Last year I saw a map showing the “Lower Cape” stopping with Eastham, the “Outer Cape” as a separate region consisting of Wellfleet, Truro, and P’town. In a recent issue of “Cape Life” magazine, a list of restaurants makes the same distinction.
Hey, wait a minute, I thought, that’s gotta be wrong. Lower and Outer are not separate regions. Outer is part of Lower.
I have always regarded it as obvious that “lower Cape” derives from our sailing past, meaning “downwind” in a region of prevailing westerlies. The same basic upwind/downwind thinking is found in Martha’s Vineyard’s “up- and down-island,” or Maine’s “downeast.” “Lower” would not stop at the Eastham/Wellfleet boundary any more than the wind.
I also thought it widely understood that “outer” is a subset of “lower,” a more recent term getting us into another metaphor
(In a “New York Times” article last summer, a woman described as a Wellfleet native is quoted, strangely, as including Hyannis in “Lower Cape.” Surely Hyannis is “mid-Cape,” another upstart term confusing the original nautical metaphor. It’s hard to imagine an Outer Cape native making such a mistake. I attributed it to a journalist new to the Cape beat.)
Why this quibbling? What’s in a name? Why would Cape Codders care about distinguishing these subdivisions? Because although the outside world may see us as one big, happy region, we know that such distinctions reinforce and express important sub- regional identities. There is considerable expressiveness in the term “outer.” When Henry Beston published his famous “The Outermost House” in 1928, “lowermost” would not have done it. (And note that the house was located in Eastham, exluded from the “outer” club in those references with which I started this column. Beston was not making a false claim; Eastham’s backside beach is of course more outer than Provincetown’s if outerness is strictly connected to easterliness.)
As the Cape has developed, it has apparently become important, at least to Outer Capers, to distinguish between the increasingly suburban feel of upper parts of the Lower Cape and the still, we fancy, traditional, rural feel of the towns from Eastham to the tip. (It would be interesting to know when it was that “outer” first began to be used.)
We cherish and insist on the narrowness of this “narrowland,” as we sometimes call ourselves, looking at more expansive parts of the Lower Cape such as Orleans and Brewster as the beginning of Ohio, as I’m sure scrawny Nantucket views fat Martha’s Vineyard, which compared to the sister island has altogether too much middle to it.
Outer Cape towns define ourselves as different and are seen as different by the others (a distinction not always intended as a compliment): outer, as in “far out,” culturally edgy, less of the mainland.
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, as well as where, we are.
If the meanings of key geographical terms are changing, we may even more significantly be losing a key demographic term: “washashore”. I’ve heard recently that some think that it’s dying out. In the 1960s and 70s, that period of growth in which, in Wellfleet in any case, and probably elsewhere as well, non-natives started settling here in numbers, the term served natives both to discriminate between the two sorts of fulltime residents and to mildly mock the invading horde. Now that, as a result of that washashore invasion, natives are a much smaller percentage of the population, an endangered species, is the term losing its usefulness?
No Comments