This post is sponsored by Tide and Downy, who made it possible for me and my sons and a group of our friends to create a great Father’s Day weekend memory. All opinions are the author’s.
Brooker Creek Preserve, Pinellas County, Florida.
Nature conspired against us Saturday morning – scattered rain showers, suffocating humidity, searing UV rays, buzzing mosquitos and deer flies. Really, you’d think we could take the hint. Nature just wanted to be left alone.
Sorry, Nature. We couldn’t stay away. A little sunscreen, a little insect repellent: science, victorious! Temporarily, of course. Nature always wins. Always. That’s why we’re drawn to it. Everybody loves a winner.
Brooker Creek Preserve is an 8,000-acre expanse of wilderness left intact among the suburban sprawl of northern Pinellas County on Central Florida’s West Coast. It is a cross section of everything beautiful about wild Florida: freshwater marshes, cypress domes, pine flatwoods and sandhills. It is home to white-tailed deer, wild turkey, eastern diamondback rattlers, river otters and hundreds of other species of plants, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and invertebrates.
The pine flatwoods at Brooker Creek Preserve.
It was all there to savor, Nature raw and spoiled only by good intentions. And savor it we did.
Part of my compensation as a Dad’s Way ambassador for Tide and Downy was the opportunity to hold an event for Tampa Bay area dads and their kids, an event that would celebrate the unique way we dads do what we do. After consulting my sons and my own boyhood memories for ideas, I invited a group of my dad friends and their kids for a hot, humid, buggy, sandy, muddy and unbelievably rad guided hike and a picnic at Brooker Creek Preserve.
As you might imagine, it gets a bit steamy in the Florida wilderness in June. It’s Nature’s sauna. Sweat happens. And on a hike with kids through swamps and along sandy trails, dirt happens. It’s all good, though. Dad’s way means you make a mess, you clean it up. Messes certainly were made, and so were memories. Here’s a video of our adventure, and what had to be done afterward to get ready for the next one:
Father’s Day Memories at Brooker Creek Preserve
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Everyone has a story about how his or her dad is truly unique. If you would like to help Tide and Downy celebrate dad’s way this month, tell that story about dad on Twitter using the hashtag #DadsWay. Was there a time when your dad was strong, like Tide on stains? Or gentle, like Downy? What were your dad’s “Tide” moments and/or “Downy” moments? What Father’s Day memories are you making this weekend?
For every tweet sent using #DadsWay until June 23, Tide and Downy will donate $1 to the National Fatherhood Initiative. The celebration continues Thursday at 8 p.m. EDT with a Dad’s Way Twitter party (check back here or keep an eye on @DadScribe for details).
This post is sponsored by Procter & Gamble. The author is responsible for all opinions, fading memories and overly sentimental reminiscences.
Where the Neuse River brushes against our family’s ancestral land. There’s a lot of mud back in there.
The Neuse River rises from the North Carolina piedmont north of Raleigh and winds its muddy way to the Atlantic Ocean, emptying into the Pamlico Sound at New Bern. The Neuse is the longest river fully contained within the borders of my home state. It is an especially crooked river, as if it took its own, sweet time carving a path to the sea, meandering where it would across the millennia, taking in the sights along the way.
With a C-shaped turn of the river between the small Eastern North Carolina towns of Grifton and Kinston, the Neuse brushes against a particularly lush and green 100-acre plot of land. Upon this land once wintered members of the Tuscarora tribe, which dominated the region until the early 1700s brought European settlers and their diseases. Somewhere nearby, maybe even right in the woods that run down to the river’s edge, Union and Confederate forces skirmished for control of this strategically vital waterway throughout most of the Civil War.
And in 1918, my great-grandfather, George Tebo McArthur, bought those 100 acres and the antebellum house on them and began to scratch a living out of the rich, loamy North Carolina soil. My dad, Tebo’s Dayton-raised grandson, spent his summers on the farm, his mother’s childhood home, in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. That kid from Ohio learned to put in tobacco, prepping the smooth, golden, gummy leaves for hanging and toasting in the cavernous barns that used to dominate the Southern landscape. He traipsed through the woods with his younger brother in tow, pretending to lead Lee’s cavalry at Fredericksburg, marching under the cypress trees, dodging hidden cypress knees and deadly water moccasins. He learned to call those mean, nasty snakes cottonmouths, which is all they’d ever been to the people of Eastern North Carolina. His people. His place.
My people. My place.
