I just spent three days in Truro, Massachusetts out on Cape Cod. I wasn’t fishing, it was a trip for my 17th wedding anniversary (and I know better than that!), but that doesn’t mean fishing wasn’t on my mind. Truro is like a time capsule, somehow ‘walled off’ from the development and “bougification” of the rest of the Cape. It feels old and unchanged, like you might’ve walked into a scene from Jaws and just kept on stepping deeper into 1975. I’m sure lifelong Cape-Codders would be able to point out a thousand ways Truro has changed over the last two decades, never mind a half-century! But for someone who spent family vacations in Eastham during the 1990s, Truro’s present-day look and feel, somehow seems to predate those memories.
On the first evening, we got a pizza from Montano’s and took it to Long Nook Beach. As I drove out to the lot, perched high on a sandy cliff, overlooking the biggest view of the Atlantic possible while standing on Cape Cod sand, I couldn’t help but think about the impressive hauls of giant stripers that had definitely been driven out on that road during the heyday of Cape striper fishing and commercial-era surfcasting. On the beach, I looked left and right and thought about how, back then, you could drive the beach from Race Point all the way to Nauset Inlet, meaning that legends like Frank Daignault, Tony Stetzko (Junior and Senior), Tony Chiarrappo, Nat Piazza and perhaps even The Fisherman’s own, Fred Golofaro had laid tracks along the beach where we sat, perhaps stopping to cast, maybe marking the spot of an epic nighttime hit, a story never retold.
I also thought about the connective tissue that binds generations of surfcasters, my good friend Teddy Menard had mentioned Long Nook at least 100 times when swapping stories along the banks of the Canal. Photos of his Bronco parked on the sand and his words describing how crossing the Canal bridges would immediately melt away all of his worries during the 1980s and 1990s floated through my head as I pictured him chasing bass in his prime. I thought about the Daignault twins and the stories we all know of them fishing late into the night, slinging “Webles” into the dark surf and fighting over the shadow line that fateful night at Race Point.
Inevitably, my own history sifted itself into these stories; the first striper I ever laid eyes on was landed from Marconi Station Beach while fishing with my Uncle Jon. At the time, I couldn’t even FATHOM that we were going to be fishing in the dark! Not long after Jon hooked up, a large wave swamped our gear, cracking the glass on our lantern and soaking everything we brought with us. At the time I was in a panic, 11-year-old me had to run around and collect everything, moving it all back from the water while Jon battled the bass. In retrospect, I’m so glad it happened that way because it has kept the memory vivid in my mind.
But this is why surfcasting feels more like a brotherhood. We are stewards of each other’s oral history. And we build legends from those stories. We love to retell them and retell our own history as well. When these stories are told together, they become ingrained, and they start to feel like they’re all our own memories. This is why, when we drove off of Route 6 into the surprisingly rural landscape of North Truro, I found myself longing for a past that wasn’t even mine. For a moment, I would have traded it all just to see a 1970 Suburban, racked-out with honey-blank surf rods and Penn ‘Greenies’. Tight-lipped casters, wearing hippers and flannel shirts inside driving off at last light to catch their tide.
It’s funny how your soul can ache for a time you weren’t even present for. But somehow, through all the reading and sharing of stories, the images I conjured in real-time as I pictured what was happening, have landed softly in my memory and imprinted as something between experience and interpretation. And even though it’s pure fantasy, I kind of love that I feel that way and that those stories were told in such a way that left me feeling like I was there.
