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Where's Sandwich?February 22, 2008 Yesterday I made one of my rare excursions off-island. I hadn't been off since last August, and Uhura hadn't been off since we drove to Portsmouth, N.H., for Lisa Barnett's memorial gathering in May 2006. Passenger tickets still come in a green book of 10, but the vehicle tickets have changed. Gone are the flimsy carbon sets printed out in dot-matrix. Now you get a slightly larger-than-business-card receipt with your schedule on it, and when the dispatcher checks your name against the roster he gives you a boarding pass that looks just like the receipt except the former says BOARDING PASS and the latter says RECEIPT. By the end of the day I'd already mixed them up once. The trip was to keep an appointment I made in mid-January to get checked out for cataract surgery. Cataracts are an almost inevitable side effect of retina-reattachment surgery. My right eye has been pretty useless for the last three and a half years; uncorrected it's now about 20/400, and corrected it's not discernibly better. Since November I've had insurance through Commonwealth Care program. Time, in other words, to deal with the cataract. The eye clinic was in Sandwich, which I knew was on the Cape but that's all I knew. On a map Martha's Vineyard, Cape Cod, and Nantucket look a short step away from each other, but if you depend on the ferries, it's almost "you can't get there from here." No, that's not quite right. It's easy to get to Woods Hole from the Vineyard (Woods Hole is part of Falmouth), and it's easy -- though it takes almost three times longer -- to get to Hyannis from Nantucket. Nowadays you can get to places like New Bedford and Long Island on the fast ferry, but you can't take a car and in the off-season it's a lot harder. It's easy to get to Boston or Providence without a car, and there's a local bus that runs to Hyannis, but the long and short is that I've been east of Falmouth maybe half a dozen times and my psychic map of Cape Cod is, shall we say, sketchy. I could pinpoint Wellfleet, Truro, and Provincetown -- the curled arm of the lower Cape -- and find my way from Falmouth to the Bourne Bridge, but in my mind all the Cape's other towns were clustered in the middle, near Hyannis somewhere. Sandwich had to be there too. Once on the boat I pulled out my New England road map, folded it so southeastern Massachusetts was showing, and went looking for Sandwich. It wasn't there. My eye ranged outward from Hyannis; it followed Route 6 and then the shoreline all the way to P-town. Marstons Mills, check; Hyannis, check; Brewster, Dennis, Orleans, check check check. No Sandwich. Here I was on the freight deck of the Martha's Vineyard, with a 12:45 appointment in Sandwich, and I couldn't find the place on a map. Maybe the map was defective? Doubtful, very doubtful. Sandwich was there somewhere. It wasn't on the lower Cape. The two-by-two-inch map on the eye clinic's information sheet had Route 6 running through it. I found Route 6 on the road map and followed it west-northwestward. Sandwich! Turns out it's about as upper Cape as you can get, near the east end of the Cape Cod Canal. Nowhere close to where I'd thought it was. What if I'd been on Jeopardy! and blown a Double Jeopardy question because I lived on Martha's Vineyard but didn't know where Sandwich was? Suddenly the scribblings my optometrist has made on my info sheet made sense: don't go all the way around to Route 6; approach from the south on Route 130. Heading north on Route 28, I didn't recognize the right turnoff till I was a mile past it, so I went the long way round -- which wasn't all that long. Maps, it seems, are more useful if you know where to look. Even if you know where you're going, you don't know what it looks like till you get there. On the way home I discovered, or rediscovered, that there are two Route 28s: the main drag from Falmouth to Bourne, and one that meanders northeastward from Falmouth toward Hyannis and Chatham. I found the latter more or less by accident. The odd thing about this Route 28 is that the portion that goes northeastward to Hyannis and Chatham is 28 South, and the portion that goes southwestward to Falmouth is 28 North. I went twice around a little rotary before deciding that the destination was more important than the direction and Falmouth was the way to go. I pulled off the road a couple miles later to confirm that I was indeed on the right road. The "Entering Falmouth" sign was even better. Another Double Jeopardy question, and this time I didn't blow it.
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