Breakfast with Herb & Mike

Cooler nights and shorter days mark the transition from summer into fall, stirring memories of seasons past. Those memories, begun at the family camp on Point Au Roche, include fishing, road trips, Cape Cod stays, and family traditions. Today, summers may be slower, but the laughter, lessons and conversations remain timeless as the journey of Breakfast with Herb and Mike continues...

Mike: Now that summer is pretty much over, I got to thinking about the things we did during the summer when I was growing up. My earliest memories are of all of us at the camp you built at Point Au Roche.

Herb: I built that when you were about seven or eight years old using beams and thousands of bricks I bought from the former hat factory that was located on the river near what is now the police station.

Mike: You built a wooden dock too. That’s the one you pushed me off.

Herb: I didn’t push you. You fell.

Mike: Maybe. At the time, I couldn’t swim and you had to fish me out of the water.

Herb: You were so panicked, you didn’t realize you were in shallow water. All you had to do was put your feet down and you would have been fine.

Mike: That may be your story, but it’s not mine.

Herb: We spent a lot of time fishing in the summers.

Mike: I remember a time we went out with your friend, Ed McShane, who was an FBI agent.

Herb: That was an extraordinary day. We must have caught more than a hundred fish. They almost jumped into the boat. We didn’t have to bait our hooks. Even without worms, the fish bit.

Mike: My job was to descale the fish with an electric scaler you attached to a drill and then you cooked the perch on a grate over an open fire. That was an amazing meal.

Herb: When you were a little older, we took road trips in the summer.

Mike: I remember going to Virginia — or maybe it was West Virginia — where we camped and went white water rafting. We had a camper that you and Mom slept in — Laura was just a little girl at the time so she got to sleep in the camper too. The rest of us slept in a tent. We didn’t like the tent, but we sure had fun rafting.

It was on one of those trips I got a lesson about honesty. You gave me a quarter and asked me to get you a newspaper. When I opened the box, there was a whole stack of papers. I took them all and gave them to the people in the campsites around us. When I told you, you explained the importance of honesty and then you made me get the papers back and we returned them to the store.

A few days later, we were driving on the turnpike. You came to a toll booth and gave the woman $10 for a $3 toll. She handled you the change and you passed it to me. When I looked at it, I realized it was $17. I yelled for you to turn around, go back and give the woman the extra $10. It was raining hard, the traffic was heavy and you didn’t go back. I tried to point out the importance of honesty and asked how what you had done was any different than what I had done.

Herb: I didn’t have an answer for you that day, and I still don’t have one today.

Mike: When I was a few years older we started going to Cape Cod with the Racettes and their kids. I remember we had a big house — a duplex — on Thumpertown Road in Wellfleet. It was a great place. We stayed for a month each year. You and Charlie would fly home, work the week and then come back on Fridays.

Herb: You’re right, it was a great place. Do you remember the time Charlie cooked a lobster that must have been 25 pounds? It was big enough to feed all of us.

Mike: I don’t remember the lobster, but I do remember eating outdoors, smelling the ocean and listening to the sea gulls. Those trips were great, but times have changed. Now that we’re older, our summers are slower.

Herb: With our boat at the marina just a few minutes from the house, it’s easy for us to get away.

Mike: Sometimes we take it out and drive up and down the lake. Sometimes we just sit on it.

Herb: You smoke a cigar.

Mike: You drink a coffee and we talk. Those are good times.