Fried Shrimp on a Paper Plate

Given the choice of vacation destinations, I will take the wooded mountains over the water’s edge. Give me elevation. Give me trilling nighttime insects. Give me bear-proof garbage cans. I’m a fella who enjoys a good hike and a pocketful of river stones. Seashells are fine and all, but who really wants to walk around with a pocketful of exoskeletons? Not this animal lover!

There are Beach People and Not Beach People. I am a Not Beach People. Which sucks because I am currently at the beach. We’re spending a couple days at a friend’s house on Cape Ann. The beaches here are rocky more than sandy, which is the sort of beach I prefer because the rocks make it too uncomfortable to spend time actually on the beach. But one doesn’t have to traipse down to the water’s edge at all to enjoy the boundless view. All the better for a NBP such as myself who dislikes picking sand out of his lunch more than he dislikes just about anything else.

That being said, if one is going to spend time at the shore, this is a good way to do it. Cape Ann is blue collar Massachusetts, more The Perfect Storm than The Perfect Couple. In fact, last night we had dinner in Gloucester, which is the port from which the crew of The Perfect Storm departed. Those good men sailed out into the sea and never returned so that I might have the thirty-dollar swordfish tacos at Oak + Ember. They were delicious.

I like it up here because it lacks the pretensions of its wealthier cousin communities. Even Cape Cod, for decades the vacation destination of choice for middle-class stiffs, has outgrown its scruffy roots. Too much money, too many cars, too little soft serve ice cream and mini-golf. Here, though, the modest vacation houses that sprang up in the last decades of the 19^th century and the first few decades of the 20^th, have remained demure.

The place where we’re staying was purchased in the 30’s by our friend’s great-grandparents. It’s still unwinterized. There’s no air conditioning. The floors are uneven and coated in a preserving tincture of nicotine and whatever sticky substance adheres to the feet of children. The pots and pans share kitchen space with spiders. It’s a space that lends itself to looking out at the gathering storm clouds over the water and wondering where the missing jigsaw puzzles have gotten to.

Our current national schism between those with and those without leaves me feeling a touch guilty at being one of the Haves. Part of that guilt, I think, has to do with being a class traitor. As I’ve written before, I grew up without much money. The idea of owning a “beach house” would have been as foreign to me as Swahili. When I’m out among the tony set, I always feel like a fraud. Here, though, waving hello to the families rolling swim noodles and floaties in their Red Rider wagons, I’m more myself. Please don’t misunderstand – I also enjoy being with super-rich people because I am an unrepentant lover of finery in small doses – but my love for high society is the love an anthropologist has for his subject. I may mingle among them but I will never be one of them.

No, I’m a fried-shrimp-on-paper-plate vacationer. A skee-ball-on-the-boardwalk vacationer. A scrape-the-grill vacationer. When it comes to relaxation, my tastes are decidedly pedestrian. Even our Italian getaway overlooking Lake Como this year was glamorous but lowkey. My greatest pleasure during that month away was sitting at the local café eating pizza with the regulars. And we never even saw any sand. It was fabulous.

Martha’s the one pushing me to go more, do more, visit our friends, see the world while our knees still function. She’s right, of course. And visiting Cape Ann for a couple days has little to do with the where of where we are and much more to do with the who of where we are. We’ve been friendly with this woman and her family for years. Her kids are roughly the same ages as ours and our two daughters are good friends. Being here is about being with them, although being with them while watching the ocean just below the promontory on which the house sits is a pretty sweet bonus.

Today we’re going whale watching. We’re told the whales have been extremely active of late. Which is exciting. Perhaps a pod of orcas will attack our boat and send us to our watery graves, which would be terrible, sure, but my 9-year-old self would 100% have chosen “murdered by orcas” as his preferred way to die. Sadly, I don’t think there are any killer whales in these waters. Just humpbacks and finbacks and minke whales. On the way back, maybe we’ll pick up some fresh corn from a roadside stand. We can shuck it in the old kitchen among the spiders, and if something should clatter to the floor and break, so be it. There is nothing precious here in this rickety old house other than our time together.