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Now we are Six.

This is a special kind of snow. It lies untrod upon across the yard like an animal’s coat, rather than a blanket. It seems to have grown out from the land rather than having been laid down from above. Soft, almost furry, there is no sense of warmth at all.

The air is crystalline. Floating around the low single digits, if not below, the air temperature will not allow for any humidity. Yet the other night we had flurries. Fog, the radio suggested, out here, closest to the ocean’s mediating embrace.

Fog at six. Fog at four. Fog at two. Fog at nothing. There is no fog when it is this cold. Not for very long, at least, and it changes to flurries. What comes down is the lightest precipitation one could dream. It barely falls at all, but swirls up and around, and down and back. Tiny, individual snowflakes, each with their own agenda, their own chaotic purpose.
The landscape of yesterday and last week, once a collection of ice and snow patches that had been covered once and never melted, is softened again. It can be swept away with a broom, or blown with one’s mouth. Off the front steps and the rear window and sideviews.

There are no footprints on this snow. Days of sledding and romping and racing and snow creatures were melted away two weeks ago. The next round of winter, the real coming of the season from the second of our weekend blizzards, grew this white coat and brought the banishing cold of this weekend.

It was not without warning. Looking through images of last year at this time, the snow heights are higher. That brutal year encased us, though, getting us used to how very cold it would be. We were lulled this year. El Nino, the child, suggested we might go the whole three months without a real sense of cold. Berries hung on the privet still. Radiant light green grass still grew on dewy banks. Winter was not happening. We could get through this easily this time. As if we had earned a respite.

Winter is to be expected. Here, it will be cold. We know this when we chose to make a home here. We count ourselves lucky when things go well, the warm days, the sunshine, the green fields to amble through. We congratulate ourselves when spring comes and we made it through yet again. We believe warmth is normal.

The beach parking lot looks out. The blue of the sky is one complete shade, the blue of the water a deeper one. Fewer cars are out even though the air is brilliantly clear. The horizon stretches out, cloudless. Whitecaps hit the outer beach, which hangs on by a thread. It is too thin. Is it high tide or low right now? Washovers, spillovers are not singular events, it seems now. It is not so much a breach to envision but a total disappearance of the sand. It is in motion, below the surface. In the spring it will show up elsewhere. The wind buffets the few vehicles here. It has blown the windshield clear of the clean, silty snow. A coffee cup and a running engine keep zero at bay for humans. Few have ventured forth. It is blindingly cold out. Even the faintest breeze is like a knife.

That spring will come, we know. That is a different time. In February, now, it can get colder. This is when we have been reminded, at last. A snow shovel. A parka. A pair of boots. A load of firewood. We have prepared, we think. This time of year reminds us how precarious we truly are. No other time of year can we walk outside and die. It is not the snow. It is the cold.

We know the natural state of things, the original state of the universe. It is to be different from what we would like. It is within the distance between planets. Cold is the natural state. Warmth is the anomaly. What we see at six is closer to the truth. This is not a season. This is as it truly is. This could be the best to ever expect. At six.

Bearing due west at 15 miles, I caught sight of a single flashing light in the darkness. I’d seen it plenty of times, but still wasn’t sure, not having a chart handy.

“What are those four lights in a row to the right of it?” my companion asked.

“Chatham Bars Inn. Just up Shore Road. Those are the lights on the top floor,” I said.

For the first time, I was seeing home from a totally different vantage point. At night, the light beckoned across the distance. But never this far, in this direction. Never this late, this dark. Out in the blue water of the shipping lanes, I saw Chatham Lighthouse.

Certainly no closer the vessel I was on would venture. The Norwegian Dawn draws 28 feet, and even this far out we only had 50 feet at best underneath us. Just the day before, halfway to Boston from Bermuda, we were in waters 16,000 feet deep.

Maybe it is the angle of the sun, or being hundreds of miles from the coastal shelf, or the Gulf Stream or the depth, but the blue water there is not just blue. It’s ultraviolet. It is unreal in its purplish hue, even more so when the foam churned up by the massive propellers of our ship bubble up like crystalline green, literally the color of too many bridesmaid dresses – sea foam.