In 1976, when I was 7, we moved from Raleigh to the farm where my father used to spend his formative summers. Those tilled fields and dense woods became my playground. I traipsed through the woods with my younger brother in tow, pretending to lead Lee’s cavalry at Antietam, marching under those same cypress trees and keeping a very close eye out for the descendants of the cottonmouths that terrorized my father 20 years earlier.
There are definitely water moccasins in there. I can’t believe I used to PLAY in those woods.
When we visit the farm these days, the highlight is always our family walk back into the woods. We grab some walking sticks off the back porch, wander down past the old potato barn, and cross the railroad track into the world of soil and undergrowth and fresh deer tracks. My 7- and 4-year-old sons thrill to the novelty of a hike into the “wild.” To these two children of the Florida suburbs, the open fields and dense forests of my childhood are other-worldly. Around every bend is a bear. The rustling leaves all are cougars. Every stick on the ground is a cottonmouth. (OK, that could be real. Ugh. Cottonmouths still give me the shivers.)
The boys come back from those hikes tired, but excited. Just as I was when I came back inside after my long, carefree adventures on the farm, the woods and at the river when I was a kid. Just as my dad did before me. And yes, we were all usually a bit dirtier than my boys are today when they come home from our community pool in Florida.
Which gave me an idea.
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The boys have their sticks and are off on an adventure. That could be me and my brother. Or my dad and his brother.
As you saw above, this post is sponsored by Procter & Gamble, parent company of Tide and Downy. As Father’s Day approaches, I have the privilege of working with Tide and Downy to bring attention to “Dad’s Way” of parenting.
I can only speak for one dad’s way of parenting – mine. So, when given the chance to plan an event for dads and their kids to have a fun time together with little or no regard for staying neat and clean, I started thinking about what we do as a family that falls into that category.
This is Florida, so I thought about the beach. Then I thought about a fishing pier, or a charter vessel on the Gulf of Mexico out of John’s Pass. Maybe we could get a bunch of us together and take an air boat ride through the Everglades, or go kayaking on the Weeki Wachee River.
Then it hit me. Not far from our home in the Tampa suburbs is a hidden gem of a public space, Brooker Creek Preserve. They have guided nature walks on Saturday mornings, and there is ample space for a picnic. I would invite a bunch of dads and their kids to get together the day before Father’s Day and just have a great time.
Which is exactly what we’re going to do, and I couldn’t be more excited. The boys are fired up, too. It’s not Disney World, but that’s the point. We are going to have fun, we are going to get dirty walking in the woods and playing and eating picnic food, and we are going to have an absolute blast with our friends. We can’t take them all to the farm in North Carolina, but this will do. This will definitely do.
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As a bit of an epilogue, I want to share one of my favorite new dad-focused commercials. It happens to be for Tide and Downy and – hey, this is a nice happenstance – our family has used Tide for years. You might have seen this one: the Princess Dress. It’s nice to see a major brand portray a father as competent instead of as a buffoon when it comes to parenting and household responsibilities.
If you enjoy the video, let the world know by tweeting about it with the hashtag #DadsWay. Me and some of my favorite dad writers around the country will be checking in on that hashtag quite a bit over the next couple of weeks, too. And as we get closer to our event at Brooker Creek, I’ll be writing more about the things that shaped me as a father – why I am who I am as a dad, and what that means for my wonderful sons.
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During the month of June, Tide and Downy are celebrating the unique way each dad approaches his role as a parent — Dad’s Way. Because they know that everyone has a story about what makes his or her dad unique, they’re encouraging the sharing of those stories on Twitter with the hashtag, #DadsWay. Every time someone uses that hashtag, Tide and Downy will donate $1 to the National Fatherhood Intitiative.
Kenny Loggins performs Saturday at Tropicana Field, kicking off the Rays’ Summer Concert Series. Photo/Tampa Bay Rays.
When most people hear Kenny Loggins sing the song, “I’m All Right,” they no doubt think of the movie Caddyshack. Maybe they associate the tune with a dancing gopher. That song has an additional association for anyone who spent much time around Tropicana Field in the mid-2000s.
Long-time Rays fans will no doubt recall that one of the staple entertainment devices on the big video board was a toy gopher gyrating to the song, “I’m All Right.” I was never entirely clear on the purpose of the dancing gopher at a major-league game, but people seemed to enjoy it and now I can’t think of a dancing gopher, or Kenny Loggins, without thinking about the Tampa Bay Rays.
I’m all right. Nobody’s worried ’bout me.
