Word: wellfleet
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Alec Wilkinson, a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of Midnights: A Year with the Wellfleet Police (1982), heard about Bunting and thought there might be a story in the lawman's exploits. Their first meeting got off to an edgy beginning. Because Wilkinson was from New York City, Bunting suspected him of being a Mafia hit man. But the Yankee journalist hung around long enough to win Bunting's confidence and come up with Moonshine, an intoxicating report on free and illicit spirits...
...college graduate named Alec Wilkinson applied for a job with the police department of Wellfleet, Mass., a popular vacation retreat on Cape Cod. His main qualification for the post was a familiarity with the area; he had summered there regularly as a child, and his parents had since joined the 2,000 or so people who weathered Wellfleet all year long. On the other hand, he possessed a slight physique and no knowledge at all about law enforcement. He had majored in music at Bennington. "Music, Huh?" the chief said during the job interview. "That...
Aside from suspicious or unruly natives, Wilkinson finds himself coping primarily with boredom. "By anyone's definition," he writes, Wellfleet is "a safe place to live." When one patrolman finds the town hall locked at night, he reports this fact as a "suspicious incident." The chief borrows the shotgun from a police cruiser when he goes hunting in Maine. During the only local bank heist in anyone's memory, the teller convinces the robber that his take ($300) is a lot of money to carry around in cash. The robber is obediently investing some...
Before Caldicott spoke, the Phi Beta Kappa members heard Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stanley Kunitz '26 read his unfinished work. "The Wellfleet Whale," and listened to choral music performed by the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum...
...part, these come from his sense of place and his unsparing, discreet eye for the truth of a scene. Anyone who has spent time on the sea knows that nothing, in terms of observation, is missing from his images of Truro on Cape Cod, like The Martha McKean of Wellfleet, 1944. From the humping blue of the water to the mild sun on the belly of the gaff-rigged sail, it is all there, immemorial, as permanent as the way the gulls face into the light...