Wendell and Muriel Smith - Audio of 2009 Interview

In May of 2009 I interviewed my parents, Wendell and Muriel Smith, when I visited them in Florida. They were getting on and I wanted to capture their story, their life, and my family's history from their memories and points of view. I transcribed the audio of these interviews for this blog. See Part 1 and Part 2.

Recently I've been digitizing my old micro audio cassettes. Amazingly, I have a microcassette recorder from Radio Shack that still works. You can't buy these anymore. Or, you can, but they are expensive and used. If there are new ones around, I haven't found them. 

Here is the original, unexpurgated audio of the interview. The following links open the audio files posted to Soundcloud: Audio Part 1 and Audio Part 2.

The House on Rock Harbor Road -- February 8 and 9, 1963 - Final Entries

The last two entries in my father's House on Rock Harbor Road journal trace a cold but not unusual winter on the Cape. My father is back in his nature/environment mindset with poetic musings on the cold and snowy winter. He ends talking for the first time about a novel he was writing and how humor pieces aren't very funny at the moment because of the recent "Cuban situation." Also, a critique of Thurber.

So this is it. What next? Where to go? I started the blog, honestly, because at the time (and no doubt, still) a writer going public with his/her work needed an online platform. I started Unreliable Narrator long before Beyond the Margins happened. When BTM started up, I moved my writing about writing, reading, and publishing there. Back here I experimented with movie reviews for a year. Since then it's been mostly intermittent entries from my father's work. I will keep UN going in some capacity. There is more Wendell writing, but I'm not sure my blog is the place for it. Maybe so. Or possibly my Dad's writing is meant to stay where it is--scribbled on legal pads, typed on stacks of white paper, scrawled on yellowed and delicate parchment, and as clipped and saved articles from long gone magazines and newspapers. We'll see.

 

The House on Rock Harbor Road -- February 6 and 7, 1963

We move into 1963 and Wendell discusses book buying and admits he has a problem (the first step to kicking the habit). Also, we get an inside glimpse into his publishing short and humorous pieces. What makes a piece funny and what magazines (in the early '60s) were looking for.

The pastel above is a Wendell original, hanging in my condo. Not sure what year he did it, but it was one of his later works.

[To enlarge each image below for a better reading experience, right click and select Open Link in new window. In the new window, click the image to make larger or smaller.]

The House on Rock Harbor Road -- December 27, 1962

Jumping ahead to the end of 1962. Wendell is still in a reflective mood, but the piece ends with a new addition to the family! (No, not me.) This illustration of Rock Harbor (looks like a pastel) is one of my father's from 1961.
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Yesterday was warm for a few hours early in the afternoon so I went into fields across the way—the fields that edge the marsh. At the line of the highest tide I gathered thatch and marsh grass layered there and carried it back to bank against the house, on the northeast where the wind blows the hardest and coldest up beneath the shingles. The marsh is still as good a place as any to gather wood for my collages, wood, that is, and other bits of floating stuff.

Uptown after lunch I picked up a dead bird by Nickerson’s store window. Perhaps it had survived the cold only to have its life dashed away by flying into the invisible wall of the window. It lived that its neck might be broken trying to get a sight of the manger scene and the crèche.

For Christmas, a pup. Liz, part collie, part golden retriever. A fat happy pup, that is about as big and fat a happy (pup) as you would want to see.

The House on Rock Harbor Road -- January 11, 1962

In this entry, my father is feeling, well, a little sad. Maybe a little removed from the goings on in the world. Maybe it's just mid-winter blues. The piece ends with Wendell (and Muriel?) on the hunt for furniture. This, it seems, is an unfinished entry. We'll never know why there is a sadness to the stranger's house.
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Today is a day of cold, the nation seems locked in a gigantic mass of cold polar air. Snow strands motorists in Tennessee. Chicago reports thermometers reading 15 below zero.

