Spring Hill at Old Harbor

There's a part of Sandwich called Old Harbor that can only be accessed on either side by walking along the beach.  I don't recall ever going there when I was a kid...I just remember once in the mid/late 80s walking down Spring Hill with my dad to Old Harbor, and back to a cottage some cousins were renting.  It was kind of far from even his cottage when I was little and I wasn't allowed to leave the confines of the jetties in front of it, so I just never got down there.  This day I drove as far as I could on the road along the marshes, parked, and badly trespassed between 2 cottages to get to the beach.  Some of these places have become year round homes, so I was really taking a huge chance doing this.  

This is the entrance to Old Harbor from Cape Cod Bay.  The channel becomes Mill Creek and that's what the Boardwalk spans, farther down the marshes.

Boardwalk would be way down there.

One of these days I'll park at Town Neck and walk on that side of Old Harbor.

This was the first time, that I can remember, that I've ever laid eyes on those rocks.  This is my hometown and I'm still finding things I've never seen before.

The current moves quickly as the tide was going out. It also drops off quite deep, so it's not something that people swim across.  Some people do 'the float', which is floating down the creek in inner tubes to around this point.

Massive sand damage to the beach grass.

Marshes

It was definitely warm this day but I wouldn't say it was 'let's wear shorts and take the jet ski onto the Bay' warm.

I love rocks.  Picked up some unique ones down this end. And I also found 2 sand dollars.

East Sandwich

The day that I shot the reflections in Little Hoxie Pond, I knew I would have to come back and shoot a couple of trees that have had names and initialed carved in them since the 1950s.  I carved mine in it sometime in the late 70s but not deep enough.  Most of  them are now unreadable but some are still visible.  I will have to return with my zoom lens because these trees are quite tall and, therefore, names, dates and initials are way up high on the trunk and branches.  The 'BW 1970', is, I assume, Brad White who lived across the street from these trees.  He graduated in 1978 so he was probably 10 at the time he did this.

This one says 'The Brier Kids 1958'.  I wonder who they were?  Is 'Brier' a family name or the name of the kids' club?

The sumac was getting gorgeous.

Hoxie Pond

There was a time in the 70s when I used to walk these tracks from across the street from my house to just about this point where they join up with Old County Road, in order to walk to Colonial Market on Rte. 6A to get candy.  It was just shorter than having to walk all the way down the road which is narrow, hilly and curvy.  

I'd dreamt about Spring Hill Beach the night before and knew I had to make a quick stop.  It's a private beach and my parents used to own a cottage here in the 60s and 70s.  I grew up here and it's one of my fave places in the world.  I rolled the dice that no one would give me a hard time for being here.

Those are the jetties that I grew up playing on as my dad's cottage was just above them.  The person that bought it in 1977 tore down the original cottage and built a huge ugly house in it's place.  I still think of this as my beach, and those are my jetties.  When I lived out west, I had recurring dreams about beach combing here and finding tons of beautiful vases, perfume bottles, and other fine glass pieces.

Someone must've done this over the weekend.  I just loved it!!!  What a clever idea!  See those white stones in the middle?  At night if you bang them together, they will emit little sparks.  Fairly sure they are quartz.

Behind the beach on the other side of the road are salt marshes.  It was low tide.

I think Vlad Dracul has moved to Cape Cod.  As you can see, these are lobstah shells hung all over this tree.  I guess that'd make him 'Vlad the Impalah'.  

It's a little....weird.

Anywho, continuing on my drive down Rte 6A, I took a quick drive up past the Green Briar Nature Center and took some pics at the little pond known locally as Smiling Pool.  Author Thornton W. Burgess set his children's stories at this pond which he named Smiling Pool.  I cannot find an official name for this pond at all.

This is off Rte 6A on another part of Spring Hill Road.

Finally, this is the view of the Bay from the top of the hill on Chipman Road  I had to crop the heck out of this picture to eliminate the road, houses and front yards.  If only I could have eliminated those wires.  Can't get a good shot on this road without wires being in it.  Believe me, I tried.

Pretty no?

Processing

I have a very rare gift in that I can often remember my dreams after I wake up.  A lot of times they will fade quickly but leave me with residual feelings that can, and do, affect me all day long.  If I have a particularly vivid dream, I try very hard to get it down on paper so that I can always remember it, and I have quite a few of them written down, including 2 notebooks I unearthed in a storage box that contains about a year or more's worth of dreams I had while I was in high school, b/c they are all dated from 1978 to the early 80's.  Reading them brings them all back to me very vividly.  My nightly ritual back then was to get all ready for bed, put  "One Summer Dream" by ELO on the turntable, turn off the lights, get into bed and that would be the last song/thing I would hear before falling asleep and it always delivered vivid and surreal dreams that I would write in the notebook as soon as I woke up.

