Forgotten in the celebrating of the 100th anniversary of the Cape Cod Canal is its contradictory effect on Cape life.
The purpose of the canal was to save ships the time, money, and danger of going all the way around the treacherous Cape itself. Incidentally it turned us into an island of sorts, profoundly affecting the nature and self-image of our lives on this side of it.
Having gone to all the trouble and expense to dig the big ditch, it was necessary to go to all the trouble and expense to counteract the island effect with bridges, which have been a source of annoyance ever since, increasingly in recent decades, as the Cape became more crowded and popular with tourists.
Right now we are once again in the middle of a discussion of enlarging the existing bridges , or possibly building a third bridge. The whole idea is the reasonable-seeming one of facilitating access to the Cape; but such reasonableness is far from unanimous. There are letters to the paper saying to leave the bridges unimproved if it’s going to mean more tourist traffic in already overcrowded summer. All of this controversy of course would have been avoided if we hadn’t dug that canal to begin with.
Getting shipping through Cape Cod seemed in 1914 a bigger problem than getting cars, of which there were few at the time, onto Cape Cod. But times have changed. Has anyone ever done a cost/benefit analysis weighing the canal’s benefit to shipping (and to those benefitting by the shipping) against the nuisance of being separated by bridges from the mainland?
Think of the canal as a moat, serving a protective, defensive function. But moats always have bridges, expressing their essential ambivalence. It’s a good image of the perennial discussion at least in recent decades of whether we want to encourage or discourage access to us. This fundamental debate pits the benefits, aesthetic and otherwise, of remoteness, ruralness, underdevelopment—our vaunted “quality of life”– against a more vital economy, more customers, a thriving tourist season. The debate includes the contradiction conservationists are quick to point out: that it’s the Cape’s traditional backwardness that most attract tourists.
I’m surprised no one has made the modest proposal that in this era in which the shipping interests seem (at least to landlubbers) to be trumped by the auto interests it would make sense, instead enlarging and building new bridges, to reinstate our natural connection to the mainland and simply fill in the ditch. Let super highways sweep onto the Cape. Give the world a real shot at us.
Many of us would see in getting rid of the moat the end of anything resembling the quality of life we have come to associate with Cape Cod. But some of the business community might point out that the quality of life embodied in a bank account would be enhanced by filling in the canal.
In debating about bridges it’s worth thinking about the nearby real island naturally defended and inconvenienced by a considerable moat. No doubt Martha’s Vineyard’s never having replaced the ferries with a bridge or causeway has something to do with the expense and difficulty of such a project, much greater than that of the engineering of the canal bridges.
But every time someone raises the possibility of joining the real world and making the island more convenient for both summer pleasure seekers and local commuters, there are lots of objections. I’ve not seen any polls, but it would seem that, despite a difficult seasonal economy, most Vineyarders are convinced that a key to what if offers to residents and visitors alike is precisely the lack of a bridge.
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