a branch or bush that had been tossed in their path by the gale winds of the night. Sometimes the lights picked out some strange creature of the night as it scurried into the brush beside the road, alarmed at this unlooked-for intrusion upon its domain.