The ongoing nuisance of the Sagamore bridge repairs got an interesting reaction from one writer of a letter to this paper: fill in the dumb canal.; it doesn’t serve much of its original purpose anyway and eliminating it would solve the perennial bridge problem.
But clearly the canal has long served another function than the o riginal one of lopping off Cape Cod from the north-south shipping route. A psychic function. Eliminating the canal might seriously endanger our self image, our identity as a region.
The canal makes a definitive break between us and great world. We may not be a real island, but we like to think of ourselves as one. We have an insular identity, defining ourselves as distinct as a region from the rest of the country.
With this insular thinking the canal helps, performing the same function as the moat for a medieval castle, inhibiting assault from without. In our case it’s assault from across-the-bridge mainstream culture, including such things as crime, suburban values, and chain stores. (Some of our towns have recently been trying to keep out the latter out by means of a moat in the form of bylaws. )
Moats were supposed to protect castles and their communities from invading hordes. Ours doesn’t succeed in that function very well as the summer invasion manages well enough despite the bridges, and most of us wouldn’t have it any other way. Hence the attraction/repulsion ambivalence of our situation: we want to remain separate and yet depend on the invasion. And it seems clear that the seemingly contradictory impulses depend on each other. If there were nothing left of our traditionally aloof, rural identity and relative inaccessibility the rest of the world would be less interested in going to the trouble of invading us in the summer.
A lot of small, remote places, islands by dint of geography, see that as a misfortune to be remedied as soon as possible. They welcome advances in transportation which make them less insular, even allowing commuting. The world beyond has the good stuff of which they are deprived by their remoteness, so such thinking goes. We are more likely to feel that we are the good stuff and it’s important to protect it from pollution by elsewhere.
Observing that a lot of across-the-bridges type culture has managed in recent decades to hop the canal, many Outer Cape Codders locate their mental moat somewhere around the Orleans / Eastham rotary; for some it’s even closer to the tip.
Any suggestion that the canal makes Cape Cod an island would be scoffed at by the real islands in our “Cape and Islands” regional designation. And it’s true that the canal is a mighty skinny ribbon of water on which to stake the claim of insularity. It would be argued that a bridge is just an airborn road and the Cape not really separated at all from the alien culture some on the Vineyard used to call Amerika. To which it might be replied that certain times of year it takes longer to get across that skinny body than it does to get to the Vineyard on the ferry.
It’s true that the ferry is a far more pleasant form of inconvenience than being stuck in stop- and-go traffic in your car. Once you have submitted to it, the ferry experience is a transformative one, turning the p assenger during the 45 minute ride into an islander, hardly the effect of the summer bridge experience.
Every once in a while someone will come up with the idea of building a bridge to link the Vineyard to the mainland, but as far as I know such outlandish thinking has never gotten far.
My guess is that if a vote were taken, Cape Codders would vote to keep the canal as necessary to our self image and identity as a region. So what to do about the bridge problem?
Here’s an idea: fill in the canal? Au contraire: widen it to a few miles and use ferries. Yes, there’s the sticky problem of which towns would have to be drowned to accomplish this, but we’ll crosss that bridge when we come to it.
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