Salt in the Veins

By Mary E. McDermott

Journey to the past and immerse yourself in charming tales of Cape Cod yesterdays with this enchanting collection by the beloved author of Old Orleans, Memories of a Cape Cod Town. In Salt in the Veins, Mary E. McDermott invites you on a nostalgic trip through her memories of the rich moments and sometimes amusing, always fascinating stories that have shaped her life and this enchanted seaside region.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sea Crow Press
• Release date: Oct 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9781961864030

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

From the time I was a small child, I recognized that Orleans was a special place. My mother was proud of her native status and instilled the same sense of pride in me.

We didn’t have amusement parks, but we had the beaches, the woods, and Rock Harbor, where we could watch the charter boats come in with their catch. I remember Captain Fred Harris, who had lost an arm, bringing his Kitty W in as smoothly with one arm as any captain with two.

We didn’t have big department stores with elevators like the stores in New Bedford or Boston, but we had Watson’s and the Sport Shop, where the clerks knew our names.

We didn’t have a big airport, but for a real treat, you couldn’t beat taking a scenic flight in a World War II biplane out of Skymeadow Airfield in Orleans, now a neighborhood of residences.

I’ve seen many changes in town over the years, some good and some, well, not so much. In this book I have tried to recall some of the highlights of my life as an Orleans native. I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed living it.

1

FAMILY

In the old days, Cape families were quite conventional with father (often a fisherman or farmer) as breadwinner and mother taking care of the house and children. She often made the kids’ clothes as well as cooking for the family. With money hard-earned and far from abundant, she knew how to stretch a dollar. A favorite dish in my mother’s family was macaroni and tomato soup, which was just what it sounds like: Campbell’s tomato soup with the addition of cooked elbow macaroni. Fish was often on the menu because it was easy to catch and cheap to buy: a far cry from today’s prices!

With the Cape’s relatively small population, young people were likely to marry someone they had known since childhood. There were jokes about inbreeding, which I laughed at until I found out that my great-great-great-grandparents were first cousins!

The arrival of summer residents increased the pool of potential mates. Local baker Clarence Knowles used to say, If it weren’t for the summer people, we’d all be foolish.

Families all have their own dramas: secrets, romances, traditions, inside jokes, and at least one member who is, like a candy bar, sweet and half nuts. My mother used to tell of a relative who was engaged to three young women at the same time; he could not have afforded three rings, so the engagements must have been verbal. Once on his way to Wellfleet to visit one of them, his car was shot at. Perhaps she had a brother who suspected his duplicity, or a jealous suitor. The next time he went, he asked his mother to accompany him, on the theory that the gunman would not shoot at a woman. Incredibly, his mother went! (He did not marry any of the three, choosing another wife.)

Another family member was married three times, twice to the same woman. Between marriages, he would advertise in the Boston papers for a housekeeper. My mother said a prospect would arrive on the morning train and leave on the afternoon train. Was it the state of his house or the nature of his expectations that caused the hasty departure? No one knew.

Our family had its share of tragedies. When I visit our plot in the Orleans cemetery, I often pause at a marker inscribed simply, Myrtice. In March 1913, my great-uncle Ernie Chase married Myrtice Crowell; her father came from Harwich and her mother from Nova Scotia. In December of the same year, Myrtice was apparently in severe pain from a difficult pregnancy. She was given ether, but her lungs could not tolerate it and she died of respiratory failure. The baby died with her, in utero, and they were buried that way.

Ernie remarried and became the father of a son, who died in infancy. The marriage collapsed under the strain of the loss, and Ernie never married again, devoting his life to working and drinking, the latter of which probably contributed to his death in his sixties.

My maternal grandmother, Nellie, was feisty, and she needed to be. Born in Dennisport, she was one of four siblings, although one sister died as a small child. Her mother, Sarah Snow Ramsey, was pregnant for a fifth time when she fell down the cellar stairs and died from the resulting miscarriage.

Nellie’s father, Daniel, was a mariner and made his living at sea, so he could not be at home to take care of the family. The two eldest children were teenagers and were sent to live with Ramsey relatives in New York State. Nellie, who was 7, was placed with a Snow aunt and uncle. She used to say that she had felt like an unpaid servant rather than a beloved child. Eventually, she moved in with a kind older couple in Brewster called Grandma and Grandpa Briggs, earned her keep doing housework, and was content. She became engaged to a young man from a wealthy family, but he thought a ring conferred certain physical privileges. Nellie soon disabused him of that notion, returning his ring (no doubt with a few well-chosen words!). She later met Wilbur Chase from Orleans, a gentleman and gentle man who treated her with respect. They were married in December of 1896 in the building that is now