Now back in New England waters, it felt like home. Cooler, drier air. A slate hue to the ocean.

I’ve always felt – scratch that – used travel as a tonic to blast myself out of routines. If you go somewhere and see new places, you ought to come back with the dial in your head moved a degree or so off where it was before.

Anything less, and you were probably just playing tourist. Anything more and you may have suffered a psychotic break. Me, I was here to punctuate my sleeping in my cabin with breaks of eating great free food and naps on the balcony.

For someone with more entries in my passport than my checkbook, I can get away with at least one trip every decade devoted to actual relaxation with my integrity intact. Especially for a Cape Codder when it is scheduled the last week of summer.

And yet, I was standing on the rail of this massive ship doing something that was common prior to the building of the Cape Cod Canal 100 years ago, starting to connect the dots on some history and thinking about what to write about it. Passing by Chatham Light in a passenger liner – that’s a singular experience. Chatham is an end-of-the-road sort of place. You do not pass through Chatham unless you aren’t paying attention to the map.

We have no highway. Our railroad, defunct decades now, was the end of a spur. Unless you are in an airplane landing in Boston, there aren’t too many times you can point to a fellow passenger and say, “You see that? I live there – right there.” This trip had reconnected me with Bermuda — a place of only the vaguest recollections from a family vacation when I was three years old – in the best manner I could have imagined. By sea. No flight to another part of the country, but just a two-hour drive to Boston. All travel was done roughly at sea level.

Certainly I wasn’t aware as a toddler of my own family’s connection to the “Isle of Devils,” so known from its treacherous reefs. But as a boy I came to learn the connection of my ancestor, Stephen Hopkins, who had been aboard the Sea Venture, en route to Jamestown colony in 1609. The story the shipwreck at the unpopulated Bermuda was the basis of Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest.

After the survivors made it to Virginia, the disease, starvation and privation by nearby Native Americans led young Hopkins to return straightaway to London. Ten years later he would be the only man aboard the Mayflower who had actually set foot in the New World. And, as we know, that vessel was turned back from its heading of the mouth of the Hudson by the shoals off Chatham.

The very waters my passenger ship now plied. From one wreck-prone area to another, with a single family member connecting them (and the greatest writer of the English language thrown in).

These are the sorts of mental wanderings one is allowed when traveling slowly, at sea level. We circle back without meaning to, time and again.

Read this and Andy’s other columns online at The Cape Cod Chronicle.

Young girl stands up to her harasser, then forced to face her own teachers in court

After three hours sitting on the hard wooden bench, watching shackled and cuffed teenagers pass by in the custody of court officers, and hearing the waiting families discuss their grief, eleven year-old Sofie was led into the Juvenile Court in Barnstable. She was there to tell her story. And so she did.

“I believe you.”

This is what the judge was telling Sofie two weeks later on her return to his courtroom. She was standing next to the lawyer hired by the parents of the boy who had been harassing her in school for months. They sat on the opposite end of the courtroom bench where I sat. He was on the front bench.

From the very beginning of her year at her new school, she had been harassed by this boy. Early on, she asked him why he was doing this. He said, “I just had the feeling from the start about you.”

When she went to her teacher, Sofie was told that he was ADHD and sometimes forgot to take his medication.

This school has no guidance counselor, nor special education teacher. But, Sofie told me, her harasser performed well academically. His behavior evidently didn’t fit the school’s profile of a bully. Yet aware of ongoing problems, the school never informed me that my daughter was being put at risk like this.

Kicking her without provocation. Telling he she is fat (she’s about 10% under average for her age). Slapping her. Getting up during lessons to beatbox in her ear. Intimidating her off the sports field when she didn’t perform up to his standards. Threatening her that if she complained, he would tell the teachers she hit him. Physical and mental abuse.

Not any one thing would be considered harassment. But she was constantly having to deal with this malice again and again and again… and never knowing when or where it was going to come next. Three instances meets the state’s criteria for seeking relief.