So, it is entirely appropriate that the Rays invited me and a guest (in this case, my wife) to attend tomorrow’s Rays-Padres game, after which the Summer Concert Series kicks off with an appearance by Kenny Loggins. We’ll be there on the field, and even though I don’t dance — ever, not even at weddings — I’m pretty sure I’ll be tapping my foot and bobbing my head to all of Loggins’ movie standards.
This guy is, of course, Mr. 1980s Movie Anthem. Danger Zone. I’m All Right. Footloose. Can’t wait.
You know what’s interesting about this for us? My wife and I have never been to a concert together. The Trop has always had a special meaning for us, but now we’ll add another memory there. Should be pretty rad.
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As part of their blogger outreach program, the Tampa Bay Rays invited me and a guest to attend Saturday’s Rays-Padres game. I was compensated with two tickets and VIP field passes for the concert. Opinions are my own.
I sort of ripped the Mid-Cape Highway in an earlier post. Actually, I don’t apologize for that. Now that I’ve been up and down it a few more times the past couple of days, I can see my memory did that road exactly as much justice as it deserved.
On the other hand, I did mention that the trees hid something magical. And, again, now that I’ve had the chance to explore the back roads again, I think I got that one right, too. In fact, I want to put together a book called something like Twenty-Minute Drives on Cape Cod. It wouldn’t sell (because who actually buys those kinds of books?), but it would be something I’d love to find on a bookshelf in one of the many, many rental cottages along Cape Cod Bay and the National Seashore.
A Cape Cod salt marsh from Bridge Road.
The first drive I’d write about is the stretch that runs from the intersection of Kingsbury Beach Road and Herringbrook, down to Bridge Road, over to Rock Harbor Road, and into Orleans Center (Main Street).
This 20-minute drive has almost everything I think about when I think of Cape Cod imagery. There are the Cape Cod style homes and cottages, the kettle ponds, the salt marshes, the old fishing docks, the old bed and breakfasts, the exclusive inns, the flowers, and a quaint downtown shopping/dining/arts center at the end of it. I try to make this drive five or six times a trip, because it just feels like Cape Cod to me and I want to remember it.
If I kept going on Main Street in Orleans, I’d run into Highway 28, which is also known as Orleans-Chatham Road. Turn right at the Nauset Middle School, and there’s EVERYTHING ELSE I think of when I think of Cape Cod.There on the right is the baseball field where the Cape Cod League Orleans Firebirds play every summer. On past that are some truly breathtaking Cape Cod style mansions, tucked into the bluffs and woods overlooking Crystal Lake, a handful of ponds, and Pleasant Bay. After a while, it becomes just plain Orleans Road, and you know that Chatham is just around the corner.
Nowadays, Chatham seems to be the Great White Shark capital of the U.S. There have been more than a few sightings lately because of the enormous seal population. So, at a certain intersection, rather than heading for busy, quaint (but touristy) Chatham Center, I headed straight for the Chatham Light.
No one is swimming in Chatham. The mayor can’t be happy.
What I found was reminscent of the scene from Jaws, when the beach at Amity Island was full on the Fourth of July but no one would go in the water. There were a few people on the beach near the Chatham Light, but I only saw one guy swimming for the half-hour I stuck around.
Still, across the street from the beach access stairs was the Chatham Light itself. I do love a good lighthouse, mostly because a lot of them have such interesting histories.
Chatham Light.
Come to think of it, maybe I’m on to something with this Twenty Minute Drive thing. I could start with Cape Cod, and move on to the next state. Maybe Twenty Minute Drives of California, followed by Twenty Minute Drives of Las Vegas, Arizona, Florida, etc. I smell a franchise.
(Hey. Hey, you. Don’t steal my idea, OK? This one’s all mine. Go get your own idea that no one will ever buy.)
Update (6:07 pm): I just saw on the news that they actually did order people out of the water at Chatham after another Great White sighting. I never saw a fin. But the seal population seems to have been thinned a bit.
The MomScribe family bought a cottage at Eastham, Massachusetts, in 1986. It was near First Encounter Beach on Cape Cod Bay. They sold that cottage in 2001, but they continued to go there every summer.
That ended this year.
For the first time in 26 years, they set up camp at a different cottage. This one is on Kingsbury Beach, still on the Bay side, about a mile or so up the beach from the old cottage.
