When Labor Day arrives on Cape Cod, three things happen, the imposition of the universal proscription against wearing white until Memorial Day, Year-round residents begin, once again, to make left turns, and, as it is what makes those left turns possible, the summer residents leave.

Most people think that there are two seasons on Cape Cod, the summer one enjoyed by the tourists and the winter one where the year-round residents, devoid of the opportunity to serve the tourists, languish in their hovels drinking to access waiting for the summer sun’s return.

In actuality the winter season ends on March 31 with May and June comprising the spring shoulder season when those who have summer homes or rental property begin showing up to prepare their places for the summer while after Labor Day until the middle of October the reverse happens during the fall shoulder season that leads to the dead of winter.

In order to continue living on the Cape where many families have lived since Miles Standish first thought up the idea for a canal to save time from Plymouth to colonies south in spite of the ever growing cost of living, many Cape Codders and year-round wash-ashores will prepare their homes for summer rental, move into some available temporary housing, trailer camps and camp grounds are a common move, to reverse the process in the fall and move back into what is really their home.

Streets whose houses were filled with families and lawns crowded with kids become a few occupied houses and fewer people out and about.

This house owner/occupant dance happens throughout the Cape regardless of the area as it benefits those who are silent victims of the tourist industry.

Pictures of Cape Cod are usually the summer ones with crowded beaches, parties, and the upper crust of society in places like Nantucket and Martha’s whose reputations as the playgrounds of the rich and famous are based mainly on carefully chosen photo-ops or the occasional off-season gathering of people who fly in and out, while the reality is that a large number of the population are lucky to have been able to find a way to continue living on their home Island that the rich out of state people have made practically impossible to do.

As Islands, while the rich and famous can jet in for their catered events and monetarily incestuous visits, the year-round residents are dependent on boats and the winter weather for their basic, not tourist, needs like food and clothing. They do not live the brochure/tabloid depiction of the Islands.

Because of the summer heat in Florida, there are many Florida License plates on the Cape Cod roads that clog them with the drivers acting as if they are either the only ones on the road and drive accordingly or are just rude and think all other drivers must respect that they are on vacation and this should be the prime consideration of all others. They are often rude and, from my experience working on the Cape, the quickest to snap their fingers at you when they want something instantly. When describing a particularly difficult time on the road with congestion caused by one seemingly unconscious driver, the question will be asked if the car had Florida plates, and if the answer is in the affirmative it will be met with groans of complete understanding and enough will have been said.

They may be nice individuals, but, as summer residents, as a group, they are the ones of all the tourists whose Labor Day departure is the most welcomed.

The islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket as well, apparently, as Cape Cod seem to be things of which Governor DeSantis of Florida has little knowledge. Besides not knowing that going from Martha’s Vineyard to Cape Cod is actually travelling within the same state just to a different town so it is wrong to insist that moving his human trafficked migrants was liberals deporting them from the IsIand to Cape Cod, he also is unaware that by this point in the middle of September, the rich people he wanted to annoy had gone home to their year-round homes and the people on the Island were, for the most part, those who understood the housing and job situation on the Island and as Islanders know that relying on one another is part of living there.

Not knowing his target, DeSantis, in wanting to own the Massachusetts Libs, actually set up a situation to annoy his own Florida people who had, unfortunately for his plans, already gone home. Instead, the refugees met the community of the Island’s residents who were not what he had assumed.

Now, had it been summer and the out of state rich people and Florida residents still been there, the reaction might have been different and more to his expectations, but the reaction would not have been from the Island residents but those who keep them from making left turns for three months each year and then are gone.

Of course, it could also be that he knew or hoped his Florida people would react negatively and he was willing to use them and counted on using them as stand-ins for the real residents. He set up a situation in which he was hoping to use the bigotry he believed Floridians harbor.

He dove into the outdoor pool of the cheap motel after Labor Day without checking to see it it still had water in it.

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For the first 40 years of my life, Oklahoma was a Broadway musical, the film version of which I had seen once, from whence had come the song I sang in every chorus I was ever in regardless of size or affiliation, personal political, or religious, but never a destination.

And then I was there.

I also had never entertained even the whispiest thought of dealing with old, handwritten documents dealing with whaling industry and all the businesses and people in its orbit.

Yet, again, here I am.

