The House on Rock Harbor Road -- January 3 & 5, 1962 -- Cape Cod Sketchbook

Combining here two short journal entries that show my father continuing to explore the idea of a written sketchbook, cataloging in word statistics and descriptions of nature and the environment.

Also, for your enjoyment, I found a couple pictures of Drummer Cove Cottages, one featuring my three sisters.  ->

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January 3, 1962. Sketchbook
The wind blew in hard for two days out of the west across the bay. And on the third day while still it blew, I went to the beach at Skaket for seaweed and grass to bank the house against the cold. On the beach half covered with sand and drift I came upon an oar. Its blade was split, a third of its power gone, it lay mute along the heaps of black weeds.

I brought the oar home to look at it more closely. Six foot tall, it stands, thin and lean, tapered straight to the blade, and nicked and scared, a piece of heavy leather where she fit the lock. Probably all the way from Scotia, a neighbor said. See, it’s long, like as not for a dory.

Somehow cast adrift, the oar rode the currents south by west through fog and squalls, brine swelled, a strong tough hardwood, bleached white as bone but carrying yet the remnants of yellow paint or varnish while deep within the blade still showed a tint of red where she’d dipped the sea uncounted times. Whose hands gripped this oar? I’ll never know.

January 5, 1962 CCSB (Cape Cod Sketchbook)
A mist rises from the tidal meadow for several forces there are met. Some days ago it snowed, and banks of white are left across the ocher marsh and now it rains a steady coming down of drops too fine to see, a warm rain for January after days of cold.

Add to this a tide not quite at flood but high enough to line the marsh with lakes and flows, a vast wet place, mottled brown and white and gun-metal gray hazed now with mist.

Ducks course the channels of marsh and gulls appear and pass gracefully, silently, in the air above until at last beyond the road and the dark outlines of shrubs there is only mist and with it the strong salt smell of the sea.

The House on Rock Harbor Road -- December 15, 1961

Here's another installment, which finds Wendell reflecting more and more on Cape Cod nature and weather, in weatherproofing his new home and also through his art.

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The wind comes in gusts in off the bay, gusts but never dropping below 30 to 40 miles per hour in force it would seem. For half a mile out white caps race toward the shore and at Skaket Beach the sand lashes at the car and dances up the road away from the beach in windy (riverlets?) of sandy clouds. I parked there at Skaket for a moment with Cindy and Shelley. Overhead a score or more Canadian geese hung winging into the wind, forming and reforming until at last in a V they flapped off Southwest along the shore of the bay.

It is now that I find the many jobs have not been completed as far as weatherproofing the house. Two storm windows still to be put up in the back upstairs (this accomplished by hooking them from the inside, and not a job for a windy day), the garage door leaks too much air, a window pane in the garage nearly out for lack of putty, the front “storm door” torn and in need of repair, and then there is the seaweed I had planned to stack around the foundation of the house, at least along the wing, which is usually 5 to 10 degrees cooler than the rest of the house. And so it goes. The jobs string out in endless line, and it takes a driving wind in the twenties to remind you of them all.

I have put together two beach collages. The first one I like so much that I took it to Hyannis to see if I could sell it at the Christmas sale. The second one hangs in the living room. I find them attractive because of the use of drift wood and small shell, etc. The various materials in a pleasing arrangement but mostly various woods mounted on a sea-worn board or plank. It would seem as though there might be a market for such things. They make striking decoration.