On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Steve from Mendocino
1978 was a year of particularly high drama, even for me. I had just gotten my MBA, I was uncertain in my personal relationships, I was feeling a need to vastly expand my liberal arts education, and I wanted to explore life on my own, without oversight from all those whom I’d grown up with. At the beginning of January, I packed my 66 VW bug with a large orange crate of books, a nice collection of cassettes, some pot, and a huge sense of adventure, and drove from Los Angeles to Provincetown. I’d rented a tiny room in the back of a house that was unoccupied during the winter, and I settled into a routine of reading 8 hours a day, 7 days a week for the two months I was there – mostly classical literature from the late 19th century and first half of the 20th century. I made no effort to get to know anybody — just settled into an increasingly isolated world of American, British, Russian, and French writers. It got rather strange.
I arrived at night, in the middle of s snow storm to a strange little town at the tip of Cape Cod, chosen for its extreme contrast from the Los Angeles world I needed a break from. VW bugs don’t do real well on slippery surfaces, so when I arrived after more than 2 days on the road with only a couple of quick naps, I was both exhausted and terrified of sliding off the road in an unknown world. I found the house ok, and managed to let myself in, and collapsed. The next morning, I woke up to this.
This is the doorway onto my world, roughly 25 feet by 25 feet including bathroom and kitchen. It was furnished with a convertible sofa, a director’s chair, and a table plus a broom, a dustpan, and a couple of cooking pans. Heat was controlled by a thermostat in the main house, and I had no access to that. The first month was quite cold, but the owner came out from Boston and set it higher for me such that I had to crack the window to cool the place. For lunch I would pan fry some kind of meat accompanied by a sauté reduction. Dinner was a large plate of a vegetable, most often blanched and tossed with butter and lemon.
Color substitution of the scene across from my little dwelling. Since I had no phone, I would use the pay phone on the left of the picture for a weekly collect call to Anne-Marie to keep in touch with goings on in Los Angeles and vice versa.
Provincetown was my first exposure to tides that empty the mud flats. We are looking vaguely toward Boston here, but, as usual, my notion of where I am is mostly dictated only by how to get to where I want to go. I suspect someone here can give a precise orientation.
This gives you a notion of the architecture, and it shows off the stacks of lobster traps waiting to be deployed as conditions permit.
I love these little amateur exhibitions. They couldn’t possibly make much money. I’m reminded of a time in Brittany when we stumbled across a little zoo of poisonous snakes. It was feeding time, and we were the only ones there. Baby chickens were on the menu, and I watched as different kinds of famous deadly snakes would strike and kill the chicks. The only one to instantly kill the chicken was some kind of tarantula. It jumped, hit, and dropped the chick instantly.
Some of the support infrastructure for the fishing industry.
It was a very cold winter. Not being used to this sort of thing, I was very impressed that the salt water froze like this. That didn’t stop the fishing boats.
Zaftig Amazon
Neat pictures! unfortunately, Provincetown no longer functions as a fishing village. It is now a tourist destination, with vestiges of its fishing past.
sab
That first photo looks like Grand Rapids Mi in 1980. Very snowy. The rest looks like New England.
evodevo
Great pics!
Hey! VW bugs did VERY well on snow, as I remember…we would be snowed in in Lexington, Ky (granted it would only be a few inches, not feet) and we would be the only ones on the streets in our Bug. Nothing else would run. And the winter of ’77-’78 was horrific here – we had 3 feet in one day…everything was paralyzed for weeks – the Ky road depts had NO experience with that kind of snow, and no real removal equipment. They had to borrow from Indiana and Ohio to clear the interstate…Luckily I had horses and harness and a farm sled, or we would never have gotten feed sacks and groceries up our driveway.
raven
@evodevo: I was fixin to say!!!!! Now the heater. . .
evodevo
@raven: YES…the heating system was NOT real adequate lol..luckily I was MUCH younger then and spent a lot of time outdoors doing farm work in bad weather, so…
Ramalama
Provincetown is my very favorite place in the whole world, I think. I love love love the artists who gather there, the galleries are fantastic. The food and bars are amazing. The fudge… the fudge! The shops. Even the entertainment. Comedy and drag queens. The only thing that I used to complain bitterly about was the dancing. I found the DJs to be lacking. Not a fan of the tea dances. But then I’d rent a bicycle and spend the day riding through the dunes and go swimming. Later off to the martini bar and then dinner. Love love love that town.
E.
Thanks for the post and the story. Always wanted to go there.
JPL
Loved the pictures and the stories you told, except for the chickens.
debbie
Snow in photographs is my favorite way of looking at the stuff. Beautiful photographs! I made it out to the tippy-tip of Provincetown a few years earlier than Steve from Mendocino’s sojourn, and it certainly was wonderful. I even loved the colored bridges!
WereBear
In the Adirondacks, there are lots of such opportunities in the deep winter. I think every writer longs for such a setup, when the world can be held at arm’s length and only visited when it is missed.
Gin & Tonic
Having grown up in the Northeast, my recollection is that the freezing of the salt water which used to be common, no longer is. I recall when people used to drive vehicles out onto the Great South Bay (LI, NY) but I don’t think it has frozen over in decades.
barbequebob
sounds like you were there for the Blizzard of 1978, which took out many beach parking lots and dune shacks, and convinced many people of the futility of building close to the ocean on sandy beaches.
https://www.capecodtimes.com/photogallery/CC/20180206/PHOTOGALLERY/206009999/PH/1
The Aquarium is now a mall of sorts. Much nicer than what we think of when we here that word.
https://foursquare.com/v/aquarium-mall/4c1e91aeeac020a113ee49c2
Regarding the orientation of your photo showing deck in foreground, salt marsh, and barrier beach in the distance, compass direction is confusing in this place. Outer Cape Cod is oriented North-South until you get to P-town, where it is east -west. Most views from P-town across open water/marsh are towards the south, and Boston is Northwest. Your photo looks to be oriented towards the Wood End/Long Point spit, which is south of town.