Far to the south in Peru, 3000 souls are buried under a gigantic slide of ice and earth. The Bridge of San Luis Rey is brought up to date by 400 years and multiplied several hundred fold. And of these lives little will ever be recorded except to note their passing.

Here on the Cape it is cold too, but in the teens and twenties and warmer in the sun in a protected spot. I walked on the beach of the bay. It was a silent world. The wind blew enough to make me turn away and hood my parka and yet there was no sound of waves for a billion tiny particles of ice formed a covering on the water some hundreds of yards out from shore to muffle waves and sound of waves. Only from far out over the white tide line did there came the faint hiss and rush of the small white caps that drove against the grated edge of the flow.

Occasionally the lisp of sparrow came from the tangle of beach plum and scrub on the high bank beyond the strands then all was silence except for the soft pad of my shoes in the sand and the crunch they made when I stepped upon a frozen patch of ground.

You found the turnoff into the sand drive by an anchor out at the main road. Following up the drive you came to the house set in a clearing in the pines. It was a frame house, wood-shingled, weathered now after a century so close to the sea and when you stepped out of your car to stand warm in the sun you were surprised to discover that the house had a view clear to the ocean down over the scrub and the moors and the dunes.

The yard had the quality of being now unattended and yet it bore the marks of sharing a life with the house –a spreading back (yard) with its rope ladder for kids to climb, a bird bath set on a high pole where a chickadee came to drink, a toy truck broken and tossed aside, rose bushes in need of cutting back, and around the yard a low stone wall to enclose the lawn.

We knock at the door and ask, “Are you the fellow advertising furniture for sale?”

“Yes, getting rid of what I can,” the man replies, as he sweeps ashes from the floor near the fireplace, the sound of the broom strokes loud in the half empty room. The great open fireplace held smoldering logs, the walls of the room were plaster, the beams in the ceiling natural. There was about the room a simple charm—yet now a sadness…

The House on Rock Harbor Road -- January 3 & 5, 1962 -- Cape Cod Sketchbook

Combining here two short journal entries that show my father continuing to explore the idea of a written sketchbook, cataloging in word statistics and descriptions of nature and the environment.

Also, for your enjoyment, I found a couple pictures of Drummer Cove Cottages, one featuring my three sisters.  ->

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January 3, 1962. Sketchbook
The wind blew in hard for two days out of the west across the bay. And on the third day while still it blew, I went to the beach at Skaket for seaweed and grass to bank the house against the cold. On the beach half covered with sand and drift I came upon an oar. Its blade was split, a third of its power gone, it lay mute along the heaps of black weeds.

I brought the oar home to look at it more closely. Six foot tall, it stands, thin and lean, tapered straight to the blade, and nicked and scared, a piece of heavy leather where she fit the lock. Probably all the way from Scotia, a neighbor said. See, it’s long, like as not for a dory.

Somehow cast adrift, the oar rode the currents south by west through fog and squalls, brine swelled, a strong tough hardwood, bleached white as bone but carrying yet the remnants of yellow paint or varnish while deep within the blade still showed a tint of red where she’d dipped the sea uncounted times. Whose hands gripped this oar? I’ll never know.

January 5, 1962 CCSB (Cape Cod Sketchbook)
A mist rises from the tidal meadow for several forces there are met. Some days ago it snowed, and banks of white are left across the ocher marsh and now it rains a steady coming down of drops too fine to see, a warm rain for January after days of cold.

Add to this a tide not quite at flood but high enough to line the marsh with lakes and flows, a vast wet place, mottled brown and white and gun-metal gray hazed now with mist.

Ducks course the channels of marsh and gulls appear and pass gracefully, silently, in the air above until at last beyond the road and the dark outlines of shrubs there is only mist and with it the strong salt smell of the sea.

The House on Rock Harbor Road -- January 2, 1962

A rush and a push and 1962 is ours. Considering my snails pace keeping up with this blog over the past couple years, I'm rushing through these journal entries. (Not sure what will happen to Unreliable Narrator at the end of this...but something exciting no doubt).

