Cape Cod's Silly Season

"Silly Season" means different things to different people. Most Englishmen and many Americans use it in media to describe slow summer news seasons where frivolous stories come out. The English also call it "Cucumber Season," which is why we always prevail against England when we fight them.

It is also used in the world of sports, especially in NASCAR, to describe a period outside of the traditional season. That's where we're heading today, we're just talking about a regional economy instead of Dale Junior.

Fans of the film  Jaws will recall Mayor Vaughn attempting to talk some "sense" into Hooper and Brody at various times in the movie. "Amity is a summer town, we need summer dollars." Without those summer dollars, people in Amity would, as Quint so graciously put it, "be on the welfare all winter."

They are describing Cape Cod to a T in that movie. Cape Cod is very far from any cities or airports or- amazingly- large commercial harbors that stimulate revenue. We have some businesses, but it doesn't make sense logistically to base a national business here. From November to April, we're not far from how PJ O'Rourke described the collapsing Soviet Union's economy... "Everyone selling coffee and cigarettes back and forth to each other."

"15% of our sales are to California, another 25% goes to Asia... let's put the factory as far away from those people as possible!" is a conversation that only happens in movies where evil rich people are shutting down a factory in a poor town for tax breaks." It is also the only conversation that would put a big industrial plant on Cape Cod.

God saw this coming, and saw fit to bless us with amazing beaches, yummy seafood, gorgeous seas and all sorts of stuff that the factory worker in Ohio doesn't have access to and will pay excessively for the chance to experience. It's symbiotic, if I spelled that right... we send a bunch of money to Michigan for cars, and we get a bunch of it back when someone with vacation time says "Stay home in Detroit, or go to Cape Cod for the summer?"

Typically, Cape Cod's tourist season runs through July and August. These are the months when summer weather demands beach activity in America, and Cape Cod offers that without the sugarcane-harvesting oppressive heat/humidity that you get down in the American South. You can stroll through a much emptier Disney World in August than you can during February vacation, almost entirely because of Florida's well known Komodo Dragonesque climate.

July and August are also when the kids are out of school (unless they f*cked up badly, of course), and can be taken along on a vacation. As nice as leaving the kids home sounds, it is better to keep them where you can see them.

"I'm renting us this cottage on a gorgeous beach with boys/girls everywhere and all sorts of exotic beach stuff to do" is a better option to run past the teenager than "We're going to cram the famn damily in the car and go see the Grand Canyon or Colonial Williamsburg." 

If Chevy Chase had just taken the Griswolds to Cape Cod, he'd have had a much less stressful vacation and we'd be down one or two good Family Road Trip movies. Psycho, Jurassic Park, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday The 13th, Godzilla, The Shining, Twister, The Birds, Night Of The Living Dead, Dracula, The Blair Witch Project, Titanic, Halloween, The Godfather, High Plains Drifter, An American Werewolf In London and hundreds of other violent/disaster movies are peopled with unfortunate folks who chose somewhere other than Cape Cod to spend some vacation time.

So, Cape Cod fattens on Tourist  during these summer months. A perfect storm of weather, school vacations, factory slowdowns and everything else that sends people to us dries up with the warm weather. It's a slow process, but it isn't like flicking a switch or anything, even with most schools in America starting up at about the same time.

I have worked a few years at a Cape Cod hotel, and one thing we all notice is that, after Labor Day, the average age of our tenants goes to AARP levels very quickly. There's a reason for this.

If you see things like Intelligence and Wisdom through Dungeons and Dragons prisms as I do, you'll understand that the I and the W are two different animals. A child could have great natural intelligence, and the only thing holding it back from perhaps running a business is the wisdom one gets as they trod through this world of ours.

If you get 100 kids, 100 adults and 100 senior citizens together, you'll probably get the same amount of intelligent people in each group. However, the older groups will have greater wisdom via their life experiences. Your toddler may assemble Legos twice as fast as mine, but he doesn't know that OJ Simpson may have killed a few people, where even a moron of a 50 year old knows this.

Old People look at September, think of Cape Cod... and that wisdom kicks in. They immediately (and perhaps subconsciously in some cases) start working a checklist:

- The weather is perfect. September is a gorgeous month. September is mostly highs in the 70s, lows in the 50s. You get 80s and you even get 40s, but 75/55 is a typical high/low temperature. You get beach weather during the day, and cool, easy-sleepin' nights. The ocean off of Cape Cod is at peak warmth, and we aren't into the October rainy season. Nor'easters are rare in September, and Cape Cod doesn't get full-time hurricane action.

- The children are back in school. This changes the whole nature of the Cape, and the whole nature of the average tourist. Not only are the kids gone, the parents of the kids are gone.

- Beaches are yours for the taking. No kids and no parents erases a huge demographic from the beach population. I grew up on Duxbury Beach, and it wouldn't be unusual to see 3500 people on Duxbury Beach during Labor Day weekend... and then, three days later and with no appreciable change in the weather, Duxbury Beach might have a dozen people on it. Some days, each person on the beach could have had their own Mile of empty sand.

- That legendary Cape Cod traffic eases mightily. Cape Cod's winter population is about 200,000. It doubles in the summer. Take half of the cars from the road, and note that the remainder are locals who know the side roads and the wrong times to try the bridges... that's why they never build another bridge over the Canal, babe. There's no need for it 9 months of the year.

- Restaurants are less crowded. This means faster seating, less harried service, faster food-to-the-table times, and chefs viewing each plate as a work of art rather than just slopping stuff on a plate. Fly-by-night summer businesses close, and any restaurant in business after Labor Day has to be good enough that locals haven't word-o-mouthed it into shutdown.

- Stores are heavily discounting their goods. Cape Cod has a heavy Snowbird (summer on the Cape, winter in Florida) population, and many busineses will barter heavily with you just to get rid of as much inventory as they can before they head south.

- The attractions that are closed were ones you had no interest in anyhow. Grandma may be really cool and say "Let's spend a day at Water Wizz," but a pair of elderly tourists have had 145 combined years to get their fill of that sort of thing, and couldn't care less if Cape Cod Inflatable Park closes or not.

- The attractions that Autumn offers are very elderly-friendly. September is well described here. October brings in fall foliage, cranberry harvests and all that farm stuff. November even gives a surge, as Plymouth fills up during Thanksgiving and spillover follows. "There's only so much to do in Plymouth, and we've always wanted to see Cape Cod, dear..."

When true winter hits, Cape Cod can get sort of desolate. Few travel agents pitch it. A beach is a rough place to be in the winter, it's always windy and the wind is always in your face. "Look! The beach has snow on it!" wears out in five minutes. Many vacation-friendly businesses are closed. We have the kind of climate where, when we get snow, we get a lot of it.

That scenario is also a few months away, and the old people know that. This leads to Cape Cod getting a Silly Season of elderly-driven tourism during September and through Columbus Day. Cape Cod businesses adapt to this, making it so that a non-grey tourist will find stuff to do if they opt for a day trip.

The September/October period bookends the June/July/August peak season with a corresponding April/May period, but Spring can be sort of funny on Cape Cod. We get an extra month or so of Summer, but we pay for it with chilly Springs. It is not unusual to see a May weather broadcast say "Highs near 70 in Boston, 50s on the Cape."

That also is something that we don't have to worry about at the moment. Instead, Cape Cod is shifting into her Silly Season, fattening before the cold winter.

Mostly, old people use their hard-earned knowledge to dominate the tourist trade here in September... but now, after reading this article, you have the wisdom that some blue-hairs took 60 years to gain. Get down here and spend those dollars!