Cape Cod Folks: Book Review

One of the odd things bout the Bible is that it pretty much jumps from Jesus as a toddler to Jesus on His world tour. There's no Teen Jesus part, which would have actually been pretty cool to read about. Maybe not that much happened to Teen Jesus, hence the focus on the birth story and the ending.

Plymouth is sort of the same way. We all have a basic visual of how 1621 Plimoth looked, and we can drive into Plymouth right damned now if we wanted to know the modern version personally. However, Plimoth was a backwater fairly soon in her history, especially in what is now Southern Plymouth.

Luckily, we have a book set in postbellum Plymouth. Beyond that, you're on your own.

Before we start, a bit of geography.

"Cape Cod" today means "all of the land east of the Cape Cod Canal." If you want to get technical, Sandwich and Bourne own a bit of the mainland, with places like Sagamore Beach and Bournedale serving as a buffer zone... sort of like a salty Estonia.

Before they dug the Canal, defining the borders of the Cape was a more dodgy proposition. Your best answer was "east of the Scusset and Manomet Rivers." Some people might point to a line running from the Wareham River to Great Herring Pond in Pymouth. Others would define Cape Cod's border as the Manomet River (bungle "Manomet" as you say it, and you now know why Monument Beach in Bourne is named what it is) as it runs to Great Herring Pond in the Plymouth/Bournedale area, and from Great Herring Pond over coastal streams to just about Ellisville.

These distinctions prove two things. One, "Cape Cod" used to include the southeastern hinterlands of Plymouth. Two, ol' Sarah Pratt McLean Greene wasn't wrong when she wrote "Cape Cod Folks" about Plymouth residents.

I don't read as many books as I used to. The NFL takes up a lot of my time, as does marketing, pornography, reggae, local politics, stuff with the family.... I'm more likely to be up in a website than in a book these days. Some people might look down on that, but hey... I'm reading.

I did feel the need to blast through Cape Cod Folks, as it is set in Cedarville. Our Plymouth road office is in the White Cliffs, in Cedarville. Not much goes on there, and I was curious as to how someone would crank a book out about a post-bellum version of it.

SPOILERS!

The year was 1881, and a woman (Sarah Platt McLean Greene) of both privilege and higher education leaves New York on, as she says, "a mission." I get sort of lost when people speak Olde American, but I think she wanted to minister to some wretches. A classmate of hers was working as a schoolmarm out in the sticks, could no longer keep the job, and offered it to Sarah. It turns out to be an isolated (meaning "the train doesn't go near there") coastal village in Plymouth.

The author uses fake names. She herself is either "Miss Hungerford" or "Teacher." Cedarville is both Kedarville and (colloquially) Wallencamp. Plymouth is Wallen or West Wallen. Falmouth is Farmouth. Sandwich, Bourne, New Bedford, Braintree, Fall River and Taunton all appear as themselves.

The story is a fish out of water tale, sort of an earlier, less funny version of The Egg And I. The author takes a job in a one-room schoolhouse (a building which still stands today, right on the corner of Long Pond Road and Herring Pond Road) for $8 a week, settles into a boarding house and falls in love with the town.

Her ride in a carriage from Plymouth's train depot to Cedarville may be the foundation of the old Cape Cod "sass" story. A socialite took a carriage to Cape Cod. The driver started talking, the socialite shushed him gracelessly, and the rest of the ride went down in silence. When settling the bill, the socialite saw a $1 charge that she couldn't identify, and she asked the driver what it was for. " Sass," said the driver. "I don't take it much, ma'am, and when I do, I charge."

The residents of Cedarville are as hick as it gets. As Dennis Miller once joked, "there were people there who were their own fathers." Most of the people in town have been no further away from Cedarville than Sandwich. The author's first conversation is with a man who explains where her house is by pointing out that "there's miles,and there's Cape Cod  miles, child." It goes downhill from there.

The only visitor comes to cull the town's virgins from the schoolhouse, you don't even get near seeing a black guy, and the Beverly Hillbillies would snicker at the folksy manners of the Cedarville residents. Several of the people mentioned in the story were able to win a Libel suit against the author.