Meanwhile, here we are, just into the new year and Wendell ruminates on a whirlwind jaunt back to the family homestead of Madison, New Jersey.

Also, I included another Christmas pic because during a jaunt to my own family homestead of Orleans (to visit my Mom on New Year's), I dug up a few pictures from the time. The above photo is dated December 1961. The dog is Ranger, helping Dad inspect the tinsel.

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We left Orleans the day after Christmas for Madison (New Jersey). After making arrangements for a license (registration expired December 31st, 1961— a fact I hadn’t discovered until the day before Christmas, a Sunday), getting a tarp for the car rack, having the dogs at the vets, we were off from Hyannis about 1:30 PM. It was a clear, sunny day and we reached motel row beyond Providence at dusk and decided to stop at the Sky-View Motel, the same one we stayed in when we moved up last June.

We paid $16 for a family unit, which is two rooms with connecting bath and closet. We always get a good night’s sleep in a motel because after the kids are tucked in bed there is nothing to do but hit the hay.

Arrived (in) Madison about three the next afternoon. The snow of 8 inches that had preceded us by 2 days gave us no trouble except that we had cold, icy weather the whole time we were in Jersey. We saw the Grants on Thursday night, the Pikes Friday afternoon, Grandpa in Tabor Friday, Bob and Anne’s Friday night, Steve and Jesse’s Saturday evening.

Sunday after Sunday school we started back, a foolish time to start, 11:00 o’clock, but we packed sandwiches and at dusk came through Providence, a dinner in Taunton, and arrived home by 8:45 p.m. I think the next time we drive it we’ll make the trip at night when the children are asleep.

Monday night it snowed and we awoke Tuesday to six inches of snow. School had been cancelled for the day so after ten days’ vacation the children got a one day reprieve and their parents a one day extension of their sentence.

During the morning the snow slackened off and gradually the bank of gray clouds moved eastward and out to sea leaving the sky free for a sparkling sun that glittered on the white and tan marsh.

The House on Rock Harbor Road -- December 25, 1961 -- Lower Cape Sketchbook

I love this entry. Though dated the 25th of December, it doesn't hint at Christmas but instead gives an idea of what my father was trying to accomplish with writing this journal. You can see how his writing and his art are fusing to evoke what the Cape, and the environment in particular, means to him. So that readers can "feel the feel of it."

Knowing it's Christmas when my father wrote it, I wonder when he had the time. Did he get up early while the rest of the house still dozed with sugar plum visions in their heads? Or was it later in the day? Perhaps in the afternoon when my sisters were busy playing with their new toys. Or later still, after everyone was tuckered out from the festivities and tucked in bed. There he is, with his lined paper atop a book propped on his lap (or, more likely, smoothed out on the kitchen table) and he writes out longhand, writing about writing.

Oh, and that's another Christmas pic of my Dad, this one from 1974 when we lived in Eastham.

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Lower Cape Sketchbook

Perhaps I have already begun this book with the infrequent entries in a diary started last summer. But what sort of book could I write concerning our life on the Cape? Not a diary simply, for too many books take that form. A chronicle of nature that follows the cycle of the seasons. In some respects it might follow this form.

Rather I will write a sketchbook of what I see around me from the elbow of the Cape north to Provincetown – Cape Tip – or wherever my travels on the Cape take me. For every few days finds me in a different spot, nosing around; the beaches, the bay, and marsh shores along the tideline rubble, looking for flotsam to add to my beach collages.

In my collecting trips I look for almost anything that carries the marks of time. Anything characteristic of the environment of sea, bay, shoreline; whether wood, metal, shell, or bone. If they are small enough to carry I take them and dry them out and let them set for a time to make (them, us?) aware of their bounty.

