Cape Cod Connections

Conversations with strangers on Cape Cod

At a Cape Cod coffee shop where I’d gone to write for a few hours, a stout, red-faced man with thick gray bangs cut straight across his forehead asked if he could share my table. I detected a faded Irish lilt when he introduced himself as Mac. While I was considering how to ask him where he was really from, he shared that he’d come to the U.S. from Ireland 30 years ago. He’d overstayed his visa and had never gotten a green card, though. That little oversight had finally caught up to him three decades later. The recent revelation of his illegal immigration status meant he’d lost his job as a long haul truck driver, couldn’t afford a lawyer, and was in danger of being deported.

I told him I was half-Irish and that I’d been tracing my father’s ancestry back to Ireland as part of my research for the book I was writing. He stared blankly at me for a few beats and then asked me where I was really from. When I told him I was also half-Vietnamese, he brightened up and said he could tell I was “something” because of my eyes.

I’ve been working on the periphery of immigration policy for the past couple years while organizing trans-partisan conversations about what it means to be American. It was a novelty to meet a white person who was worried about being deported. His predicament felt as much of a commentary on our broken immigration system as it was about a class system that favors those with means.

After Mac left, I returned to a waterside restaurant that had looked touristy when I’d walked by earlier in the day. It was late afternoon and the bar seats were filling up with burly men who I imagined had just come back from fishing all day for the seafood that supplied all the restaurants in town.

The exterior walls were covered with cedar shake shingles that were typical of Cape Cod. Hundreds of old buoys of different shapes and sizes hung from the ceiling and on the walls. I took a glass of rosé outside and sat alone on the dock and wrote in my journal as the afternoon sun began sliding into the sea.

An older local couple drinking light beer in glasses of ice soon joined me. They asked me where I was from and when I said DC, they lit up with questions about the city and my writing. They never asked me where I was really from. I’d braced myself for the question, though, as I always do whenever I meet someone who asks me where I’m from.

They shared stories of what Cape Cod was like back in the old days and how it had changed. The woman, a retired school teacher, said she’d first visited the Cape with a girlfriend when she was 21-years-old. Thieves had robbed them, but left each of them with a ten dollar bill, enough to eat and get back to Boston safely in those days. She believed the considerate thieves hadn’t wanted to leave two young women stranded in Cape Cod.

The couple offered to buy me a glass of wine, which I didn’t really need at that point, but I accepted because it felt like the friendly thing to do and I wanted to keep talking to them. The cost of our three drinks came to about $23. She gave the bartender a $50 bill and told him to keep the change. She whispered to me, these guys are working so hard and they deserved a little extra.

We watched the boats glide in and out of the little harbor for a little while longer together and then wished each other well before parting ways.