Once Upon Cape Cod; From Cockle Cove to the Powder Hole
A group of essays describing Dana Eldridge's early years on Cape Cod in the 30’s – so very different from today’s Cape. Written with humor and warmth, this is a must read for anyone with a love of all things Cape.
“Dana Eldridge writes with an infectious sense of humor and an unembarrassed love of the past. This is a book of essays where time stands still, the way it should. His boyhood adventures remind you of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. He had loving, laconic parents, and perfect grandparents. The whole watery world of Cape Cod was full of freedom and adventure for a boy. Here is the classic theme of local, small town life before we began to run away from it. It was an ideal many still look for, but seldom find. Yet these essays in Dana’s parochial style gently pull us back. Cape Cod has not deserted its own proportions, in a run of fish, a clam flat, and the endlessly changing shores. We have only to stop, and go out looking for them.”
John Hay, Author of several books on nature, including The Run and A Beginner’s Faith In Things Unseen.
“This is a love story. Perhaps several love stories. It covers a large part of the life of a man born and brought up in the lap of luxury. His parents had little money. But they all had Chatham. And having Chatham, they had Cape Cod, the Atlantic, the beaches, the ponds, the piney woods, and all the wealth of good things that were there. Dana Eldridge, who gives us this glimpse into his love life is more than a good writer. He is, to our lasting benefit, a story teller. The luxury to which he was born was a cornucopia that debouched all the oysters one could eat, all the little necks one could want, all the snapper blues one could consume, and all the salty out-of-doors one could inhale. His childhood in Chatham and on Chatham’s Monomoy Island was the place that formed his character; and Dana knows it. And so he reaches into his memory and brings forth, as immediate as the weather today, what life and living was like where everything a boy or young man could dream of was all around him, waiting to be consumed. A writer would have polished the material. Dana simply tells it, and it lives.”
John A. Ullman, Past editor of the Cape Codder Newspaper