A Cape Cod Notebook

Over the past few weeks our local snowbirds have been returning from their annual winter sojourns in the south.

Seen from space, it seems so obvious that Cape Cod is one. But we know better.

Nantucketers take pride in our long history of stargazing and astronomy. Maria Mitchell, the first woman to work as a professional astronomer, was born here and discovered a comet in 1847 from the roof of the Pacific National Bank at the top of Main Street.

People come to live on Cape Cod for a variety of reasons. I came because its landscape and history spoke to me in such a compelling manner as a subject for writing.

People thought Luther Crowell was insane, but he wasn’t. He was the greatest inventor in Cape Cod history.

This week Bob concludes his account of the stranding of a large fishing boat on the Outer Beach last month.

If you live on Cape Cod, you likely have sand in your car. And if you live on Cape Cod and don’t have sand in your car, I might question if you are really living life to its fullest.

I’ve never thought of any beach before as my beach. Maybe that’s because all those other beaches already had names. I thought this beach was nameless, marked only by it’s “Emergency Beach Location 21” sign.

A few weeks ago, I had the occasion to visit my daughter and her family in Portland, Maine. I decided to go by train and booked a seat on Amtrak’s “Downeaster,” from Boston to Portland.

Not included in the blockbuster J. Robert Oppenheimer movie is how a Cape Cod connection played a crucial role in Oppenheimer’s early life, including his eventual move to Los Alamos to build a bomb that can destroy the world.

Beginning a new year in the middle of winter has always seemed ridiculous to me. But then no one asked me. I know, I know: it was Caesar’s doing, 4,000 years ago, to honor Janus, the god of new beginnings.

At the end of December, one of the Cape’s newspapers ran a special nostalgia issue. On the front page was Joel Meyerowitz’s iconic photograph of one of the Days Cottages on Beach Point in North Truro.

One of the most beautiful spots in Wellfleet, or for that matter, on the entire Lower Cape, is Old Wharf Road. It is one of those headlands that, along with Indian Neck and Lieutenant’s Island, thrust out into greater Wellfleet Harbor.

Whenever I have occasion to go to Boston and don’t need to rush home, I often avoid the divided highways and take a different route back to the Cape. One of my favorite alternatives is to take Route 58 south from Abington to Carver just before the Bourne Bridge.

Late Sunday afternoon — it isn’t all that late, but now that it’s dark at 4:30, late is all relative. Landmarks change in the winter light. The boarded-up Surfside snackbar where teenagers spent the summer scooping ice cream haunts the empty parking lot.

It looked old. It looked like something that was ready for retirement, though it still worked, still functioned.

Cummiquid writer Susan Moeller talks about the thrill of trick or treating.

Seth Rolbein, a journalist living in Wellfleet, talks about an 1820 fire that had a major impact on the Cape’s 20th-century development boom.

Nantucket Writer and Historian Mary revisits a place she wondered about as a child.