The Cape: Still beauty amongst the McMansions

Sesuit Creek, in East Dennis

 From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

David Gessner’s 1997 book, A Wild, Rank Place, is a series of essays about, among other things, how Cape Cod has become exurbanized, such as with grotesque show-off McMansions replacing the low-to-ground, modest gray-shingled houses so identified with the Cape. And yet he can still savor  its remaining windy and haunting beauty. It’s a subject that particularly appealed to me because part of my family were/are old Cape Codders; I’ve seen  even more change than he has.

Mr. Gessner (born in 1961) lived off and on for years in a family summer house in East Dennis  (sold a few years ago). It was the heart of his family.

The  title is a phrase by Henry David Thoreau  based on several trips he took to the Cape in the early 1850s that resulted in the book of essays called Cape Cod.  But as Mr. Gessner’s book notes, Thoreau’s deforested Cape looked a lot different than it did in the 1600s, when the English arrived, and  of course much different than the current version, where woods have grown back even as the number of houses and convenience stores explodes and car traffic worsens virtually every year.=

There is vivid and idiosyncratic nature and environmental writing here,  mixed with an intense family memoir whose heart is  Mr. Gessner’s effort to come to terms with the transitory nature of life, and especially mortality, and entropy, with his father’s fatal illness at the center of all that. There are also some charming pen-and-ink drawings by Mr. Gessner, who is a cancer survivor.