It’s still Cape Cod. It’s still the Bay. The sunset looks the same. The hermit crabs and snails and other marine animals look the same. The sand is still perfect for building huge castles, and the locals still apparently practice voodoo (see accompanying photo – but spit over your left shoulder and turn around three times before you look).
The new cottage at Kingsbury Beach.
This place, the new cottage, is fantastic. We would recommend it to anyone who wants to get away for a week or two. It’s still within easy driving distance of our haunts in Orleans and Eastham, and it has a sunset deck!
Something’s missing, though.
A family can’t spend two and a half decades in the same vacation spot and simply expect those memories to drift away on the next tide.
MomScribe and her sister, AuntScribe, were little girls when the old cottage became a family fixture. Now, they both have husbands and their own kids. As the years passed, and the family continued to congregate at the old cottage every August, I’m sure they expected their own kids to build their summertime Cape memories on the foundation begun 26 years ago. A foundation seated firmly on the rickety wood planks of that dear, old cottage.
Weird Voodoo Shrine at Kingsbury Beach. I really can’t explain it.
They’ve made the best of the move. That’s been pretty easy, actually, because this new place is, as I say, fantastic.
Still. The emotional tug of the old cottage is powerful. On the beach today, AuntScribe looked up from digging in the sand when she heard a door slam from the ridge above.
“That’s what I miss about the old cottage,” she said. “You know the sound the screen door made when someone was on their way down to the beach? I miss that sound.”
I remember that sound. It could be heard from the beach no matter how far out we’d wandered at low tide – and the tide goes out for miles on Cape Cod Bay. That sound meant someone we loved – a friend, a family member, a neighbor – was on the way down to join the fun on the beach.
I think about my kids growing up on Cape Cod. I think about the little things they’ll pick up on at this cottage, or the next cottage. I wonder what their “slamming screen door” will be.
It will be something, I have no doubt. And as long as it has to do with family and good friends, that’s all that matters.
We’ll head back to Cape Cod for the fifth time as a family in a couple of weeks. Before we started going there (almost) every summer, I thought of Cape Cod as this exotic place. It was the Kennedys and lobster, sailing and lobster, summer theater and lobster, golf and lobster, lobster and lobster. There was also a deep link in history between my family and the Cape, but more about that curious connection in a minute.
The first time I went to Cape Cod with my wife was for her sister’s wedding in 2005. It took place at this incredible seaside resort built around two Gilded Age mansions perched on a bluff over the Atlantic. You would think that breath-taking setting would reinforce my pre-visit perception of Cape Cod. But I think in this respect, Cape Cod is like any other place you hear or read about a lot and mentally slot into a “mind’s eye” view. What you leave out in your imaginary vision of a place is what I call the street-level view. It’s like that in Las Vegas, where you imagine a never-ending line of magnificent casino resorts glittering in the desert, only to forget the space in between, where you’ll find nameless souvenir shops, outdoor bars, Walgreen’s, the McDonald’s, M&M’s World, 7-11, and the stream of people who wander up and down the sidewalks of Las Vegas Boulevard all day and night.
THIS is how I always envisioned Cape Cod.
The street-level view at Cape Cod is defined by the forested stretch of Route 6, the main artery that runs the length of the Cape from Bourne to Provincetown. There is nothing remotely exotic about most of Route 6, also known as the Mid-Cape Highway. My first impression of Cape Cod was shaped by that drab drive along Route 6. I was expecting Cape Cod-style clapboard cottages, sweeping beachfront vistas, yacht slips and mansions. Instead, I saw trees. An apparently endless mass of trees to left and right for mile after mile after mile. Oh, but what those trees concealed. It turned out to be far more exhilarating than I imagined – and I can imagine some pretty exhilarating stuff.
So, we go back now just about every year. Jay was 8 months old the first time, and he tried to crawl up the beach to Boston. He didn’t quite make it.
View of First Encounter Beach from the cottage.
MomScribe spent most of the summers of her youth at Cape Cod. It was just what her family did. When school got out, they shipped out of Westford, Mass., and settled down in the cottage in Eastham, situated about a quarter of a mile down-Cape from First Encounter Beach on the shore of Cape Cod Bay. They stayed for weeks, living the Cape life, working on their tans and appreciating the sunsets. The girls worked at an ice cream shop, or at Arnold’s – a well-known seafood, ice cream, and mini-golf spot along Route 6 between Eastham and Wellfleet. When it was time to go back to school, the family packed up and shipped north again. But the summers were spent on First Encounter Beach, where my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was among 20 passengers and crew members of the Mayflower to conduct a (bloodless) battle with Cape Cod’s Native Americans. His name was Stephen Hopkins, and he was a part of the third on-shore expedition that issued forth from the Mayflower as the future inhabitants of Plymouth Colony searched for a place to put down stakes. Others more famous than my 10G-grandfather were also there, including William Bradford and Myles Standish. Hopkins was included, we have decided, because he had been to the Jamestown settlement a decade earlier and was (ostensibly) familiar with the native inhabitants.
