Deja Vuing the Cape

Spotting the Campground from the Bourne Bridge

I returned home yesterday from the Cape Cod conference where I had had a really weird session of Déjà vu which turned out to be childhood memories resurfacing.  I woke up yesterday really regretting my failure to bring Alka Seltzer (my failsafe hangover prevention measure) with me after my networking activities of the prior day.  I decided the best way to re-attach the back of my head was to go out for an early morning jog (calling it a run would be wildly inaccurate).  As I labored down the early morning Cape Cod streets I was struck by a feeling that I had been here before but I could not recall when and definitely knew it wasn’t in the recent past.  I thought it might be the hotel itself which reminded me a lot of the Waytansea Hotel from my recently completed Chuck Palahniuk book, Diary.  A faded hotel set in a bunch of rich peoples’ homes and this definitely had me checking for the nearest exits at times and avoiding all art work, but I digress.  I finally rounded a corner and saw a place, just a small Mom and Pop type restaurant that I know I had been to before.  I was wracking my brain – definitely not what I was planning to do on this hangover recovery run when it clicked in.  The first summer after my parents’ divorce we went on a vacation with the family of one of my mother’s friends to Cape Cod and had stayed in this very area for at least a night.  I actually stopped running and looked around and now that I had a connection small snippets of memories came oozing back to the surface.  I remember there was a theater in nearby Falmouth where William Shatner was appearing in some summer stock and being totally impressed that I was this close to Captain Kirk.  I remembered being amazed that the ocean water was warm enough to swim in comfortably, compared to York Beach, Maine.  Most of all I remember realizing for the first time my dad would no longer be a part of these family vacations and feeling a real sense of loss.  As I was driving home yesterday I passed over the Cape Cod Canal on the Bourne Bridge and glanced over the side to see if the camp ground I remembered from that long ago trip was still there – it was.  I remembered looking up from that campground as a young boy and being amazed at this huge bridge.  In the almost fifty years since I had been there the bridge was much less impressive but it was still a nice trip down memory lane if nothing else.  (Note to self:  Remember Alka Seltzer for all future trips)


View from the Campground that So Impressed a Younger Version