30-Nov-99
While I'm thinking about it, I wanted to tell you more about Rockport. It's out at the end of Cape Ann, the big blob on the map on the northeast side of Massachusetts Bay. Cape Cod is on the south side of the bay. Cape Cod is basically a great big sandbar. In the last ice age the glacier stopped about where Cape Cod is. It dropped all the sand and gravel it had scraped off the land to the north right there at the end as the ice melted (a terminal moraine, for you vocabulary buffs). That's Cape Cod. Cape Ann is mostly solid granite. Halibut Point State Park has an abandoned granite quarry. Exhibits in the visitor center explain how you split a block of granite where you want and how Rockport granite was shipped all over the world.
The quarry, which used to be the town's main industry, stopped operations around 1930. Nowadays the biggest industry is tourism. There are some bookstores and clothing stores, but a lot of the businesses are little gift shops. Rockport has some of the smallest stores in captivity. Rent must be astronomical. One card shop we went into was about the size of a large walk-in closet plus two standard closets. It had six customers and you could barely turn around in it.
A lot of the most interesting stores are out on Bearskin Neck, a piece of land that juts out into the harbor. There are galleries, T-shirt places, a rubber stamp store (Stamp Port), Helmut's Strudel, and lots more. This time of year it's possible to drive into Rockport and park within walking distance. In the summer you have to park in an outlying lot and wait for a shuttle.
I'm sorry, I'm cutting out about now. I can see this entry getting less and less organized as I go along. It's too bad, because there was a really nice cafe, one size larger than that card shop, where we got coffee, tea, a huge brownie, and a big slice of cranberry bundt cake and managed to squeeze onto stools at the counter, with the cooperation of the German tourists jammed behind us at one of the three tables in the place. The back room of the cafe had a Hawaiian gift shop, and the proprietress, who spends the winter (after the Christmas season business is over) in Hawaii and the summer in Rockport, was happy to tell me all about the Hawaiian language. Bonsoir, or aloha, or something.
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