So I will record in my sketchbook that which I cannot carry but which is part of the environment – wood, metal, shell, or bone. Indeed it may be part of the scene, the effect of where I am. It will be a collage in words, a searching for the same effect that time-worn objects have—words on paper for wood on wood. Cork on wood. I want the reader to be able to rub his hand over a weathered washed up plank and feel the grit of it, the smell of it. To feel the feel of it.

The House on Rock Harbor Road -- December 15, 1961

Here's another installment, which finds Wendell reflecting more and more on Cape Cod nature and weather, in weatherproofing his new home and also through his art.

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The wind comes in gusts in off the bay, gusts but never dropping below 30 to 40 miles per hour in force it would seem. For half a mile out white caps race toward the shore and at Skaket Beach the sand lashes at the car and dances up the road away from the beach in windy (riverlets?) of sandy clouds. I parked there at Skaket for a moment with Cindy and Shelley. Overhead a score or more Canadian geese hung winging into the wind, forming and reforming until at last in a V they flapped off Southwest along the shore of the bay.

It is now that I find the many jobs have not been completed as far as weatherproofing the house. Two storm windows still to be put up in the back upstairs (this accomplished by hooking them from the inside, and not a job for a windy day), the garage door leaks too much air, a window pane in the garage nearly out for lack of putty, the front “storm door” torn and in need of repair, and then there is the seaweed I had planned to stack around the foundation of the house, at least along the wing, which is usually 5 to 10 degrees cooler than the rest of the house. And so it goes. The jobs string out in endless line, and it takes a driving wind in the twenties to remind you of them all.

I have put together two beach collages. The first one I like so much that I took it to Hyannis to see if I could sell it at the Christmas sale. The second one hangs in the living room. I find them attractive because of the use of drift wood and small shell, etc. The various materials in a pleasing arrangement but mostly various woods mounted on a sea-worn board or plank. It would seem as though there might be a market for such things. They make striking decoration.

The House on Rock Harbor Road -- December 4 & 5, 1961

Covering a couple days here. December 4 is the nerve-wracking day of signing papers for the Drummer Cove Cottages (no lawyers' names included, thank you very much). December 5 our man is back in form, taking an oil class and putting his work into a local craft show.

[To enlarge each image below for a better reading experience, right click and select Open Link in new window. In the new window, click the image to make larger or smaller.]

The House on Rock Harbor Road -- November 29, 1961

Without mentioning how long it's been since I've posted (April 12th), here is the next installment in my father's journal. And the season matches (late November). This entry I have to admit is a bit scattershot, but spotlights Wendell's sense of humor and fascination with the family's everyday activities.

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Let’s get a few things straight. Like dates, for example. This Friday morning (Dec 1) we make settlement on Lorraine Cabins, hereafter known as Drummer Cove Cottages. This should mark some sort of high point or low point in our lives.

Today I got a check to cover costs and got an insurance policy to cover fire, EC, property, and liability damage. There is some small question of a lawyer at the closing, [name redacted by editor, but I will divulge for a small fee], the friend of a friend of a friend, who met us for our June closing is under indictment on two counts taking funds from the local ambulance association, and trying to rig his mother-in-law’s will for a better property settlement, (or) something of the sort. So I’m not sure if we’ll have him represent us or not.

Other activities:

Great books discussion group every other Monday evening at the Orleans Elementary School (Wendell).

Ballet classes (Robin). 2:15 PM Saturday afternoon. Again at the elementary school.

Methodist choir (Wendell). Thursday eve and Sunday AM.

Sunday school teachers (2nd grade), Moo, Sunday morning, thus a fast and tight schedule is had by all.

Mother’s club (Moo), church, this week, in fact this evening a children’s fashion show. Models: all three girls.

Cindy had her picture in The Oracle and Post-Standard (what are you doing there in the picture, Cindy?). “Johnny Bear and I are scrunching up our mouths like this, see?” And we saw. And so did hundreds of others.

