Thoreau and me on Cape Cod

So, I never was much of a Thoreau fan. He has always struck me as one of these faerie Victorians, with a little too much idealism. I'm pretty sure had I met in him in person, he would have annoyed me, or perhaps not. However, he is a damn good writer. I'm reading Cape Cod, his treatise on his experiences over the course of several visits in the mid-1800s. Fertile mind, his. He writes about walking across the beach from Eastham through Nauset, and of how boring it was. Giving a flavor to the kind of boredom he was experiencing, he wrote about what he read (while under an umbrella, walking along the dunes towards the coast) as he walked, that is, about the first preachers of the Outer Cape, in the 1600s. He writes about several preachers and related events for a good several pages, then ends with this wonderful sentence:

"There was no better way to make the reader realize how wide and peculiar that plain was, and how long it took to traverse it, than be inserting these extracts in the midst of my narrative."

Cape Cod is an interesting place, as much for the history that is woven into the roots of the trees and the roads and buildings running through it as for the way it reflects the current sociological fabric. The season is only just beginning to start here, and as I tour around, I see the elements clearly: the retiree, the vacationing families, the lone parent who lives out here more often than the other parent, working elsewhere. And you see the Brazilian or Portuguese landscape workers. The construction crews, natives of the fishy land. The financially well off, in their vacation uniforms of flip-flops, sunglasses, and baseball caps, the women almost always sporting a pink, green, or navy blue, slightly nautical bag. The native teenagers, doing what teenagers do everywhere in the world.

You can imagine what the construction crew guys think of the lightly clad rich woman, with her pink handbag and starfish silver jewelry. You hear the voices of those same women, concerned with either their children or their work in a shop or at some high-powered company. Surely similar socio-economic class differences play out everywhere in the US, but I think it is rather stark here on the Cape during shoulder season.

In any case, I'm enjoying my time here, with the stinky one, Bandit.