Although the two events may not seem to have any relationship, other than me by accident and of no importance, I have found in transcribing old documents that were assumed to be isolated records of individual whaling voyages with no connection to other logbooks or business letters of local companies, that a coincidence may have been missed by others, but, because of something seen by a transcriber, leads to a thread of connections.

The present Edward Gorey House Museum in Yarmouthport, Massachusetts, as the Gorey House, may seem to be just an old house on Cape Cod, but the still existing original section has a connection to New Bedford whaling, the capture of the whaling ship Milo in the North Pacific whaling grounds by the confederate ship Shenendoah months after the Civil War had ended as the captain of the confederate ship had yet to get the news, and a company half a world away writing a letter to the captain of a ship it owned warning of that marauding confederate ship hoping he got it in time but was received by that captain weeks after the marauding and torching of ships had ended. The connection between these unrelated logbooks and business papers may have gone unnoticed had one name involved not been the surname of my grandfather. Other such connections happen often and it is amazing.

Barite roses consist of radial and rosette sprays of disc-shaped barite crystals that contain angular medium quartz and a small quantity of hematite that imparts a reddish color to the “roses”, and were formed during the Permian era when ocean waters covered the western half of Oklahoma and the counties of central Oklahoma were under shallow bays. Over time, barium sulphate precipitated out of seawater and crystallized around grains of quartz sand forming a broad band of the reddish Garber Sandstone as the ocean retreated westward, and a geologic formation of reddish sandstone was left behind.

However, there is the other explanation of why these rose shaped formations are so plentiful in a narrow swath of what used to be called Indian Territory.

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 mandated the removal of all American Indian tribes east of the Mississippi River to lands in the West. Ostensibly to protect the Native Americans who had acclimated very well to the lifestyles and practices of the people who had already taken large chunks of their land from those who were still often taking it with violence, the reality was that these Cherokee and other tribes were moved once gold was found on the land some occupied and explains why some Cherokee were not moved and a branch of the tribe still remains East of the Mississippi.

The forced removal was devastating as hundreds of Cherokee died during their trip with thousands dying from the consequences of relocation, and the long forced march has became known as the Trail of Tears. A Cherokee legend says the rocks represent the blood of the braves and the tears of the maidens who made the devastating journey and they formed when the drops of both hit the ground.

I have a few.

Paul Cuffe was an American businessman born in 1759 on Cuttyhunk Island when slavery still existed in the New England colonies. His mother was of the Wampanoag Tribe and his father was a slave freed by his Quaker owner when the Quakers woke up and realized this practice went against core beliefs. He had signed on to a whaling voyage or two as a teenager and during the American Revolution delivered goods to Nantucket by slipping through a British blockade. This experience led to him building a lucrative shipping business along the Atlantic Coast.

As an Abolitionist he became involved in the British effort to found a colony is Sierra Leone where the British had transported more than 1,000 former slaves originally from America travelling to the colony and then England to offered his recommendations to improve the lives of all the people there proposing and then making training, machinery, and ships available to the people to help the colony be successful.

Education was a major concern for Cuffe and it was his insistence that ensured that all schools in Massachusetts were integrated.

Since its early days the Old Dartmouth Historic Society, of which the New Bedford Whaling Museum is its most visible component, has desired to make the whole block upon which the museum sits an educational campus. Whatever reluctance may have existed to the purchase of one end of the block was somewhat removed when the corner lot from the museum to the cross street blew up in a gas main explosion freeing the land for purchase, and upon it now sits the Paul Cuffe Park that honors a very important merchant in the history of the South Coast of Massachusetts and an African/Native American, the embodiment of what he believed all people could be especially African Americans and Native Americans if given the opportunity which is something he endeavored to do.

In transcribing whaling ship crew lists, I had come upon a ship whose first mate was Paul Cuffe’s son. This, of course had me dig deeper and so it was that I was very happy to be at the dedication of the park where a descendent and elder of the family was to speak.

With the Bourne Building of the whaling museum on one side and a commanding view of the harbor on the other, rather than waxing eloquent about all Paul Cuffe’s mercantile and social activities and successes, the head of the family began telling his boyhood experience of having to attend an all-Black school on the army base in Oklahoma to which his father had been stationed in the 1950s while the White kids went to the all-White school to which, although closer to the living quarters than the Black school, they took a school bus while the Black kids had to walk to theirs.

The descendent of the man who ensured schools were integrated in what to the elementary school kid at the time was the universe was being denied an equal education in a public school on a government installation as separate but equal only stressed the separate part.

