To Turk's Head in Winter

A brisk walk of a winter's Sunday in Rockport can be refreshing. Just don't look at the thermometer when you make the start. The wife and I have learned to our pleasure that once on your way, despite the fact that the mercury is down to the 10 mark, the cold becomes a challenge you can't resist. Besides, home never feels better then when the jaunt is over.

We are no Elliott Rogers or John Kieran type of hikers. That twosome and Dr. Melvin Copeland step in terms of miles. Ours are shorties and mean sneaking a gas buggy ride to get to the hop-off.

This time that point was Turk's Head Inn. Having lost too much sleep, inhaling smoke and dodging flaming embers of hotel holocausts on the Cape in the past few years, this battered beagle of the daily bugle eyed the huge garish mass of wood with eyes askance, and a quizzical "You next?" look. We sure hope not.

The sharp orbs of the missus caught two beautiful old wrought iron hitichin' posts in front of the hotel entrance. Horses' heads adorned the top of the slim standards, which still had the rings through which grand old gents slipped the reins to keep the old nag from wandering heather and tether.

We recalled that within these walls, a grand relative of ours, one Denmark P. Clark, once reigned as the general manager and official greeter, and personal friend of such Broadway greats as Sophie Tucker. Denmark, with nothing in common with the dour Dane of Elsinore, gave the Cape Ann Clarks that genteel dash of the manor born.

Old Turk's Head that frigid matinee hardly looked like the place where once the immortal Admiral Fighting Bob Evans proudly strutted with his lady in the gala ballroom when his White Fleet road at anchor in Sandy Bay amid a panoply of lights. That was the array of warships of the early 20th century that circled the globe to show the nation's power of the seas. Ah, yes, Turk's Head has lived some mighty proud days down through the years.

Down through Penzance Road, named by one with a Gilbert and Sulivan crush (remember the "Pirates" ?), we were charmed with the profound blue of the sea, sparkling in its deep freeze, and keenly lined by the border of thick white snow around Thacher's Island and Straitsmouth. No artist could breathe any more life into a canvas than had nature in that striking panorama.

In direct contrast was the grim dirty brown cylinder of the government tower, a mystery even to the natives, and actually a hush-hush installation of Uncle Sam's frontier troops. But its tower shape plants a bit of feudalism in Yankee-land.

Standing gaunt against the skyline right handy to the bleak tower is an equally bleak house whose odd unorthodox shape looks like it came out of a Toonerville Trolley cartoon. No doubt it once was an archtectural grand lady, but in our eyes, it ranks only to Gloucester's gruesome City Hall. They bulge where they should wheeze.

A neighborly hail and we again sneaked, this time into an oasis of a tummy-warmer in a glass. The outside freeze was forgotten. Resuming, we came across the ruins of what was once a stone garage. It took you back to the pix of medieval ruins.

Being power-line conscious, we suddenly were aware that along this picturesque stretch there were poles and wires strung along, just like up country. We had heard so many millions of words in the five public hearings on the Joppa-Fishtown line of the unsightliness of these strings that it suddenly occurred to us that along this ocean front, those poles and lines passed un-noticed until you looked directly at them. Even wires can't dim real beauty!

Streaking ahead of us on this seaside jaunt was the sleek brown-coated boxer, the pedigreed Molly we won in a box of cracker-jack. The gal was really stepping out in the gorse and the heather of the shore-side moorland. Every inch of the way spelled a mystery to her whitened snout. In fact, she even found herself a friendly collie playmate along the way.

But above all else we learned with surprise as we merged into Lozants Place that our Molly had bird dog blood in her veins. For as she plunged deep in the brush out flew, in a panicked state, a covey of five pheasants. The old gal had actually flushed them. An armed hunter in season would have loved that thrill. We just like watching them. We could never pull trigger on so beautiful a sweep of nature on the wing.

Finally we emerged onto what we like to call our old happy hunting grounds --of the days when we were story hunting for the unique. It was the picturesque land of Loblolly, right on the bold Atlantic shores, boulder strewn, where in the old days, Emerson Haskell presided over his oceanside open-air restaurant, and his tall gaunt, ever cheery son, Frank Haskell, succeeded him as the maitre d'hote. Lobster and clams were their forte. And so famous did they become that our nation's President, William Howard Taft, while in office parked his ample parts in a chair at a table on that rocky shore to gorge on Haskell's viands of the deep. Taft was summering in Beverly at the time.

Times have changed. The only symbol left is the shore itself. Prominent is a crude sign reading "No Trespassing" but why anyone would even deign to trespass in the area is beyond us. Them cobbles are had on the arches.

And the increasing cold was all too nippy at our noses and that of the galloping four-footer, so up Ruthern Way we stepped to again hit the hotel and the warmth of the aging gas-burner and home. Oh, it was so nice!
J.P.C., Jr.