Outer Cape Voices
August 31, 2025
First Congregational Church, Wellfleet, MA

It was the summer of 1976. I was 22 years old; my father had just died; I was about to start a new job; my family was a mess; and I was angry, grief-stricken, and confused. I only had a few days to get it together. So, I got in my car—a Chevy Vega—with a sleeping bag, a Gulf Oil credit card, and $30 in my pocket. At sunrise, I turned on the ignition, blasted the radio, backed out of my driveway in Columbus, Ohio, turned right onto the freeway, and drove east for 830 miles till I reached Land’s End, stopping only for gas, bathrooms, and bottles of Coke. Like Maria, the main character in Joan Didion's 1970 novel, Play It as It Lays, I kept hard-boiled eggs on the passenger seat, which I could shell and eat while driving at seventy miles an hour.

I didn’t know anything about Cape Cod, except that the Pilgrims landed here. I had never eaten a lobster, much less a clam, a scallop, a mussel, or an oyster. Our fish came from a can or the frozen food section of the grocery store.

I’ll never forget, after 14 hours on the road, driving along Rt. 6 with Pilgrim Lake, the Provincelands and the Atlantic ocean on my right and the bay with its seaside cottages on my left. To this day, that view takes my breath away. When I arrived at Race Point, I got out of my car, walked onto the beach and stood for a moment in awe, and then screamed at the blue sky, the rough sea and the gulfs flying above me. Afterwards, I sat on a log and cried.

A very kind man walked up and asked if I was all right. I poured my heart out to this stranger. He asked where I was planning to stay for the night. I told him I had no idea. He suggested that I could camp in the backyard of his family home in Wellfleet. “Where’s Wellfleet?” I asked. “You passed it on your way here,” he responded.

What did I have to lose? So I followed him back up Rt. 6 and we turned left onto Cahoon Hollow Road and then right onto a sand road that I can no longer find. I parked in his driveway. After introducing me to his wife, he showed me how to use the outdoor shower and led me to his backyard.

I spent my first night on the Outer Cape sleeping under the stars. The next morning, I got up and drove back to Ohio to start my new job, promising myself that one day I would return.

The following summer, I returned to the Cape for a week in Provincetown. Perhaps I forgot to mention that part of my confusion was that I was coming out. Like other lesbians and gay men of my generation, I had joined a minority group overnight, and now I had to figure out how I was going to manage this new identity.

So, of course, I headed to Ptown, the Mecca of the LGBTQ community. As a young, newly minted lesbian feminist, I was in heaven. For one glorious week, I walked up and down Commercial Street, sunbathed topless at Herring Cove, ate at Spiritus Pizza and the Old Reliable Fishhouse, danced at the Pied Piper, and listened to live music at the Crown and Anchor. And of course, I shopped at Womencrafts, purchasing the obligatory t-shirt, along with a Rita Mae Brown novel and a Meg Christian album. I was now ready to face my midwestern world with my newfound status.

I returned to Provincetown year after year, staying in various places until I found my shack on the harbor, which I rented from an old Portuguese woman for a couple of summers for the extraordinary sum of $500 a month. I read that it was rented last summer for $13,500 a month.

A lot of important things happened in PTown: I gave my heart away, I discerned my vocation, I discovered women’s music, and I became a photographer. For many summers, I didn’t feel the need to venture beyond Herring Cove and Commercial Street.

But then, during the summer of 1982, my dear friend Annamarie Pluhar invited me to her grandmother’s house off of Black Pond Road. I can still recall driving my low-to-the-ground Chevy Vega up her long driveway, going as fast as I could so as not to get stuck in the sand. I’ll never forget the look and smell of that beautiful gingerbread house in the woods — a living room lined with shelves overflowing with books, interesting art on the walls, and a simple kitchen with a big wooden table. Then we walked a path lined by poison ivy to the road by Horse Leech Pond and climbed the dune to her beach. And I knew that I had come home. This place is where my soul was born.

