In lieu of staying with an oysterman’s family and a lighthouse keeper, the lodging the two men had arranged, I’d booked a couple of Airbnb rooms on either side of my shack stay. Though I planned to take some long walks, I’d be driving alongside their route, stopping at points of interest. I wasn’t ambitious enough to attempt their journey on foot. Their aim was to hike roughly 28 miles along the blustery beach from Eastham to Provincetown. On October 11, 1849, Thoreau and his friend, William Ellery Channing, arrived on Cape Cod in the wake of a nor’easter, carrying umbrellas. Just over the barrier dune, waves churned against the beach. I felt a sudden surge of relief, then nervous excitement. camera icon © AP PHOTO/MICHAEL DWYERĪs we trudged up to the shack where I’d stay - known as Peg’s, for Margaret Watson, its original owner, who lived in the structure for 30 years - I caught sight of its pitched roof in the swaying grass. Marconi Beach, Cape Cod National Seashore. Thoreau described it as “the bared and bended arm.” But though I’ve lived in Boston for almost 20 years, visited Thoreau’s grave in Concord, Massachusetts, and floated in Walden Pond, I’d spent almost no time on the cape, the hooked peninsula that famously flexes into the Atlantic. I was familiar with his oft-quoted book, “Cape Cod,” chronicling his three trips to the area. I’d come to the seashore on the trail of writer Henry David Thoreau, who walked a significant stretch of the cape’s backshore in 1849. Whelan, a local doctor and the chair of the Outer Cape Artist in Residence Consortium, was driving me out to the sea, where I’d be hunkering down for the night just before the structures would be buttoned up for the winter. Thanks to a fortuitously timed last-minute request, the opportunity to spend time in a shack had unexpectedly materialized. Our destination was a cluster of rustic dune shacks strung along Provincetown and Truro’s so-called “backshore,” arguably the wildest, remotest part of Cape Cod National Seashore’s 40 miles of protected beach. On blind curves, Whelan honked the horn in case other vehicles - most likely SUVs from Art’s Dune Tours, a park concessionaire - were headed toward us. All around us were wheat-colored dunes, bright in the October sun and carpeted with tufts of beachgrass. Route 6, the main thoroughfare that runs the length of Cape Cod, and already I felt civilization falling away. Thoreau described Cape Cod as “the bared and bended arm.” camera icon © KAREN MINOT
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |