A Pre-Election ay Walk to Beach Street

The Sunday before an election, national or otherwise, is a busy one in our game, what with making our vote tabulation forms, so the wife and I and our adopted woofer shortened our weekly walk. The boss decided to stay in the center of Rockport town. From School Street we headed toward the main stem with the four-footer under control by the leash. We envied a proud mother with two attractive young daughters jumping off the church's granite wall, all of two feet, but to them a bonafide dare, just as did our youngsters in the dim past. It has always amused us to see how crookedly arranged are these granite slabs that make the low wall, as if they had become a wee bit tipsy with time.

Main Street traffic was surprisingly heavy this brilliant sunny Sunday. Above us was bright sun, haunted by lowery clouds split by a screaming jet. Even the heavens lack the peace of yesterday. Political signs blazed forth from shop windows, Republican and Democrat, but none for Prohibition or Socialist-Labor candidates, who stay incognito but for their last names.

We came to the grandiose granite steps of Detective Ralph Piper's Main Street possession, a fabulous stairway and wall that has impressed Rockport, native and otherwise. It is a gorgeous piece of work that would do credit to a royal mansion. Clustered in front of the waiting station, "Brud" Curtis' emporium, were bikes and more bikes, his and her'n, with the teenagers yakking a mile a minute about school, girls and boys and all other subjects dear to their hearts. But not a word about the nation's politics. They leave that talk-talk to the mossbacks, like us. We saw where Brud is pushing his store into the ocean ready to handle an enlarging trade for the summer. It started as a hole in the wall.

On Beach Street, we were again delighted to see that house with the old cellar window of eight minute panes and the cerulean blue cellar door, set perfectly as a frontispiece of the Cape's most modern motel and its characteristic gull perched on the eaves. The comfy green wooden benches facing Front Beach had nary a customer this ideal Fall day. Instead along came a dyed-in-the-wool Rockporter headgeared for a football scrimmage, come what may. The youngster looked the part to a "T-formation."

Then our volcanic boxer Mollie came into her element, for we had entered Mill Brook Meadow, sold by jeweler Joe Thibeault at cost to the Garden Club and by it given to the town of Rockport. Barrels of room for her to scoot after birds she luckily could never catch, a running brook for her to wade in and snout for what she could find. And the rustling sigh and moaning of weeping willows to hold us enthralled. The willows weren't the only weepers in Sandy Bay. The town is still rock-ribbed GOP, you know.

From there through olden Smith Street, a way of comfortable sturdy old homes, all neatly kept up. 'Tis a part of town which we always love to visit for we feel we are again walking through a section that was nearer to what the village was in the past. Here was the old baker shop where Post Office custodian Eben Knowlton's ancestors operated a bakery. Today the building is one for storage. For us, it had rich memories.

A beautiful yellow-leaved maple, a background of the spire of the Finnish church greeting us with a touch of old Europe, a battalion of more weeping willows as we headed away from this dead-end street toward our own home lane. Brief as it was, the three of us breathed the better for this walk. Try it sometime for the better heart and leave the drugs on the bathroom shelf for a change.
J.P.C., Jr.

Walk to Whale Cove and Henry's Pond

Remember the time in Rockport when you could walk the length and breadth of the shore from the Headlands to Land's End without committing the crime of trespassing? Well, the wife and I recall such a day in the past. And we are minded that it was the shore path followed by the Coast Guardsmen at Straitsmouth Lifeboat Station when they nightly patroled the waterfront through winter wind and snow.

So on perhaps the finest October Sunday in years, weather-wise, the three of us, Molly, the spayed female boxer, the "missus" and myself decided to try to find a stretch of that path. And in the bargain we'd take a peep at the Whale Cove development.

We cheated a bit by riding as far as that spot on South Street where a sign to the left, decorated by an impressive black whale, read "The Smiths." It marked the home of Mrs. J. Raymond Smith and her son, Ray. Close by was another whale-decorated sign, reading: Whale Cove Lane, dead end, pass at your own risk." The daredevils in us took over as we chose to risk whatever was ahead. The Wife spoke of a flourishing brook that ran down alongside this lane.

The brook, however, had disappeared! Molly nosed out that fact, as she snooped along the bracken that had grown over the gully. As ancient as the brook that was, appeared drooping willows. In a neighboring pasture that swept down to the sea, a lone cow was blatting a mile a minute, maybe trying to attract the boxer's attention. But Molly is no cow dog, and though she looked, she must have decided against chancing the hooves of a something a lot bigger than she is.

Off to the starboard was a scene of the present. Modern homes, low and with long slightly sloping roof, are in such numbers to almost make up a village of its own, "Whale Cove Village."

Reaching the shoreline, we thought we might meander right to Land's End. We were advised by one of the neighbors that we could go a short distance, but through growth of high brush, and then by walking through somebody's backyard to get onto another lane that led back to South Street. That shore line walk amounted to no more than a couple of hundred feet. In the other direction, a public path is just as absent.

The view was the best. A couple miles offshore, what looked like a nautical hen with her brood following behind was apparently a fishing dragger towing a string of eight engine-less lobster boats down the coast. They tell us that hulls are bought this way and engines installed aat the home port. Something about the law somewhere. But it was no day to be listening to law.

Back to the car and a bit more walk-gypping as we decided to hit for the beach so the four-footer could have a real run The strand in front of Henry's Pond in South End, struck our fancy. The way that Molly ran from one end of the beach to the other and through the roaring surf, it seemed as if she had whippet blood, though they (who gave her to us) insist she has a pedigree.

The beach was far from deserted. At least four skindivers showed up. One of them said he was interested in collecting shells, that he had a big collection from the Hawaiian sea bottom, where he had done a great deal of diving. Even a charming swimmer appeared in a summery blue bathing suit. And she actually swam, though the water felt to our bare feet to be at the zero level.

We couldn't help but think what an enviable chance the town once had for a boulevard from the Headlands to Land's End! The path was there, and nobody ever figured the time would come when it would be lost to the public.

Anyway, it was a joyous day for strolling and as good a one for sunning on the beach It was Rockport at its best.

J.P.C., Jr.