In her affidavit to the court, requesting the harassment order, she laid it all out. Then restated verbally it to the judge all on her own in the middle of April. She had been out of school a week already. She talked about being anxious about returning to school after Christmas vacation. At the beginning of the school year, she was a solid A-/B+ student.

By April, she was getting C’s and D’s. She was losing sleep. She went to the doctor for stomach problems. And her weight was down. A letter from her therapist backed up the effects of the trouble she had been experiencing.

Outside, not permitted into the courtroom, were three witnesses. All three from her school. The coach who told me she couldn’t be everywhere and had multiple classes to supervise, and yet marked Sofie down for bad sportsmanship for arguing with this boy. This is the same girl who assists in teaching karate, and is now helping coach softball here in Chatham.

There was the head of the Lower School, who told first me, and then the therapist Sofie had seen about this harassment, “We see everything that goes on here. Nothing happens that we don’t see. There is no bullying at this school.” He went on to say Sofie was simply not fitting in, and suggesting that Sofie see the school’s non-resident psychologist. To address her problems. Pathologizing the victim.

And last of the three was her 5th grade teacher. At our last parent teacher conference this elderly woman could not remember what town Sofie lived in but managed to recall that she had had problems with some boy at her prior school. In response, I reminded her that the problem in 3rd grade was solved by moving Sofie to different classroom at Chatham Elementary School in 4th grade. But no amount of advocacy on my part seemed to make a difference at this school. Peace seemed to be more valued than making sure there was a positive environment within which everyone could learn.

By the time of the last incident, Sofie had long lost her confidence she could bring any problem to these three faculty members. How many times does making a kid say, “I’m sorry,” lose its meaning? They were plainly out of their depth with a boy who desperately needed help controlling his compulsive acting out.

The last straw was, sadly, after an incident that Sofie successfully managed on her own. Despite having told him three times already during the year, this boy began mocking her grandparents’ accent, concluding with the words, “And that is my Austrian accent criticism.” She deflected with a simple, “Gee… thanks.” Unsatisfied, he moved onto criticizing another boy’s schoolwork. At which point, Sofie told him to keep his nose out of other people’s business.

Somehow, these simple words caused him such distress, he ran to the boys room in tears. When their teacher came over to ask what had happened, Sofie told her. Her teacher told her, “You should have let me handle it.”

“But it was offensive,” Sofie countered.

Her teacher persisted, so strongly that Sofie had to sign out for the Girls Room. As she was leaving, a boy in the case asked what was wrong. Her teacher answered, “Oh, nothing. She’s just being a big baby.”

After Sofie told me what happened, we went to talk to the head of the school. She told her story calmly and clearly, just like she later did to the Clerk Magistrate of the Juvenile Court a week later, and then to the judge. The school told me they investigated, but the teacher denied saying anything like this. It was then I realized this school was completely in the dark as to what constitutes bullying these days. Even when she handled it effectively herself, she still couldn’t win, and was shamed for standing up for herself and her classmates.

So if the school would not protect her, she felt she had to ask the court for an order that would.

During this second hearing, Sofie stood her ground when the boy’s attorney badgered her with questions. She had already seen her three teachers enter the courthouse, and be escorted into a separate room by this attorney around the corned from us. We could hear them — the most unhostile witnesses imaginable –conferring with opposing counsel for over an hour. That they were subpoenaed is beside the point. Having failed to protect her, Sofie’s teachers had come to testify against her.

After Sofie finished stating her case, the judge said he didn’t need to have her teachers testify because he knew everything they said would be the exact opposite of what she was claiming. To put a fine point on it, the boy’s attorney said they would refute everything in her affidavit.

“I believe you.” That is what the judge said to Sofie. Even though he felt he couldn’t grant the order for lack of evidence then and there, he said he was leaving the door open should it arise. Upon her leaving the courtroom, he commended her again on her composure, saying one day she would make a fine attorney.

By that evening, Sofie was reading others’ accounts of bullying from years past at that very school. When one alumnus posted his dismay to the school’s Facebook page, the school blocked him. I was blocked. Others were blocked, too, who spoke up for Sofie.