Palindrome
Love Provincetown! I was in Boston for work a few years ago and spent a weekend meandering up the cape. I wish I were a photographer – you have great static memories.
laura
There’s a 66 VW bug in my driveway and I simply cannot fathom getting from Sacramento to Provincetown in 2 days. The idea of dedicating two months to deep reading and almost nothing else seems so appealing. Thank you Steve from Mendocino – your photos are always a treat.
Xavier
@raven: …kept the left side of your left foot nice and toasty! And the defroster worked great if you wrapped a muffler around your face to keep your breath off the windshield.
Janiem
@laura:
It’s epic! And only one driver!!!! I did three round trips across country in the seventies, none of them alone, and we didn’t come close, even though we did usually drive all day and all night. Clearly we were wimps. ;-)
The photos are amazing, and so evocative. The scenes make me think of Nantucket, where I did a similar (if much shorter) retreat in November of 1970. The phone booth — remember when one collect call a week (or for me in college, a month) was all that fit into the family budget? Now, most days, I want to toss my phone in the lake because it rings so often, and so often for scammy reasons.
I will be coming back to these pictures all day and beyond, finding more to enjoy.
ETA: The blizzard of ’78 was in early February. I lived just outside Boston proper then, and the place shut down for a week. It was one of the two biggest storms I’ve lived through, the other being the ice storm of ’98 in Maine. How was it on the Cape, Steve from Mendocino??
JanieM
@evodevo: Was that this one?
My grandma in Ohio said it was the worst wind she had ever lived through. Along with a lot of other people in her rural area of NE Ohio, she was evacuated to safer shelter.
Steve from Mendocino
Anne-Marie and I had four 66 bugs between us over a 15 year period. They’re almost like jeeps off road. Nevertheless, the back end likes to come around when it’s slippery, which, in fact, happened on my return trip. Slid into the center of the interstate and ended upside down in soft snow. The nice trooper in Arizona wrote me up for the accident and driving too fast for conditions. Two points on my license. The rear window cracked and popped out, and I drove the rest of the way to Los Angeles with a hole where the window once was. THAT was chilly. The adventures of youth…
JAFD
I may have mentioned this before, apologies if so, but…
The ‘blueish-white light’ effect of ‘sun shining on fresh snow from a cloudless sky’ – that is ‘what the light is like’ after I got my cataracts removed.
Doc said that seems to be common.
Wunovdezedaze will get screen brightness and contrast re-adjusted to ‘comfortable and not blindingly bright’. ‘Screen time’ cut down till then.
Stay healthy, happy and hydrated!
evodevo
@JanieM: Yep…that’s the one! Virtually NO ONE in our part of Ky had a four-wheel-drive vehicle. We had just bought one (a beat-up pickup truck) and also had chains for it, but that STILL wasn’t enough to get up our hilly driveway. It sat at the bottom of the hill and I used it to drive to UK in Lex, and to get groceries/feed, but it stayed there for at least a month, till all the snow melted. The county road crew came out our lane 10 days after the snow with a road grader…that’s all they had…interesting times!
not_a_cylon
@JAFD: My mom just had one eye done (still awaiting surgery on the other), and described the same effect. She also takes a lot of photos of flowers and is particular about the way some shades of purple come through. It’ll be interesting to see how that resolves itself :)
russell
I’m just trying to get my head around CA to P’town in 2+ days. Even if you don’t sleep at all, that’s a crazy road trip!
Steve from Mendocino
Left about 5:00 am and arrived after 9:00 pm. I guess that makes it closer to 3 days. Yes, crazy trip
JanieM
The best we ever did was 50 hours from just east of the North Cascades to Ashtabula, in 1972. Three drivers, only pit stops. The car was a Nash….I assume, from Wikipedia, that it must have been a Rambler American, since I don’t think it was old enough to have been the original Rambler. We bought it in Boston at the start of that summer for $10 (from someone’s fraternity brother) after it had sat all winter.
It carried us to hiking stops in the Grand Canyon and the Rockies, then to Redondo Beach for a longish visit with friends. At that point the car was getting about 30 miles…to the quart of oil. We had the engine rebuilt/replaced and drove the car up the coast to the Olympics, then the North Cascades, then back east. I remember some guy who had brought his family to the Grand Canyon laughing about the fact that he had put $200 (a lot of money then!) into his very nice late model car before making this trip, and here we were, a bunch of hippies, taking our chances.
One of my later trips also has a car story attached to it…funny, I never think about the cars. But Steve’s story is bringing it all back. I wonder if, buried in some box in the loft, there are snapshots………
Hob
As a kid, I spent some time in P-town in the winters for half a dozen years in the early ’80s, and loved it, so this all looks familiar and makes me a little weepy. It was pretty weird to finally go there in the summer later on and see how different that was from the off season, because I had always thought of it as a very quiet place with little oases of comfort in the freezing-ass cold, like the Portuguese bakery. My family stayed in a cottage behind a house somewhere toward the south end of Commercial. Once I was 11 or 12, and therefore old enough by ’80s latchkey kid logic to wander around on my own steam, my favorite thing was to go downtown, buy a horror paperback, and—if it wasn’t snowing—rent a bike (I think the same person ran the bookstore as rented the bikes, probably the only reason they were available in the off season), bike out to one of the beaches out of town on the back roads while freezing my face off, then go home and relax by reading Stephen King (which seemed right because, having never been to Maine, I imagined it to be just like Cape Cod) and eating a bunch of those Portuguese meringue things.