Much running around to decorate and trim and find a Santa Claus suit (it’s not at the cleaner’s or Willis Gould’s or at the fire house or at the Federated Church). And all we can find is the wig. Whoever borrowed it last Christmas didn’t return it. Well, if you promise not to tell I’ll lend you mine, but you’ve got to return it in good condition.

Weather: Cold. Windy. Snow flurries. Partly cloudy.

[The picture is of Wendell and Muriel in September 1953 - long before Cape Cod was a twinkle in their eyes.]

The House on Rock Harbor Road -- October 4th 1961

Let's just jump right back into my Dad's journal from 1961 shall we? Here we are in October of '61. Today's entry finds Wendell waxing on attending a book club, Muriel attending a PTA meeting, daughter Laurie who excels at being popular with the little boys, and Robin's sit-up challenges.

[To enlarge each image below for a better reading experience, right click and select Open Link in new window. In the new window, click the image to make larger or smaller.]

The House on Rock Harbor Road -- Thursday, September 28th 1961

Thinking of Wendell on this rainy Wednesday before Thanksgiving. So what better way to remember him than by posting another journal entry? Topics from Sept 28th 1961 include post Hurricane Esther landscaping. Wendell learns about a past inhabitant of his new house on Rock Harbor Road from townie Roscoe J. Nickerson. More talk of trees. Also, we may never know what's in it for Elmer.

To enlarge each image below for a better reading experience, right click and select Open Link in new window. In the new window, click the image to make larger or smaller.

The House on Rock Harbor Road -- Thursday, Sept. 21 + Monday Sept. 25, 1961

The Saga of Hurricane Esther continues. (Read the first part, in case you tuned in late.) I've combined a couple of shorter entries. Also, I've transcribed my father's rather challenging handwriting and also included scans of his typed pages. [To enlarge each scanned image below for a better reading experience, right click and select Open Link in new window. In the new window, click the image to make larger or smaller.]

Thursday, Sept. 21

The eye of the storm is 40 miles SW of Nantucket. I walk down the road to the harbor. (Editor’s note: They lived down the street from Rock Harbor.) The rain let up and the wind was fresh from the east in gusts probably up to 40mph.

Mrs. Lambert is not in her cottage. She must have gone to Mrs. Gibson’s house. Striding along the road the wind pushes me along. Small land birds fling them themselves suddenly into the air as though thrown and land downwind as quickly as they appeared. The pigeons pattern the lee side of a rooftop. When the wind does to a (?) they circle about in the air in scattered confusion. Only the gulls seem at home in the storm. Flying almost lazily against the wind, they swing windward in wide arcs that carry them far out across the meadow where others can be seen on the ground white against green.

The wind guests lash at small isolated trees when all around there seems a lull. These brief blasts of air lend the wind a temper, a personality given to outbursts of anger. Such moments call attention to the vulnerability of a tree. Rooted, it must always stand its ground against all elements and all forms of attack.

While I watched that single tree—a silver poplar—in the grip of a terrier wind, I thought of the photographer Edward Steichen who in his eighties is devoting himself to taking hundreds of pictures of the small tree, a shad bush, in all its phases, in all seasons and in all kinds of weather.

Monday, Sept. 25

The House on Rock Harbor Road -- Wednesday, Sept 20 1961

Hurricane Watch! The Saga of Hurricane Esther. This is the epic journal entry wherein my father chronicles the family's experience riding out Hurricane Esther.

[To enlarge each image below for a better reading experience, right click and select Open Link in new window. In the new window, click the image to make larger or smaller.]

 

The House on Rock Harbor Road -- Tuesday, Sept 19 1961

It's been a few months, but here you go: scans of the next entry in my father's journal. Topics include a visit from his parents, singing in the Methodist choir, and inspiration from an unusual source: distant cousin and writer, Humphrey B. Neill.