I’ve never been able to buy a house on the Outer Cape. It’s always been beyond my reach. But, I’ve been here the majority of summers of my adult life, visiting, renting, or working in exchange for housing in various locations. I sheltered from Hurricane Bob in an apartment on the west end of Commercial Street. Over the years, I’ve stayed in a beautiful cape on Old Chequesset Neck Road, a rooftop retreat near Lt. Island, a cabin close to Gull Pond, a cottage on Drummer’s Cove, a sea captain’s house on Holbrook, and now in the lovely home of former parishioners near Duck Pond. These houses — and others whose locations I can’t remember — are regularly featured in my dreamscapes.

I’ve hiked many trails and biked many back roads. I’ve swum in most of the ponds. I’ve kayaked and sailed in the harbor. I’ve caught strippers and bluefish in the bay. I’ve body surfed in the ocean. I’ve dug for clams and hunted for oysters. I’ve watched sunrises, sunsets and meteor showers on the beach.

Driving across the bridge every June, I sing “Old Cape Cod,” an earworm that stays with me until we depart in the fall. Though I’ve always been a summer resident, when I pack up and leave in September, my soul remains.

Twelve years ago, I was invited to become the priest at St. James the Fisherman, an Episcopal summer church, located on the hill above the Post Office and WHAT. For over a decade, my wife, Emily, and I have been “official” summer residents of Wellfleet, complete with our beach/dump sticker.

I preach, teach, lead worship, and serve as a pastor in exchange for a place to live. My friends call me “The Vicar of All Wellfleet” with an emphasis on ”all.”

It’s been a dream come true. Can I really call pastoral conversations work when they’re done over morning coffee, a golf game, or a walk on the beach? I never tire of climbing the beautiful path to church on Sunday mornings, or standing in the pulpit or at the altar in my flip-flops. And, I get to invite colleagues to spend the weekend and be guest preachers. Most of the time, it doesn’t feel like work; instead, it’s like a gift that makes me pinch myself in delight.

The Chapel of St. James the Fisherman is an icon of the Cape Modern House movement. Designed by the late Olaf Hammerstrom, nothing inside has changed since its construction in 1956. It’s holy ground, a thin place - a simple building with a simple table on a beautiful hillside on a spit of land sticking out into the sea.

For nearly seventy years, people have worshiped in this space. We convene in June, gather throughout the summer, and then disperse in September. We worship in shorts and sandals. We have meaningful conversations on the patio. We sing accompanied by a piano that, although it lives in an unheated building during the winter, miraculously holds its tune during the summer. We enjoy Oreos and fruit punch at coffee hour, except for once a year — on the Feast of St. James — when we have oysters and champagne. And on that feast day, we read a necrology of all the people who have worshiped in this chapel since its beginning. The names are a map of Wellfleet: Melville, Marshall, Thaler, Mayo, Holbrook, Newcomb, Arnold, Oliver, and Hatch, and a history of summer and winter people: Ketchum, Walters, Glowacki, Douglass, Gatch, Porteus, Pike, Smith and Coburn; along a multitude of those who now reside on a distant shore.

The St. James' congregation (like the rest of Wellfleet) is a mix of Fleetians, wash-a-shores, summer residents, seasonal workers, vacationers, and day-trippers. None of us claims ownership of the Chapel; all of us, no matter how long we’ve worshiped here, are merely guests and stewards of this simple structure built on a fragile hillside.

Perhaps, that’s the truth of our theme tonight - “No place like home.” None of us can claim ownership of the Outer Cape. Regardless of how long we’ve lived here, we are all guests and stewards of this place.“This land belongs to the creatures of sea and sky — the fish, the sharks, the birds, the flies, ticks, and bees — and to the commons we call creation.”

I’m a summer resident, and that's what I’ll be until I’m not. But this I know. When my body is elsewhere, my soul remains here. And, as Thoreau once wrote: “We are not all wreckers contriving that some treasure may be washed up on our beach, that we may secure it . . . ” Some of us, like me, will always be the ones who arrive in June and leave in September so that those of you who live here year-round may enjoy the quiet without us. Just remember, that it’s still a place that we — summer people — call home.