‘Stephen Hopkins’ at Plimoth Plantation.
In any case, the spot where Hopkins and the rest of the Mayflower force fired muskets and stood among the falling arrows of the Nauset Indians was named First Encounter Beach and would one day become the summer-time playground of my future wife. It is entirely fitting that a descendant of one of those intrepid Mayflower passengers should journey there with his family every summer for a week of eating lobster rolls, exploring the tidal pools, building sand castles and searching for the perfect Cape Cod cocktail (I favor a simple concoction of Captain Morgan and ginger ale).
There is another historical connection between my family and Eastham. Among the Plymouth settlers who left for the Outer Cape in the mid-1640s was Nicholas Snow, who came over a few years after the Mayflower and married Stephen’s daughter Constance Hopkins. Nicholas and Constance helped found Eastham, which was incorporated in 1651. Giles Hopkins, one of Stephen’s sons, also came along. The three of them are buried and memorialized now at the Cove Burial Ground on Route 6, located just north of the Orleans Rotary. Constance and Nicholas were my 9G-grandparents.
Constance Hopkins’ memorial at the Cove Burial Ground.
I took a photo of Constance’s headstone at the Cove Burial Ground on a Tuesday in August of 2007. The next day, MomScribe and I took a quick trip to pick up her grandmother in Connecticut. On the way, at my insistence, we stopped at Plimoth Plantation, the amazing living museum based on the original Plymouth Colony. There is a colonial village recreated in great detail from period maps, and it is “inhabited” by actors playing the roles of the colonists who would have been there in 1627. Of course, the first thing I wanted to see was the Stephen Hopkins house. We found it, and sure enough, there was a portly gent with a beard holding forth on a log chair across the dusty road from the Hopkins house. It was the faux Hopkins, who was something of a character in life, and we listened for a minute to the man portraying my 10G-grandfather before we ducked into the very small hut that served as their family dwelling.
‘Constance Hopkins’ at Plimoth Plantation.
Inside, we found a young woman in period dress. It was Constance. I added her picture to the one already on my camera of her grave stone. The actors couldn’t break character, so it would’ve done no good to tell her of the strange circumstance of visiting her final resting place the day before. I don’t know if it would’ve meant anything to her, anyway. It meant a lot to me, though. It was one of those moments only Cape Cod could give me. I think about Constance every time I pass the Cove Burial Ground. That’s a big part of my street-level view of Cape Cod now, that surreal brush with the living past. I can’t wait to experience that again in a couple of weeks with MomScribe and the boys.
This time, when we cross the Sagamore Bridge (or the Bourne Bridge, whichever seems quicker at the time) and jump onto the Mid-Cape Highway, I’ll see those thick trees again. But I’ll also see the sunsets, and I’ll feel the breeze off Cape Cod Bay, and I’ll smell the fresh fish and burgers and hotdogs and veggies on the grill. I’ll taste that first cool sip of Captain-and-ginger ale, and I’ll hear the soft waves rolling in off the bay at high tide. I’ll think of the boys running and laughing along the beach, and I’ll remember all the days we’ve spent there already, and smile at the thought of all the Cape Cod days to come.
We love Phineas and Ferb. You may ask, “Aren’t you a little old to love a kid show?” And I would say, “Yes. Yes, I am.” And just keep right on watching.
To celebrate the end of Jay’s first year in “real” school, I slapped together a home-made greeting card last night using Word and Google images. I showed it to Jay this morning when he woke up, and he absolutely beamed as he read it. Here it is (minus the cool cartoon font, Jokerman). Curse you, WordPress limited font capabilities!
Hey, Jay!
I know what
We’re gonna do today!
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Doofenschmirtz says:
“Jay RULES the Tri-State Area!”
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And Phineas has an announcement …
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IT’S SUMMER!
Man, where do we begin?
Congratulations on finishing kindergarten!
Love,
Mommy & Daddy
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Grrggrggrggrggrgg.
(That means, “Have a great summer, buddy!” in platypus talk!)