To enlarge each image below for a better reading experience, right click and select Open Link in new window. In the new window, click the image to make larger or smaller.

Stay tuned - the next entry is a doozy. Wendell chronicles the saga of Hurricane Esther.

The House on Rock Harbor Road -- Saturday, July 22 1961

The further adventures of the Smith family, seen through the eyes of patriarch Wendell. The summer of 1961 continues. In this entry, my father sets up his paintings at a local art show in Eastham and  discovers how hard it is to actually get the general public to buy artwork. He meets artist Larry Edwardson and learns about how he became a painter and his process. [Again, I'm transcribing my Dad's pages of longhand writing. Tune in next time for more scans.]

Yesterday I “hung” eight, nine of my paintings in the second outdoor showing of the Nauset Painters, a group of local amateurs, mostly women, who paint boats, beaches, and cottages about as most amateurs paint boats, beaches, and cottages. The exhibit was being held in Eastham on the Green by the old Grist Mill. I arrived with 7 oil wash sketches and one still-life in oil (entitled Still-Life). At the first show on the Orleans Green, check wire fencing had been erected and the Nauset Painters did the hanging for the hoped-for 20% of sale price if anyone bought.

I pulled into the Eastham Green and found painters were staking out claims for space along the split rail fence that boarded the Green. I was told that no other support would be provided. You can’t set matted paintings against a fence (but) you can a framed oil. Luckily, I had a length of rope in the VW and a little grocery store near the Green had clothes pins in stock.

So I rushed back to the Green and stretched my rope along a goodly length of fence beneath a skimpy locust that held some promise of shade later in the day. To my left along the fence I shared spectators with one old Grandma Moses whose husband helped her set up her three cottages. But they were fairly good cottages and drew more favorable comments than my paintings, with local viewers at least.

It was a game to guess whose cottages they were and where they were located. “That looks to the Mayo’s on Tonset Road.” “Looks’ more like that little three-quarter sitting back off Barley Neck just beyond Mabel’s house.” And so it went.

After securing my paintings I took the tour around the 30 yards or so of split rail fence then left the exhibit until after lunch. My paintings were just as I had them. None had sold. Perhaps if I had stayed with the pictures I might have pushed through a sale or two. But I spent most of the afternoon sitting in the heat and shade chatting with the one really serious artist on the field, a Larry Edwardson of New Britain, Conn. He was a man well into his fifties who had worked on newspapers, radio, and for some years had his own advertising agency in New Britain. A few years ago he set January as his target date for self-support by painting alone. Already a good artist, (he was) a member of (the) Salmagundi Club in New York but not too widely exhibited.

He severed his relations, accounts, and began to paint. Within a matter of days he was bedridden with infectious hepatitis and it was eight months before he was able to paint productively. For what I gathered, Edwardson is able to make expenses and keep painting. He has a trailer which allows him to live cheaply, north in the summer and south in the winter. The Cape, Gloucester, Maine, Connecticut, New Orleans, and Sarasota (places he mentioned). It’s his hope to get his paintings placed in a dozen galleries and then spend a month painting local scenes in each place.

Edwardson works almost entirely with palette knife and he has a special set made up from putty knives, filed down to various points and widths. He showed me his paint box. “It was handmade in Italy. A friend bought it for me. And I use a disposable palette. I always start clean each morning.” The artist opened the box with pride for unlike my own it showed signs of long and hard use. The wood was browned with age and weather and the tubes of oil paint spoke of having become part of many paintings.

“This turpentine,” he said, “is just to clean up with. I lay the paint on fresh, no turpentine or oil, with the knives. Why, I’ve gotten so I can make a circle with a knife, just like that.” He flicked his wrist. “I hold a towel in my left hand and wipe off the knives as I use them. So I’m always working clean. I had intended on finishing those two pictures.” He pointed to two Masonite boards with half-finished scenes on them. “But I don’t want to attract a big crowd, get people standing. This isn’t the kind of exhibit for that. If these were real artists, practicing painters, I might. It’s a tough business, boy. If it means selling a painting, most artists would step right in front of your paintings to show their own.”

