He Wanted to Sell Cape Cod Air in a Can

Stand in the bike shop lot at 30 Salt Pond Road on a September morning and take a breath. Pitch pine. Road dust off Route 6. Somewhere under it, the cool mud smell of Salt Pond at low tide. Across the highway sits the Salt Pond Visitor Center, where the National Seashore hands out maps all year.

A man who grew up on this land thought that breath was a product.

"He would sell anything," his daughter, Nancy Rutledge, told the Provincetown Independent in 2023. "He wanted to sell Cape Cod air in a can. He talked about that a lot."

Nobody wrote down what the label would have said, or whether a single can was ever filled. The better question is what a man like that did with the things he could actually get his hands on. On Salt Pond Road, most of the answer is still standing.

First fruit, then eggs, then chicken pies

His name was Charles Chase. Everyone called him Buddy. His parents, Leslie and Mabel Chase, owned an 1820 farmhouse at 40 Salt Pond Road, and on their land by the highway Buddy put up a stand. According to Rutledge, he sold fruit first, then eggs, and later chicken pies.

There's an old rumor that a colonial tavern for pirates and mooncussers once stood on the spot. Rutledge told the Independent it looks like her father was the first person to do business there.

In 1947 Buddy and his wife, Norma, turned the stand into the Hillside Restaurant. Marca Daley, the Eastham Historical Society archivist and Rutledge's childhood friend, described it to the paper as a diner: hamburgers, ice cream, and cake under a glass dome on the counter.

Only family touched the till

Rutledge's parents gave her a stool so she could reach the cash register. They "only wanted family touching the till," she said.

Around 1961 the National Seashore got ready to level the hill beside the highway for its new visitor center. A gambrel-roofed house sat on that hill. Buddy bought it before it could be bulldozed and had it moved across Route 6 to his side of the road. A souvenir shop came next.

The same year, Eastham, which the Independent calls the last dry town on Cape Cod, started allowing alcohol sales. The Hillside began making real money. Rutledge said she learned to push drinks long before she was old enough to order one, for the business and for her own tips. Mark Herman, a historical society volunteer, told the paper the Hillside was "quite a watering hole in the 1970s, for better and for worse." One regular drank there after work so faithfully that his wife brought his dinner to the bar.

Then Buddy opened a motel. Seven units and one apartment. He didn't build it.

Two stories, heated, and built for 4-H

According to Rutledge, he converted it from a two-story heated chicken coop he'd built years earlier as a 4-H project.

Sit with that for a second. Somebody's youth-club poultry project was sturdy enough, and warm enough, to take paying guests on Route 6. The chickens moved out. The tourists moved in.

It's the same move as the fruit stand and the moved house and the canned air. Look at what's already on the lot and ask what else it could be. Eggs became pies. A condemned house became a gift shop. A coop became a motel. The only idea that didn't work was the one with nothing inside it.

The habit didn't cover everything. Rutledge told the Independent that her father's drinking with friends at the Hillside caught up with him. He stopped paying taxes on the property, and his daughter Melissa Ayala said the government eventually took it. Buddy Chase died in 1988, at 60. He left two former wives, five children and a girlfriend. The two wives, Norma and Kathy, became close friends and traveled together. "They had a lot in common," Ayala told the paper.

An off-Cape investor bought the property in the 1980s, and it has been the Lobster Shanty since, with shingles, lobster traps and yellow awnings. As of 2023, the Independent reported, restaurant staff were living in the old coop. We've written before about Lower Cape buildings that come with somebody else's life still in them. This one has a whole family's worth, and some chickens.

The swallows still find the barn

One of Buddy's ideas stayed in the family.

He also started renting bicycles. That business is now the Little Capistrano Bike Shop at 30 Salt Pond Road, run by Melissa Ayala and her husband, Mark. The family's own history says Buddy started it in 1948. The Ayalas also own the old Chase farmhouse at 40 Salt Pond Road, the Independent reported, and both it and the Shanty sit inside Eastham's Old Town Centre National Register District, about 40 acres around Salt Pond and Locust roads.

The shop's website explains the name. Buddy and a relative the family calls Great Aunt Maude named the barn for the swallows that went back and forth between it and Capistrano, the California mission known for its returning birds. Some still nest there in season, the site says.

The barn sits between the Cape Cod Rail Trail, which has an access point at the visitor center, and the Nauset Bicycle Trail, 1.6 miles one way from Salt Pond to Coast Guard Beach. The shop is open seven days this fall. You can rent a bike for the afternoon on the same land where a young man sold eggs and chicken pies and talked about canning the air.

So go stand in that lot again and take the same breath. Then rent a bike and follow the Nauset trail out to Coast Guard Beach, where there's nothing left in the air but salt.

He was right that people would pay for it. He just never needed the can.

The Little Capistrano Bike Shop | 30 Salt Pond Road, Eastham (on Route 6, across from the Salt Pond Visitor Center)
Open 7 days, 9 a.m.–4 p.m., through Dec. 20, 2026, per the shop's website, which notes hours can change without notice. The Wellfleet branch's posted season ended Sep. 20.
508-255-6515 · littlecapistranobikeshop.com
Tip: The shop says renters can leave their car in its lot for the whole rental, and rental bikes can be returned after hours through its lock-up system.