After the Blizzard - A Walk Along With Others

Although snow hills lined both sides of the streets, the weather was ideal for walking Sunday, so mild that not even mittens were necessary. So the wife and I and our four-footed female boxer, Molly, decided to see some of the after effects of the Cape's record blizzard.

This time for once the hiking urge was not original. There's nothing like a snow deluge to ground folks and teach them that feet were made to move shanks mare and not just to push down on a bar of iron to jump a gas wagon from low to high.

We had hardly emerged from our Rockport doorway to thread our way through the waif-size path the head of the household had shoveled but what we were greeted by the sigh of youngsters turning the snow mounds into a winter playground. Took us back to the days when we had kids just like that.

A touch of snowbound Valley Forge was noted in the pitiful gesture of the stubby little cannon on the church lawn doing its darndest to poke its snout over the drifts. We came onto a Main Street where the road surveyor, Pete Perkins, and his loyal gang of five men had completely cleared one whole side of snow during the day and were just finishing up that phase of their 3-day toil. In fact they had even cleaned the sidewalk for its entire width.

What amazed us was that although we even invaded some back streets on this walk we were able to trod on plenty of bare ground. We got to thinking that their example might well be copied by some other communities. For a space we had given Molly her freedom to roll in the snow, rush up and down the snow heaps but the time had come for the leash for we were nearing the sacred precinct of another female boxer for whom our wheezing gal shows nothing but jealousy. And I'm still no athlete when it comes to separating warring femmes of whatever specie.

Down along Front Beach, the silence of the greyish-blue sea offered a weird contrast to only two days before when it was tearing up the shore with a meanness that only the sea can show. Some of the results were strewn even onto the edge of the road, in kelp, seaweed, and plain debris.

The snow had left a strange pattern along the low stone wall of the cemetery opposite the beach. It seemed like a sullen grey shroud while for a background were the snow-splashed tottering headstones of slate.

Although the walkers were far more than usual, folks were also on wheels once more after back breaking hours of shoveling out their cars. Snow narrowed roads jacked up the danger of being on foot with cars whizzing by both ways. Cleared roads presented the temptation. The fact soon drove us onto a side road, Smith Street, for safety's sake.

The wife and I soon discovered that it was about time we had included this way on our strolls. First we were faced with a tercentennial marker that said John Pool, Sandy Bay's second settler, built the first framed house on the spot back in 1700 and that the same gentleman furnished the lumber that built famed Long Wharf in Boston in 1710.

That was the past. But the street in the present is one of fine, solid homes that do credit to the town. All well kept along with their grounds. Even their dogs were polite. One of their number gave Molly, a 21-bark salute.

Another greeting from somewhere in the area could be taken as a gentle warning to the sniffing stalker to clear out. They sounded much like geese. We were too happy they were not on the loose for we could see our Molly coming out second best. A pinched nose wold ground her for good.

From there up Beach Street onto Granite where he-males still battled with shovels, again out of harm's way down placid Norwood Court, into King and back onto Beach where for the first time we spied a bell buoy washed up on Back Beach along with all manner of ocean spewed debris.

It was a glorious Sunday stroll, one that we know many others enjoyed just as we three did.
J.P.C., Jr.

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.