That must have been my trouble at the Eastham show. I was too modest and nothing sold.

The House on Rock Harbor Road -- Thursday, July 20 1961

Today I bring you Thursday, July 20th, 1961. Where Wendell goes on an expedition to find The Outermost House, the house popularized by Henry Beston in his book The Outermost House, A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod. There are some beautiful nature passages. I know my father admired Beston, Thoreau, and other writers of nature. [No scans of his pages this time, just my transcriptions of his longhand.]

Last Friday, or was it Thursday, July 20th, I drove to Eastham and the Coast Guard Beach. I parked in the farthest lot behind the big dunes, slung my sketching bag over shoulder, and trudged along the tracks left by beach buggies through a notch in the dune wall.

A young boy about twelve fell in step with me. He looked bright and alert so I said to him, “I wonder if you can help me?”

“You want to know where the Outermost is,” he replied as a fact.

“Well…yes.”

“You can’t see it from the ocean side but it’s the next to the last house on the dunes. It’s more over on the dune-side. The Audubon Society has it now. You can’t miss it. It’s white with blue shutters and they have put up a new stove chimney.”

“How far down is it?”

“You see down about the last dune that juts out. About there.”

We had come through the notch and down onto the shelf of the beach. And here surely was the Outermost Beach for it bowed out into the ocean and looked to be the most Easterly of shoals. Bathers and swimmers dotted the shimmering sand to our left but there were only a few people to the right toward Beston’s old home for a year. (Editor's note: Henry Beston is the author of The Outermost House, A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod.)

Once on the beach side, the one prominent, persistent part of the scene was the waves. Big and small. Up and down the beach there was always white water curling over and down and on this day with a stiff off-shore breeze, the waves approached the beach fighting the wind, each wave with its mane of white, making them the seas horses that “men call such waves on every coast of the world.” (The Bird in the Waterfall: A Natural History of Oceans, Rivers, and Lakes by Jerry Dennis.)

Henry Beston’s description of a blue wave rolling in toward the beach is a superb piece of writing. It’s found in his chapter “The Headlong Wave,” and carries from mid-ocean and the pulse of the earth that sent the wave coursing westward until it crashes on the beach at Eastham. (Editor's note: As far as I can find, this is a paraphrase of the quote, "Somewhere between this Spanish land and Cape Cod the pulse of the earth has engendered this wave and sent it coursing westward though the seas.”)

I left the boy then and trudged along the ridge of dry sand above the farthest reach of the surf. My sneakers that I wore only bogged me down so I took them off and carried them the rest of the way in my pack. But the hour was late—getting on towards 5:30 in the afternoon—so I never reached the Outermost House that day but turned back half way to the last dune the lad had pointed out.

Much as I seem to read slowly the books I enjoy, so I take my time in finding Beston’s house. It would be there. Like the book it had held fast to its place in the world for thirty years or more. It would be there next week, or the week after.

The House on Rock Harbor Road -- Wednesday, July 19 1961

Here's the latest, another scanned couple pages of the next post..er, entry in my Dad's early '60s journal. Highlights include more adventures of an artist struggling to make a living. Also, we discover my mother's secret desire!!!

The House on Rock Harbor Road -- Friday, July 14

It's been a few months, so let's get back to my father's journal. Here we pick it back up in the middle of July, 1961. His brother, Bob, and his family visit my family on the Cape. Meanwhile my father continues to make a go as an artist. Finally, my folks end up in Provincetown for dinner an eye-opening walk through the ever-present galleries.

Yep, it was the dawn of a new era - where my Dad was getting a firsthand look at Beats and the culture of artists. Remember, this was 1961, and while not exactly square, my father was unused to seeing, as he puts it, the "habitat of beats." [No scans of his pages this time, just my transcriptions of his longhand.]