But the very best note came a day later, in a letter from Stella Jade Wolf, a former student of that very same teacher of Sofie’s. Now an adult, Wolf recounted how a little over a decade ago at this school she was bullied from practically Day One. Having received a harassing note, Wolf brought it to this teacher – who destroyed it. The teacher would lie to the Wolf’s parents, dismissing any problems. When Wolf’s grades plummeted, this teacher suggested the girl had a learning disability.

Wolf is a now a teacher herself. She told Sofie that by speaking up about this teacher, it validated the suffering Wolf, the former 5th grader, went through. To follow up, this Wolf wrote to the head of the school to say that what she heard from Sofie was all-too-familiar to her own experience with this same teacher.

Then another alumnus wrote to the school and me, and without making judgments, offered her expertise as a guidance counselor on how the school can move forward on a more proactive anti-bullying program.

No reply has been forthcoming to date. No report on the head of school’s investigation into this incident, as required by state law, was provided to me.

The saddest part is that I had convinced Sofie that these things would never happen at this school. How could I be so sure? I graduated from this school in 1984, Student Council President and voted Most Likely To Succeed. The compassion and kindness I found there then is now missing, painfully so. I am an alumnus of Cape Cod Academy, and I am ashamed of my school.

Having lost its values, and then crudely attempting a cover-up, it is CCA in name only.

(Note: Sofie finished up 5th grade at the Laurel School in Brewster, where she was welcomed warmly, made many friends easily, and thrived academically.)

Two Cape Cod-based travel series head to RIPBS

Partaking in Antiques Roadshow and Curious George? It now comes with a side of South American adventure. And in two different flavors, thanks to a pair of Emmy-nominated series from Cape Cod.

On March 29, 2014, Rhode Island PBS begins interstitial broadcast of new episodes of two series Through My Eyes (TME) and Hit and Run History (HRH). Grassroots productions of the Cape Cod Community Media Center, both series have received numerous accolades and grants for bringing global adventure to underserved audiences.

“Through My Eyes follows two elementary schoolers, Ava and Sofie, as they explore the world,” explains TME director Jen Sexton. Specifically designed for classroom use, the series has received six Massachusetts Cultural Council Grants. “Kids, parents and teachers raved about our past episodes, and told us they wanted more.” TME’s “Skipping School” was nominated for a New England Emmy in 2013.

Offered the chance to accompany HRH to South America, the Cape Cod Travel Girls jumped at the chance. “To the City of Fair Winds,” TME’s first episode in the new series on Rhode Island PBS, introduces young viewers to Argentina’s exciting capital, Buenos Aires.

Meanwhile, the “Gumshoe Historians” of Hit and Run History have been following the story of the first American voyage ‘round the world. Less Ken Burns, and more Anthony Bourdain, HRH’s exploits have taken them all over the Northeast and across to Cape Verde. “Our style of storytelling lends itself to short-form serialization,” says HRH creator and host Andrew Buckley. “This is snackable history.”

Emmy-nominated “7,377 Miles from Home” opens HRH’s new series on Rhode Island PBS. In this episode, footage from two days of travel accompanies an interview with Samantha Addison of the Falklands Islands Radio Service, tracking from Cape Cod to New York, Chile and cross-country on East Falkland. “We lead off with a clear picture of how remote and stark this place really is,” says Buckley.

Under ten minutes in length, the episodes work well for public broadcasters to program between longer shows. As public television stations broadcast commercial-free, there is typically time between the end of a full-length show and the end of the hour.  Hit and Run History and Through My Eyes give public broadcasters the chance to fill that brief slot with high-quality programming that engages, entertains and educates viewers.

“We’re happy to share these two new series with Rhode Island PBS audiences,” said Kathryn Larsen, Director of Programming at WSBE Rhode Island PBS. “In addition to scheduling the episodes at various times on both Rhode Island PBS and Learn, we are reserving a regular time slot for each series to make it easy for audiences to find and follow them.”

Through My Eyes will air on Saturdays at 9:50 p.m. and Hit and Run History will air an hour later at 10:50 p.m., beginning March 29.

