Without the slightest doubt, October is
Cape Cod’s best month. On a good day, the air is crisp and cool, and the light
is bright and sharp as a razor; the pale blue sea and the aquamarine sky
sparkle and compete for the eye’s attention, the
atmosphere is so clear and devoid of haze that you can stare off
across the sea into the far heart of infinity. Between sunset and
darkness the waters of the harbor can pass through
a whole unbelievable cycle of color changes, and this cycle itself
can change completely from day-to-day. At sunset it might be a
bright light, blue-tinged with rose, and a few minutes later it will become
like polished silver, then like burnished pewter, and next it will be gun-metal
blue like a polished Toledo blade. And if
there happen to be dark clouds in the background across the harbor, the water
will turn into the richest tone of indigo you could imagine; the white
boats bobbing in the harbor will become whiter than
white, something outside the spectrum, a luminescent trick played on the retina by a never-never
landscape.
The little old lighthouse sitting out on Long Point is the
constant gauge, like an optical
metronome, to which the eye always returns to discover the beat, the
vibrations of each day’s visual symphony. As William Butler Yeats said, “Lulled by this sensuous music, one neglects monuments of
unageing intellect.”
Note:
Perusing Howard Mitcham's wonderful Provincetown
Seafood Cookbook
(Reading MA, Addison-Wesley, 1975) last night, something I hadn't done for some
time, this passage struck me as being exactly right. (So, for that
matter, is everything else about Mitcham's book, which is a must-read-and-own for
fish-lovers, Cape Cod enthusiasts, and
anyone who likes charming marginal drawings by artistically gifted
authors.) Over the past decade, I’ve mostly recovered from my previous
antipathy to the state of
Massachusetts. (It was a matter of
putting some
unfortunate memories behind me and replacing them with some good new ones.) We have spent a fair amount of October time on the
Cape during annual reunions of our “Wuhan Six” Chinese adoption group and, with the exception of one unseasonably Equatorial year and
another Arctic one (both exciting!),
Mitcham’s description is spot on.
Howard Mitcham, who passed away in 1996, was a legendary figure in Provincetown life, both in
cooking and artistic circles. One aspect of his book which I appreciate, something current “celebrity chef” Anthony Bourdain
also cited when he nominated Mitcham’s book in the New York Times as the out-of-print cookbook most deserving reprinting, is Mitcham’s championing the grand culinary qualities of certain of our less
“prestigious” fish. Adapting a smart wine adage, there isn’t a
fish for every occasion, but there is an occasion for every fish.