July 14, Friday

The Bob Smiths arrived about eight Wednesday evening. Showed them the house, let the kids see each other and rub noses (our had already been tucked into bed, under protest, “Oh dear, now we’ll never get to see them.”) then showed them to their cottage in the woods. Moo and I returned after nine bearing ice bold beer, and we had a good time chatting.

On Thursday morning Moo and Ann took all the kids to Pleasant Bay where Robin, Laurie, and Cindy had to report for their swimming lessons. Bob and I drove off with the VW to sketch and take pictures. A friend of Aunt Moo’s said, oh if she could have a picture painted of the view from Fort Hill. So, obligingly I sketched the scene; that is, I made note-sketches of two or three parts of the panoramic 180 degree expanse of inlet, islands, salt marsh, outer beach, ocean, fields, and foothills. By late afternoon, after a time out for  a swim in Skaket, I had completed a 9x12 oil wash looking north across a cove beyond a cedar meadow, and a 14x17” painting of the inlet to the east, the largest oil wash I have done to date.

Priced them in the gallery. As yet, no comment from Moo’s friend. Though later that evening she looked at them and didn’t care enough for either to buy them. But she told Aunt Moo she might take one of the other small washes. Notwithstanding all this talk, she never mentioned the pictures again.

Saturday morning Aunt Moo drove home with them. Aunt Moo wanted one of the $7 pictures but being family and having stayed here for two weeks she thought she should be given a 20% discount and offered to give me $5 for it. We told her she could have the picture, especially since she had taken us to dinner and to the theater in Dennis.

Then followed much discussion – she said she wouldn’t take the picture unless I took the $5. But how would she carry the picture? Put it in her suitcase? Too big! Wrap it? It would bend. Lay in the car? Too crowded. It was decided that the pictures would stay here and mother would bring it when she drives home to Morristown.

Thursday evening Bob and Ann took us out to dinner. We left at 7 o’clock and drove to Provincetown. It was the first time there for any of us since Moo and I hadn’t gotten any further down on the Cape than Truro.

Provincetown is a rather startling experience. There were the dunes to be seen on the way into town and the long row of tiny cottages along the bay. Then suddenly the road narrowed into one crowded street where the station wagon had to crawl by a single row of parked cars, one sidewalk, and shops and houses fronting almost on the street. Add to this the shoppers and the strollers who step aside as you pass and the whole effect is one of edging your way through some thronging (foreign) street.

They are...a rather varied and motley crowd. Some of the throng comes across the bay from Boston by boat. Some arrives by Cadillac from Hyannis, others by motor scooter from Greenwich Village in Manhattan and the forefathers of many natives came by ships from Portugal and England. And they all make up the unique setting that is Provincetown.

There is much of the arty chic of New Hope here, and much of the grubbiness that has always characterized Bohemia and today marks the beats, but it’s all colorful, much of it talented, part of it great, still more of it without greatness or talent. Commercial Street finally runs its course and cheapens near the end.

We ate dinner in the Flagship and afterwards went gallery-hopping back along Commercial Street. We missed seeing the best art the town offers for at ten o’clock both the Chrysler Museum and the Provincetown Art Association were closed. Still, the people in the galleries proved almost more interesting than the paintings.

In the first gallery we came to, a one man show was being launched with punch bowl, paper cups and all. Having dressed for dinner and perhaps overdressed after wearing casuals for two weeks, Moo and I as well as Bob and I felt much overdressed. In fact, almost pleasingly so, for this was a habitat of beats. There were beards but mangy beards, and sandaled feet that vied for the honor of being the “dirtiest.” (I wondered if these people ever went on the beach but then if they did they might look as though they were square.) The women were variously dressed in a fashion that put them way out. Most with a spooky look (Editor's Note: I'm guessing they wore black eye-liner and maybe black clothes. Spooky indeed!).