I saw a map recently showing the “Lower Cape” stopping with Eastham, the “Outer Cape” as a separate region consisting of Wellfleet, Truro, and P’town.
Hey, wait a minute, I thought, that’s gotta be wrong. Lower and Outer are not separate regions. Outer is part of Lower.
Some years back, a team of academic researchers, invited by the National Seashore to come and study the Outer Cape, met in Wellfleet’s library . The meeting had barely started when audience members objected to the title of the study itself, claiming that Outer was a misleading term. According to a spokeswoman cited in the news story, “Even the Cape Cod Commission does not have an official term to distinguish between the towns of the so-called Lower and Outer Cape,” implying that, as with the map I saw, somewhere there is a boundary between the two regions.
It has always seemed obvious to me that “lower Cape” derives from the era of sailing, meaning “downwind,” in a region of prevailing westerlies (not in nor-easters, of course). The same basic upwind/downwind thinking is found in Martha’s Vineyard’s “up- and down-island,” or Maine’s “downeast.”
“Outer” is a subset of “lower,” a more recent term, that came into use when towns from Eastham or Wellfleet to the tip began to want to distinguish ourselves from the fatter and perhaps increasingly suburban feel of large parts of the traditional “lower” Cape closer to the bridges.
(In a “New York Times” article last summer, a woman, described as a Wellfleet native, is quoted, strangely, as including Hyannis in “Lower Cape”; no wonder outer Capers want to have our own, exclusive term. Surely Hyannis is “midCape”, another upstart term confusing the original nautical metaphor, if it has any meaning at all.)
But with words, right and wrong are determined by usage, or by a tug of war between newer usage and upholders of the older. Are the meanings of our key regional terms shifting and changing? I’d be interested to hear from others with corroborating or differing understandings of these key regional terms that to some extent define who and what we are.
Speaking of key terms, I’m told that “washashore” is no longer being used as much as it used to be. It would be interesting to know when exactly this term used to distinguish between native and non-native fulltime residents (and mildly insult the latter) started to be used. Presumably when washashores started to become a demographic force to be reckoned with. If it is being used less, is that an indication that the dwindling percentage of natives has thrown in the towel?
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