I know that dreams are a way to process unresolved issues.  I have recurring dreams over and over again, that center on where I grew up and the people with whom I grew up.  For example, if I have a dream about elementary school, the kids in the dream are the ones that attended school in my town only for a year or two.  I rarely, if ever, dream about the people with whom I have remained friends, because I know where they are and what they are up to.  But whatever happened to the kids who I befriended and who then moved away?  There was no way of knowing where my classmates were moving because there was no internet to keep track of anyone.  I still wonder what happened to those kids.

I have been tortured, and yes I do mean tortured, by dreams I have, representing so many unresolved issues from my childhood on the Cape, that I hate having them.  There are recurring dreams that I like a lot, even love, but the ones that take place in and around my childhood home and that end of my street are always somewhat troubling.  If I decide to follow through on having a private and invite-only "dream blog", I will pour out the details of those dreams, but in public I prefer to keep them to myself.  I am very in tune with my dreams because I have been writing them down and mulling them over to try to find the source of the dream's very odd subject matter.   Oh, I should mention that my dreams are very surreal and always with a sinisterness lurking in some element that just isn't quite right at all.  All I will say is that what I call 'the midnight sun at mom's house' dreams are among the most sinister I have, and it is because of those dreams that I could never live in Alaska because to actually have a midnight sun would be a horrible thing for me to have to deal with in real life as well as in my dreams.  

Dream-processing my dad's death from lung cancer was where I hit all the stages of grief.  I don't remember working through the stages in my conscious, every day life.  But I got hit hard every time I had a dream about him.  I went through a period of time in about 2005, 2 years after he died, where my dreams found me over the top, seeing red, pissed off, completely furious with him, no matter how nice he was being to me in the dream.  I was just being so hateful to him.  Hmm. Anger stage much?  Cause yeah, I was pretty damn angry about the way his health was handled and how quickly he died from the date of diagnosis.  And even more angry about the fact that he died.

My favourite recurring dreams have to do with beach combing, usually on Spring Hill Beach in East Sandwich, a place that has always been very special to me and which I find myself longing for, the older I get. I remember doing the whole 'if i won the lottery thing' not too long ago, and I thought to myself that I'd like buy a vacation cottage on Spring Hill.  What's this?  Me?  Longing for a place on Cape Cod?  In my hometown?  A place I swore I would never return?   In those beach combing dreams I'm at my parents' old cottage, and I only venture between the jetty breakwater that was in front of their cottage and the jetty breakwaters further down the beach on either side of ours.  Instead of finding cool shells and rocks, my dream-treasure consists of beautiful venetian glass vases, spun glass, art glass, all kinds of cool and colourful glass objects. Tons of them.   Sometimes Christopher Radko-like ornaments too. I greedily pull each one out of the sand and stuff them in a big bag. 

I spent so many wonderful, childhood days at that place.  Is my recurring dream telling me that the beautiful treasure that I desire so much is to live near, or own a cottage on, Spring Hill Beach?  Maybe like the one my dad used to own?  (That one, unfortunately, was torn down by the guy that my dad sold it to, and he built a 3 story house on the lot.  It broke my heart).  

When I was young, I always thought I would be able to completely sever all ties to Cape Cod by moving west.  I swore that once my parents were gone, I would sell their house and never return  to visit, nor would I ever look back.  In essence, turning my back on, and shunning, Sandwich and my life growing up there.   As it turns out, and much to my complete and utter surprise, I cannot do that. My dreams won't let me. I've lived on the west coast for nearly 22 years, but I visit the east coast almost nightly after I fall asleep.  It's not quite so easy to shake one's hometown and past, especially if you've grown up in a small town like Sandwich, which truly was a great place to live back then. And over and above that, I can't shake the people from my past either, and I don't want to.  I can't.  I won't.  You can run, but you can't hide, from your past. Am I glad that I moved west?  Absolutely.  I've had a blast out here for sure.  It's a beautiful place to live and I have had the most amazing experiences.  No regrets. 

My dreams are in overdrive now, except now I'm starting to process Washington State AND Cape Cod at the same time.  It's overwhelming, but I can't turn away from it or hide from it.  I have to let it work itself out that way.  So it's off to sleepy dreamland now, to see where I go tonight.  

Treasure

I became fascinated with beach glass (I refuse to call it 'sea glass') when I was a kid, and have been collecting it for as long as I can remember. You don't see a lot of beach glass anymore since most bottles are recycled. And out here the Pacific pounds things to bits. I used to have fairly good luck in the 70's and 80's on the Cape beaches, and then at Glass Beach in Fort Bragg, California, where I got most of my best finds including interesting shells, shards of pottery, china & ceramic, and the rarest of all: Red. Cobalt is hard to find too.

When I was little and would play by myself at Spring Hill, I would fantasize that, as I was climbing over the jetties, there would be a huge pile of beach glass treasure on the other side of the breakwater. Of course there never was, but I still remember that anticipation of hoping to find treasure on the other side. I dream about beachcombing a lot.