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🐚 Bed at 6:30 didn’t feel illegal

🐚 Bed at 6:30 didn’t feel illegal

Sweatshirts, flashlights, and a house that stopped humming.

Arthur Radtke
February 27, 2026

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Hey, Cape people.

Still no power at our place.

I’m in the driveway letting the car run so I can steal a little charge for the laptop — figured I should send this instead of checking the outage map again.

The branches are mostly cleared, but the house is cold and quiet. No baseboard heat. No fridge hum. Just wind.

We were in bed at 6:30 last night. Sweatshirts, extra blankets, flashlights lined up on the nightstand. Didn’t even feel early. Just felt like the move.

If you’re still in it too — I see you.

There’s some warm stuff in here this week. Go find a room with lights on.

👉 “The branches are cleared. The lights are back. Now the real question…”

After a couple days of flashlights, fridge-checking, and cleanup,
most of us just wanted something warm.
On the Lower Cape, that usually means pizza or chowder.

🧭 Before the Break

We throw around storm names like they came and went.

But some of them never left.

One night in 1987, the ocean punched through North Beach — and Pleasant Bay has flowed differently ever since.
1938 flattened dunes that never fully came back.
1991 shaved beaches back farther than old photos remember.

If you’ve ever heard someone say, “Before the Break…” — this is that story.

👉 🌊 Five storms. Five permanent changes. All right here on the Lower Cape.

⚓ Before the Selfies, There Were Shells

On the morning of July 21, 1918, a German submarine surfaced off Nauset Beach.

And opened fire.

Not in Europe. Not somewhere distant at sea.
Off Orleans.

The target was a tugboat and its barges — but shells landed close enough that Cape residents gathered along the bluffs and shoreline to watch.

It’s still the only time a World War I enemy attack reached the U.S. mainland north of Florida.

There’s a historical marker for it. Most people walk past without ever noticing.

We went back to the naval records and contemporary newspaper accounts to trace what actually happened that morning — and what it must have felt like to see a European war rise out of the Atlantic.

If you’ve stood on Nauset and felt how exposed the horizon can look, you’ll want to read this one.

Come stand there with us.

You Could Hear Who Had Power

When the power went out this week, you could hear the difference.

On some streets, generators settled into a steady, mechanical hum.

On others, there was nothing.

At the peak, more than 200,000 Cape residents were without power. Brewster was nearly all dark. Route 6 traffic lights blinked out. Gas cans lined up at Cumberland Farms.

And inside certain houses, the cold arrived fast.

No baseboard heat.
No well pump.
No hum of anything.

This isn’t another storm recap.

It’s about the houses that went quiet — and what that felt like on the Lower Cape.

Step back into that night →

🗡️ Shakespeare, Dismantled in Orleans

Hamlet.
But not the one you remember.

This spring on the Lower Cape, Shakespeare’s most brooding prince gets rewritten — absurdist, queer, feminist, and very much up for debate.

Seven Tuesday nights.
One classroom in Orleans.
A retired Boston College professor leading the charge.

It’s not a performance.

It’s a literary takedown.

👉 Find out what’s unfolding →

🏠 Maybe We Should Talk About This

After this week, I kept thinking about the houses on our streets.

The ones that handled the cold fine.
The ones that didn’t.
The ones where someone probably said, half-joking, “We’re not doing this forever.”

I wasn’t planning to host anything.

But I keep having the same driveway conversations lately — about timing, about oil bills, about whether to fix something now or wait another year.

So maybe it makes sense to open that up a little.

I’m considering a small, free Zoom night just for newsletter neighbors. Nothing formal. Just sharing what I’ve seen families run into down here — the surprises, the regrets, the things that go smoother when there’s more runway.

If you’d sit in on something like that, just reply “Zoom.”
If there’s enough of you, I’ll open a room.

No pressure. Just a conversation that probably happens sooner or later anyway — and maybe finally putting a few faces to familiar names.