When I arrived in Oklahoma from Los Angeles, I lost most of what rights I had had as a Gay man.  It was the 1980s and Gay rights were uneven throughout the country, and practically non-existent in some.

As I sat listening, I heard the man recount his loss of rights and this obviously made such profound impression on him, it was that point that meant the most for him at that moment.

My transcription team members and I had been pulled off whatever long-range project we were working on as the museum had just acquired two logbooks from two voyages of Cuffe whaling ships around 1806 and these became a priority. Considering that Paul Cuffe is so easily overlooked in African/American History when he was, as far as business, the country’s first Madam C.J. Walker, having members of the community help with transcribing such historically relevant documents seemed like something worth trying.

In the process of setting up such a thing, I met people with various levels of interest in Paul Cuffe and was invited to the Wampanoag Pow Wow at which descendants of Paul Cuffe would be present.

Thus, I was able to bring a Rose Rock from my collection of Oklahoma things and give it to a member the family, explaining the legend of the rock to him, the connection between it, Oklahoma, and the person who turned out to be his uncle and the historian of the family, and that I thought the member of an East Coast tribe who had spent time in Oklahoma, as I had done, and who had experienced a loss of rights in his case won by his ancestor and in mine by contemporaries, might like to have something from there with a Native American connection.

So in the historical home of the Paul Cuffe of Ashanti and Wampanoag parentage, a rose rock from Oklahoma could end up sitting as a small connection to Tribes out west and to memories a member of an East Coast tribe who spent time there and experienced what his ancestor had never wanted him to.

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As a teacher in the Buckle of the Bible Belt who happened to be a Gay man, I was once approached by some teachers wearing gold crosses on little, delicate gold chains like people wear garlic when approaching a vampire and told I did not belong where I was and needed to go away because this was America and l had no right to be here. This lack of belonging was belied by my having been born in Boston, the son of two U.S. citizens.

A native American in Oklahoma was protesting at the dedication of a statue commemorating the Land Run having been erected on land once the home of his Native American Tribe in whose honor the settlers had named the town after they took the land. He was told by someone in attendance to stop being so negative and just go home. The irony, as white hot as it was, went right by the creator of it.

Recently, over the Labor Day weekend, a video went viral of a woman in Huntington Beach CA going ballistic over a Pride flag that was hanging among many others at a motel by the beach. She insisted that as this was America, “these people” had no right to have that flag flown or even be here. Only flags representing Americans should fly.

One might feel comforted in assuming that these were individuals of unknown education and limited and provincial backgrounds, so, as foolish as their attitude, actions, and words might be, there is a tendency to cut them some slack as they may be uninformed enough to be victims of their own ignorance, chosen by or forced on them.

But what if someone with a demonstrably high level of education and who by profession must be informed makes a similar statement as a member of Congress by stating clearly that anyone who does not think as he and his political supporters do, who have their own thoughts on issues is not American, forgiveness for kindness’s sake is totally out of place and undeserved.

Ron Johnson after claiming the coming election was about freedom complained,

“The press is so unbelievably powerful and the left has infiltrated every institution of this country.” 

Apparently, for him, anyone on the left who may have different opinions than he, does not have a right to participate in democracy, and their attempts to participate in it is “infiltrating” American life.  

“They started with the college and university system. So they control college of education and journalism and law. And they’ve infiltrated every agency. They’ve infiltrated religions. They’ve infiltrated everything and now we’re seeing the results of that. That’s why our nation is literally on a precipice. We’re at a hinge point in history.”

And continuing his accusation that people with differing ideas are invading areas that are not for them, he continued,

“We have to win this election and we have to win many more because we’ve got to push them out of these institutions and return some normalcy, return the values that made this country great.”

He and most likely his supporters seem of the belief that people on the Left (non-MAGAs) should not be allowed to go to church, college, be employed by those institutions, or even the local, state, or federal government, or vote in elections because their participation, being as it is an “infiltration”, is some form of unpatriotic invasion.

So much for “indivisible under God with liberty and justice for all.”

Of course, one must remember that this is the guy who tweeted,

“What does July 4th mean to me? Freedom,”

from Moscow on the Fourth of July in 2018, the day after the Senate Intelligence Committee affirmed that U.S. Intelligence had concluded that Russia had interfered in the election to help Donald Trump.

The GOP’s big tent is only for those who can get to it, and the wall surrounding it makes that difficult.

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