WSBE Rhode Island PBS transmits standard-definition (SD) and high-definition (HD) programming over the air on digital 36.1; on Rhode Island cable services: Cox 08 / 1008HD, Verizon FiOS 08 / 508HD, Full Channel 08; on Massachusetts cable services: Comcast 819HD, Verizon 18 / 518HD; on satellite: DirecTV 36 / 3128HD, Dish Network 36.

WSBE Learn transmits over the air on digital 36.2; on cable: Cox 808, Verizon 478, Full Channel 89, Comcast 294 or 312.

Dear Governor Patrick:

I have recently learned of your intent to declare Oct. 1, 2012 as “John Kendrick Day” in the Commonwealth. The draft of the proclamation I have seen, written by Scott Ridley, cites Captain Kendrick’s career as a Revolutionary War privateer, and, more importantly, his role as commander of the Columbia Expedition – the first American voyage ‘round the world.

Having spent the last 17 years on the track of Kendrick and the Columbia, in libraries from Barnstable and Salem to Vancouver, London, Hong Kong and Manila, writing one novel and countless news articles, and producing an ongoing series for WGBH for which we received over a dozen grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, this is a topic in which I hold, clearly, a great deal of interest.

As a native Cape Codder who claims John Kendrick as a kinsman, who grew up on and fished the same waters of Pleasant Bay and the elbow of Cape Cod, and like him has gathered a crew from all over New England to travel to Cape Verde, the Falklands, Cape Horn, Argentina and Chile en route to the Pacific Northwest, Hawaii, China and Japan, it is with great sincerity and in all seriousness that I ask you to reconsider.

Please do not proclaim Oct. 1, 2012 as “John Kendrick Day” in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

This is not a request I make lightly, and I am sure other historians expert in the topic and humanities professionals would concur with my reasoning.
I do not argue that this is a date unworthy of commemoration. Two hundred and twenty-five years ago, the ship Columbia Rediviva and its smaller consort, the sloop Lady Washington, were preparing to depart for parts unknown, in a desperate gamble to pull the local economy out of post-Revolutionary War Recession. An ad hoc syndicate composed of former war profiteers, privateers and slavers were brought together in the house of architect Charles Bulfinch (who designed the very building in which you are reading this letter), fresh from the Paris salon of Ambassador Thomas Jefferson.

The goal of this private enterprise was no less than to replace the old trade routes inside the British mercantile system from before independence with global trade with China and Pacific, making the very most of the open markets that lay before the new United States. Yankee ingenuity at its best.

And John Kendrick, born and raised on the Harwich-Orleans line, who had married in Edgartown and raised a family in Wareham, a successful privateer and whaler, was chosen to command.

What he did with that command,the legend that surrounds it, and the fact that he never returned home have been a matter of controversy. But controversies among academics alone are certainly not enough to deny a man acknowledgment.

Rather, there is a chapter to this story that is very dark. Upon two visits to what we know as Queen Charlotte Islands, off the west coast of Canada, Captain Kendrick came into conflict with the people who refer to their archipelago as Haida Gwaii.

His first visit ended in undisputed humiliation of two chiefs, the second in the deaths of scores of Haida. This, in turn, resulted in the deadly capture years later of the schooner Resolution by the Haida, with only one survivor.
Having grown up next to the last village of the Nauset tribe, and maintaining exceedingly cordial relations with the First Peoples at Nootka Sound and Clayoquot Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island, John Kendrick’s conduct at Haida Gwaii seems oddly out of step. Why it happened remains in dispute. The result is not.

To the people of Haida Gwaii, this is a very painful episode in their history, with repercussions through the generations. Kendrick’s visits coincide with the breakdown in their traditional society. Christie Harris’ painstaking research with the Haida and their oral histories resulted in Raven’s Cry, first published in 1966. John Kendrick casts a dark shadow in the memory of the Haida. The wound is still fresh.

It is clear Mr. Ridley is very enthusiastic about his book on Captain Kendrick, and wants to spread the word far and wide, seeing this 225th anniversary as a good opportunity to do so. However, in his recent headlong hero-worship, Ridley has greatly glossed over the incidents with the Haida.

