Opinion/Your Turn: 'You'll never want to go over the bridge': A wash-ashore’s tale

“You’ll never want to go over the bridge,” they told me when I first came to Cape Cod. Back then, after I’d sold my house, moved to the Cape and burned my boats, I had no clue what they meant. I was forever coming up with excuses to go back to Queens. A birthday party, a reunion, dentist visits. I dropped the “New York” part from my answer when anyone asked where I was from.

“I get it!” they’d say. “Queens is in New York. I know!”

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You see, Queens is the forgotten borough, the red-headed stepchild of New York City. We have a bit of an inferiority complex, always apologizing for not being cool like Brooklyn, prestigious like Manhattan, or in-your-face like the Bronx. Staten Island doesn’t count. We’re on the edge of Long Island to the east but they look down on us also.

Queens is the most ethnically diverse county in America. Only in Queens can you find the Himalayan Yak restaurant next to Sean Og’s Tavern. And when you go into Sean Og’s you’ll find that people from Nepal love Guinness too.

But no one stays still these days. The Mexicans move to Corona and replace the Dominicans who moved to Maspeth after the Polish moved to Middle Village replacing the Irish who moved to the suburbs. Then their kids grow up, come back, and move into a six-story pre-war building in Woodside where grandma lived when she arrived from Galway in the 1950s.

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I miss it. The energy of newcomers like my parents settling down and raising families — in it for the long haul. Gentrification changed all that.

I miss the old New York, the stories and memories passed from generation to generation. The characters. The pride in calling a neighborhood home. It’s all gone now. I don’t think there’s such a thing as a New Yorker anymore. Mae West got her start as a teenager singing in Neirs Tavern, a local bar that’s still standing. After a lifetime in Hollywood, she returned to be buried in the family plot in Cypress Hills Cemetery. I don’t see Ray Romano doing that. Me either.

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It's a steep learning curve for me here on Cape Cod. I’m treated much better on the roads now that my New York tags are gone. I learn that the red flag on the mailbox is there for a reason and that you don’t have to study to get a clamming license. I’m complimented for not having that bad of an accent. Now if I could only learn how to swim.

I get lost, in the trails, the ponds, the ancient places, the quiet nooks and crannies I never tire of discovering. Part of me wonders if Queens was like this once. I slow down, which is why I came here in the first place. After the secret evaluation period is over, my neighbors start talking to me. They tell me I’m fitting in nicely. Soon I’m leading weary New Yorkers all around, the ones who thought I’d lost my mind when I announced that I was leaving. They’re looking to bolt the Empire State themselves and burn their own boats somewhere new.

“The property taxes are how much?” they ask. “And they think that’s high?!”

Now I’m the one peering from behind the blinds to look for out-of-state tags.

“New Jersey. Who let these guys in?”

I walk next door and extend a warm handshake to my fellow wash-ashores.

“Welcome!” I say. “You’ll never want to go over the bridge.”

Neil Cawley is a Hyannis-based lawyer and writer. His “Speech and Debate in the Time of Covid” was named a 2022 Tucson Festival of Books Nonfiction Finalist and was featured in the February 2022 edition of bioStories, an online literary journal.

This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Cape Cod wash-ashore tells of leaving Queens, N.Y., moving to Hyannis