Cape Cod History

1938: Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson at Gull Pond. 1991: Stranded Whales Freed. 1997: Spec Houses Back in Season

1991: Stranded Whales Freed

Rescuers working to free 18 stranded pilot whales that ran aground yesterday on Fisher Beach in Truro. All 18 were successfully herded into deep water at high ide and all apparently survived.

1997: Spec Houses Back in Season

In 1989, Carol Konner was burned -- and burned badly. ''I lost $8 million and went broke,'' said Ms. Konner, a tough-talking 60-year-old developer who was a major player in the Hamptons building boom of the late 80's -- and who finally has started to build again.
   Last year at this time, Ms. Konner was either planning or building four houses. This year, she is actively working on 26...
   But with all kinds of residential construction booming in hot spots like Long Island's East End, speculative building of vacation homes has returned to the Hamptons and to a lesser extent in Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard and Cape Cod... NY Times.

1938: McCartthy & Wilson in Wellfleet

Two of America's most famous literary figures of the 20th century made Wellfleet and Gull Pond fairly famous. Here's an excerpt from the current edition of the New York Review of Books on the couple and their life at Gull Pond.

At Gull Pond

When Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson, who married in 1938, were getting on well, they found each other mutually stimulating and, in the company of friends, they excelled at repartee, not argument. Although McCarthy had little good to say, either in interviews or in her own memoirs, about Wilson as a husband, she clearly benefited as a writer of fiction from his sustained encouragement and support. It seems that the couple agreed for the most part on political and literary matters, but were often at odds over things mundane. Wilson, by his own admission, tended to misbehave at precisely those times when they were getting along well.

Considering their marital difficulties, it is not surprising that Wilson made fewer entries in his journal during the years the marriage lasted. The passages dealing with Cape Cod nature are, however, of great interest to us...

Gull Pond May 21, 1942- The ladyslippers were out, sprinkled so sparsely around the brink of their solitary flowers-deepening in a couple of days from flimsy stooping ghosts as pale as Indian-pipe to a fleshy veined purplish pink swollen between pigtails and curling top-knot that also suggested Indians; and along the white sand of one side, where the bowl of the pond shelved so gradually, the little white violets with their lower lips finely lined as if with beards in purplish indelible ink, their long slim rhubarb-purplish stalks and their faint slightly acrid pansy smell, grew with thready roots in the damp sand; they were yellowish like ivory here, but on the opposite more marshy bank (with its round stones, its patches of red irony water, its shooting-box with a flock of square black and white decoys, its steeper banks, its dead gulls and fishes) their effect was not quite so dry and they showed a vivid white like trillium where they bloomed against the deeper and the more luxuriant green.

As one walked in the water one encountered pines putting out their soft straw-colored bunches of cones and smelling with a special almost sweet-fern fragrance. The baby cones seemed almost embarrassingly soft, almost like a woman's nipples.-When we got to the shallow channel between Gull Pond and the next one, I found a mother herring trying to get through from the latter by gliding and flapping on her side. She was silvery with purple-silver along the upper part of her length. At the mouth of the channel there were several of them splashing and when I came close I saw that the water was all dark with a whole crowd of them-from above they are just roundish muddy streaks under water. The sand here, flat and more marshy and grown with gre en rushes, was all tracked with the trefoil (?) of gulls' feet, where they had come to get the fish... NY Review of Books.