ShareThisBy JEFF BLANCHARD
Before there were traffic jams, before there was a Kennedy Compound, even before there was a Cape Cod Canal with bridges between the mainland and the flexed arm that juts out into the Atlantic, windmills were the most conspicuous manmade objects on the peninsula's landscape.
The Cape's oldest surviving windmill is on Route 6 in the center of Eastham and was built in 1680, or just about 150 years before the town's other man-made icon, Nauset Light.
A recent Google search turned up nothing on the abutters' reaction to the construction of either. As for the permitting process for windmills throughout their glory days on Cape Cod, it seems to have gone pretty much like this:
"Hey, Higgins, what say we build us a windmill?"
"Where?"
"Over there."
"Okay!"
Before the Christmas Tree Shops began to sell cheap goods from China under the arms of a replica windmill at its store on the canal, before the spread of mini-golf courses with spinning windmills and even before the waterfront became a desirable place to build a house _ because the ship captains who lived here knew better than to plant their families in the path of the sea _ a windmill was the most important (and expensive) asset that a Cape Cod community could invest in. After all, this is where the power was _ the power to turn grindstones that milled corn into meal, and, later on, the power to pump up the salt water from which to extract and sell salt.
The rich guys in town would pay for the wood, the stones and the construction. Then they'd hire a miller who would sit there waiting for residents to bring in their corn, which he'd grind into cornmeal and scoop out of the hopper, some for you, some for me. That's how the wheels of progress spun.
It is this historical context that makes the current debate over building the Cape Wind wind farm in Nantucket Sound so funny, odd, absurd, aggravating, ridiculous, embarrassing, hypocritical, whatever. Regardless of your position on the proposal _ it really doesn't matter how much you know about global warming, air pollution, megawatts or the fishing, fowling and navigational aspects of a wind farm _ one thing no one can deny is the inherent contradiction between Cape Cod and this pitched battle over windmills.
If those who favor the addition of a wind farm that would produce electricity can be seen as the vanguard, and those who would oppose the project from their mansions along the shore as the old guard, what we have now is a role-reversal on history.
None of this can be lost on the anti-wind folks, no matter how strident their voices in opposition to Jim Gordon and the proposal by his company, Energy Management Inc., to put 130 wind turbines in the Sound.
Their central beachhead in the battle runs along the Cape's sound-side shoreline between Hyannisport, home of the Kennedy clan, and Osterville, home of the billionaire fossil-fuel magnate Bill Koch, who has taken the lead in organizing the fight from Oyster Harbors, a gated island community where visitors must check in at the guard-house next to _ of all things _ an old and nonfunctioning windmill.
Oyster Harbors is the very model of a masterfully designed (by Donald Ross), perfectly manicured, beautifully maintained private golf resort, where famous Americans from the Mellons to the Eisenhowers to the Kochs have found their sanctuary from the madding world since the Roaring Twenties.
Today there are two ways to get your name on the rolls at Oyster Harbors. You can have enough dough to buy a house there ($5 million should just about do it, but that does not make you a member of the club, only a member of the community); or you can live elsewhere and join the golf club to at least enjoy the place, if not sleep there. That's $75,000 to start, and $6,300 in annual dues, not counting the occasional club sandwich and the cost of a guest in your cart.
If you have enough blue in your blood or at least green in your bank, but still can't win the invite to Oyster Harbors, fret not. Alternatives exist. The two closest are Osterville's Wianno Club, where the anti-Cape Wind folks held their first organizational meeting way back in June 2002, and the Hyannisport Country Club, where JFK used to play and where the Kennedys still hold annual outings _ always for charity, of course.
If you are lucky enough to get your name on a waiting list at either of these two, a check for $40,000 will be needed for initiation. How can you tell when a spot has opened up? The best way is to check the flag out front. Half-mast is good news.
While Hyannisport is practically surrounded by water, which makes it the beloved institution it is, Oysters Harbors is favored by some who focus strictly on the quality of the course, and ignore that it offers barely a glimpse of the water because of the natural growth and the addition of mansions that surround the course.
One visit is enough to create some lasting impressions, including:
You'd live there if you could.
Virtually everything with a flat surface has a printed rendering of the windmill at the Oysters Harbors gate _ the menus, the scorecards, the bags handed out in the pro shop, everything.
These are people who understand marketing, and who understand the value of a symbol as old and cherished as the windmill. Indeed, it must be excruciating for them to be forced to choose between the windmills and their version of Nantucket Sound.
In any event, that's where they are, stuck between their enclave and their high-profile battle to stop what they think would be the unsightly addition of a wind farm six miles away in Nantucket Sound. It can't be any fun. If you think about it long and hard enough, you can almost muster sympathy for their plight, and begin to understand why they so don't welcome this Jim Gordon fellow with his big plans for wind energy.
(Jeff Blanchard is a Cape Cod-based writer.)