But there is another man whose opinion and expertise I ask you to consider. Robert Kennedy has served for years aboard Washington state’s official tall ship, the replica of the Lady Washington, and is a member of the Haida Nation. In response to your intended proclamation, Bob observed: “The inability of ‘history’to incorporate the impact on the Native Peoples of the Americas is, to those Native Peoples, criminal, but not unexpected.”

In approaching the story of the Columbia Expedition, I have felt there was no actor in it wearing a completely white hat. I have always been clear as to my background, my personal connection to Captain Kendrick, and my affinity for his talents as a navigator, diplomat, trader and storyteller. I still see him in the faces of the fishing fleet and the flats of Chatham every day.

But when we raise John Kendrick far above us on a pedestal, we remove him from humanity. He becomes unapproachable, inaccessible.

We diminish those who worked with him, supported him. Worse, we ignore those who still bear wounds he inflicted. I am sure you would agree there is never a better time than now for a lot more understanding and a lot less bluster. Let us move with less haste as we carve him into white marble.

For more practical terms, my own concern is that anyone, myself, my daughter and my crew included, from Massachusetts heading out to Haida Gwaii from here forward will be received in the context of your proclamation. Is this how we want Bay Staters to be known to a coastal people with a long and rich cultural tradition on the Pacific Rim? Long after you leave office, the memory of your proclamation will remain in the minds of the Haida.

However, the alternative is not to simply ignore this anniversary on Oct. 1, 2012 and the very real – and leading – role that John Kendrick played. So instead, I call upon you to instead be more inclusive and proclaim it “Columbia Day.”

Include in that the roles of all members of the Columbia Expedition. First Officer Joseph Ingraham, who served in the Massachusetts Navy and ended up as a prisoner of war on the prison ship Jersey. Robert Gray, the captain of the Washington, whose past is still in dispute. Include all the backers of the voyages: chief investor Joseph Barrell, privateer John Derby, blackbirder Crowell Hatch and refugee Samuel Brown, as well as Charles Bulfinch. You would honor Robert Haswell, the loyalist who returned to the United States to service as a junior officer and wrote the log of Columbia. The shipbuilders of Scituate, Marshfield and Essex. And the dozens of other men of Massachusetts, and their families who remained at home, and served as the foundation of our Republic.

Additionally, you would honor the people around the world who had never seen an American before. Who helped the men of Columbia on their way, curious about this new democracy and its people, and who helped her return home three years later.You would honor young Marcus Lopes, who joined at Cape Verde and certainly had no idea the hardships he would face rounding Cape Horn in the tiny sloop Washington. You would certainly spark greater interest in the whole topic of the Columbia Expedition (and not just one man), as that story still lies in shards about the globe.

In the service of history and of humanity, I humbly ask you to take a broad view of the event that commenced on that morning on the first of October 1787 off Pemberton Point in Hull. There is much good to be done by your words, and I ask you to make the very most of this anniversary.

Sincerely,

Andrew Giles Buckley

Chatham, Mass.

Cape Cod’s Gumshoe Historians profile John Kendrick of the Columbia Expedition

O Captain! My Captain! The man picked to command the Columbia Expedition had a lifetime of experience. Militiaman. Whaler. Privateer. Gumshoe Historians Andrew Buckley and Matt Griffin track John Kendrick from the South Orleans/East Harwich shores of Pleasant Bay to Edgartown Harbor, then over to the house on Wareham Narrows bought with booty from the Revolution.

Locations: Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard & South Coast of Massachusetts.

Interviews: Alan McClennen, Nancy Cole, Thornton Gibbs, Benjamin Dunham

Boston rocker Shea Rose again introduces this episode, the second in this series from Hit and Run History. Creator and host Andrew Buckley and Assistant director Matthew Griffin start off in very familiar territory – just a couple towns over from their native Chatham. Sharing lineage with Columbia’s commander, the two start with an interview with Alan McClennen, Jr. of Friends of Pleasant Bay. The big question is what lessons would Kendrick have learned at an early age here, in this remote corner of New England, that would make him the man chosen to lead the first American voyage ’round the world?