She moves into a boarding house run by a retired sea captain and his wife. There is a son at sea with the scorned-wife name of Philander Keeler. The grandparents can be called nothing but Grandma and Grandpa by anyone who interacts with them, and they live in a one-story house of many rooms known as "The Ark." Most of the business in the comes-to-charm-you village conducts itself through the Ark at some point.

She meets the kids, all of whom- ages 3 through 20- are taught in the same class. If you squint sideways at the class descriptions in To Kill A Mockingbird, you'd have about the right idea of what her lot looks like. There's one kid who goes to class barefoot ("In January. On Cape Cod."), another who has to be dragged in by his father, a third who eventually gets scarlet fever and pretty much dies at her desk, and a rough-but-charming 19 year old named Becky.

Becky gets involved later, although not in a HLA manner. Not that kind of book, player. Becky and the teacher get hung up on the same guy, a lady-killing yacht owner. The author has other shadowy student issues, as she later promises her hand in marriage to a student who is taking to sea.

Cedarville food takes some getting used to. They eat whatever food (beans, pumpkins) is up for harvest for weeks at a time. At one point, every kid in her class raised their hand when asked "Who had split herring for breakfast today?" Popcorn is the big party food, coated with milk and sugar. If you get sick, Grandma boils up some onions and molasses. I don't recall seeing them get any sort of meat other than fish.

It goes without saying that the arrival of the fetching young schoolmarm tunes up every bachelor in town. They visit her constantly, both alone and en masse, hoping to go five-hole on the blue-blood babe. They all want her as a wife, and she eventually narrows it down to the fisherman with money and one of her students. The winner gets killed, of course.

It's a charming little book, and makes a great guide for anyone who wondered how things were around here 135 years ago. Pretty much all of the book is conducted in an isolated area running from about Manomet through Sagamore.

I'll save you some Qs by telling you that there are no car chases, sex scenes, dinosaurs, snipers, rappers-turned-actors, karate fights, CGI, elves, aliens and so forth... so it's already down one star.

I was able to read this book for Nathan, thanks to the good people at Project Gutenberg.

Added Bonus: Quotes!

"The Wallencampers were quick to note the estrangement between us, and affirmed that "Beck was mad, and wouldn't speak to teacher, along o' teacher's goin' with Beck's beau.'"

"Investigating the place where she had been sitting, I found a wild confusion of claws and shells, as carefully denuded of meat as though they had been turned inside out for that purpose.

What was my surprise and mortification to find a like collection at nearly every seat in the school-room, and all the while my flock had seemed unusually silent and attentive; such proficiency had those children acquired in the art of dissecting lobsters.

I saw how many they devoured day by day, and how much water they drank, and I fancied that they themselves grew to partake more and more of the form and character of marine animals. I believed that they could have existed equally well crawling at the bottom of the deep or swimming on its surface."


"And yet, notwithstanding this, they had grown used to a wild ruggedness of nature and condition, a terrible, sublime uncertainty about life and things in general when the wind blew, missing which, in this earthly state, they would have pined most sadly. And I do not believe that they would have exchanged their rugged, storm-swept, wind-beleaguered little section of Cape Cod for a realm in sunny Italy itself; no."

"I knew what it meant—mild winter on the Cape! There's the devil in the old Cape weather, teacher, and he never skipped four seasons yit! If it ain't one time, it must be another. Yis, yis! mild winter on the Cape, and no March to speak on, and a hurricane in summer! "


"A little more than a year after I left Wallencamp, I heard of Grandma and Grandpa Keeler's death. "Very quiet and peaceful," they said concerning Grandma, but I had known what sort of a death-bed hers would be. Scarcely a week after she had passed away, Grandpa Keeler followed her. I had it from good authority that he kept about the house till the last. There was a "rainy spell," and he stood often gazing out of the window "with a lost look on his face," and once he said with a wistful, broken utterance and a pathetic longing in his eyes that did away forever with any opprobrium there might have been in connection with the term, that "it was gittin' to be very lonely about the house without ma pesterin' on him."


"Since then, I have not heard from Wallencamp. It is doubtful whether I ever get another letter from that source. Though singularly gifted in the epistolary art, it is but a dull and faint means of expression to the souls of the Wallencampers—and they will not forget. From the storms that shake their earthly habitations, they pass to their sweet, wild rest beside the sea; and by and by, when I meet them, I shall hear them sing."