Watch “The Commander” here or subscribe to the Hit and Run History video podcast on iTunes.

With the 300th anniversary of the establishment of the town of Chatham, it only seems appropriate that we take a moment to talk about an issue of dire consequence. This is a problem that has bedeviled this town for some time now, and in the past few weeks it came into public consciousness. It puts in peril that most sacred of institutions, namely, the Cocktail Hour.

I speak, of course, of skydiving.

Now, as a native whose roots go back in the area to a leaky boat from Plymouth, England (if not before, should DNA testing show a little extra familiarity with the original locals), I know as well as anyone how important the Cocktail Hour is to Chatham.

Why, I can’t go just about anywhere on Cape Cod or up to Boston without someone inquiring, upon learning I am from Chatham, about this time-honored custom.

This should surprise no one. We might be waiting in line somewhere and when it is our turn, we will be asked, “What’s your hurry?

Need to get back down to Chatham fast? Late for Cocktail Hour?”

It really is amazing how so many people not from Chatham can be so sensitive to what our priorities are.

Some have even added on “at the country club?” Well, how kind! They must have a pretty high opinion of me. That’s almost embarrassing. Pretty over the top, and perhaps worthy of its own column, but not here.

Now that tradition to which I speak must be hearkening back to my ancestor, Stephen Hopkins, who brought his family with him across on the Mayflower. He was one of the “Strangers,” as the non-religious passengers were referred to, compared to the “Saints” or Separatists who were wishing to leave England to worship as they chose. Hopkins did rather well for himself in Plymouth, and tried to move down to the Cape like his son, Giles (from whom I get my middle name).

But the authorities at Plymouth kept ordering him to move back. The place was depopulating, and for good reason: Hopkins kept brewing beer and getting shut down for it. That’s right, court records show fines levied on Hopkins for making and serving liquor. That was not to be tolerated, so of course Hopkins wanted to get down here. I mean, how are you ever going to establish a tradition of a Cocktail Hour if the guy bringing the booze can’t make it?

No wonder it took until almost another century for Chatham to be founded. Is it any coincidence that, rumor has it, just a year before America saw the publication of the very first Mr. Boston’s Official Bartender’s Guide? That’s what we in the historical biz call “a supposition.” Sounds important.

But just like so much of Chatham’s 300th anniversary, let’s not get bogged down by historical facts or ancient records or how people behaved or what they were called, where their businesses were located and whether or not any one of the people who built and lived in the houses we love so much would be allowed to use their property as they saw fit if they were alive today.

For one, they’d be too poor to buy anything to drink. And besides the Methodists wouldn’t drink at all. But can we please ignore that great big church right in the center of town with the clock tower and focus on the real issue? Can we just think about the skydivers? I mean, how can we not? Always with their flying around, having fun, hooting and hollering, ready to fall RIGHT ON YOUR COCKTAIL PARTY. Oh, yes. We all have them. I myself have four or five per day, and living in the flight path of Chatham Airport, I can tell you that I live in fear of some person having the time of their life just landing right in the middle of all of that.

You see, there’s nothing Chatham hates more than someone else having fun. We didn’t “find our way here” for that. Even if we were born here. It is not appropriate for Chatham, as some people who I never heard of have said, for people hundreds and thousands of feet away to express happiness at flying.

When I think of cocktail parties, I know I think of the quietest, best-behaved people. Like a church. Having lived in many places in Chatham, I can’t tell you how many times I have had to go next door and apologize for racket of flipping the pages in my book disrupting the sanctity and quiet of a neighbor’s cocktail party. If Chatham can’t be a place where fuddy-duddies can get sloshed in peace without being disrupted by the distant howls of happiness from on high, then I don’t know what is appropriate for this town anymore.

Clearly one of these two has to go, and I think we all know which one.

It’s not like these are waterskiers, after all.

Read this and Andy’s other columns online at The Cape Cod Chronicle.