A Cape for All Seasons
Majestically eroded, the great glacial bluffs of Cape Cod’s outer beach rise from the open Atlantic, separating the ocean from Cape Cod Bay. Its many-colored sands and clays flow grain by grain, or in sudden shelving slabs, to replenish the shore below. The beach, broad and gently sloping in summer, short and steep in winter, arcs northward for more than 20 miles, giving the walker a curved prospect two or three miles ahead at most. And always, coming onto the shore and reforming it, with measured cadences in calm weather, with awesome fury during northeast gales, is the sea. Here, as Henry Beston put it, “the ocean encounters the last defiant bulwark of two worlds.” There is no other landscape like it anywhere.
Cape Cod holds a special place in America’s landscape, history, and collective imagination. As the world’s largest glacial peninsula, it juts farther out into the Atlantic Ocean than any other part of the United States. It was one of the earliest landfalls of the European explorers in the 16th and 17th centuries. Its purported identity as the “Wonderstrand” of the Viking sagas remains apocryphal, but it was—as every Cape Codder will be quick to tell you—indisputably the first landing place of the Mayflower Pilgrims in 1620, and it became one of the oldest settled areas in the country.
Cape Codders early on took to the sea with a will, and they have never relinquished it. Over the centuries there developed on this thin peninsula a unique maritime way of life that has produced some of the most familiar objects and images in American culture. They include that durable architectural form, the Cape Cod house; indigenous nautical designs such as the Cape Cod catboat; tools like the quahog bullrake; and such functional folk art as carved bird decoys. Cape Cod bogs produced the first commercial cranberries, that traditional part of our Thanksgiving celebrations. The Cape’s villages, low hills, and sandy shores are still dotted with gray shingled windmills, looking like ungainly landbound ships, whose great sheeted arms once ground corn and pumped seawater for the making of salt; tall lighthouses that stand sentry on bold eroding sea cliffs and at the entrances to low, protected harbors; stately sea captains’ houses with roofs crowned with “widows walks” and yard gates framed by arched whale jaws; and, from local wharves and piers, fleets of colorful boats manned by fishermen who continue to go out to harvest the sea as they have for centuries.
Fishermen’s floats, weathered-shingled boathouses, and catboats—Cape Cod’s coves reflect its seafaring traditions.
Perhaps the most enduring image of all, however, is that of the legendary “Cape Codder” himself. He appears in many guises: as a Portuguese “banker” fisherman trawling for cod in a small dory off the Georges Banks; a Truro “mooncusser” salvaging the booty from an 18th-century pirate ship wrecked on the Cape’s “backside;” a Wampanoag Indian gathering alewives, or migratory herring, in spring to plant with her corn; a Wellfleet whaler casting his harpoon at a right whale in the icy Arctic seas; a Yankee clipper ship skipper from Brewster or Dennis helping to open up the China Trade or setting a transoceanic sailing record that still stands today; a Cape Verdean girl picking ripe wine-colored cranberries in the long rows of a Harwich bog; a Chatham Life Saving Serviceman pulling his surfboat through a fierce January gale to make a daring rescue of the crew of a vessel grounded on one of the Cape’s treacherous shoals; a Provincetown rum-runner in his weather-beaten dragger eluding a Coast Guard cutter in the fog; an “old salt” in sou’wester and knee boots spinning yarns in Barnstable or Rock Harbor.
These and other versions of the protean Cape Codder have been celebrated and recorded in story and song since the founding of this country and have become a part of our history and folklore. In fact, few if any rural areas of comparable size have been written, painted, and sung about so richly over the years as the Cape landscape and its inhabitants.
Pages 10-11: Because the Outer Cape is such a narrow strip of land with the Atlantic on one side and Cape Cod Bay on the other, sunrises and sunsets can be spectacular. Here the sun rises over Eastham’s Nauset Marsh, which was a harbor when Champlain explored the area in 1606.
Still, the dominant image of Cape Cod for most Americans today is probably that of one of the Nation’s most popular summer playgrounds. For two centuries countless visitors and vacationers have escaped the burdens and the routines of daily life for a day, a week, or a season of liberation, exploration, relaxation, and recreation along the Cape’s unsurpassed beaches, ponds, marshes, bays, pine barrens, inlets, and dunes. Originally a summer resort for Bostonians and other New Englanders, the Cape now receives visitors from everywhere, at all seasons of the year. One of the favorite summer games for Cape children is to see how many different state license plates they can spot. Not infrequently they can get them all, including Alaska and Hawaii—as well as the Canadian provinces, Mexico, and several European countries. Where Cape Cod once produced seamen who sailed around the globe to bring home wealth and exotic treasures, the Cape has in turn become host to much of the world, providing the setting for countless beach parties, clambakes, family outings, sailing and fishing trips, summer romances, and increasingly, an appreciation and enjoyment of its rich environment, history, and natural resources.
Gulls seem to be everywhere, but the variety of birds makes Cape Cod a birdwatcher’s paradise throughout the year. Along shorelines, tides rhythmically polish shells and cobbles.
What constitutes the enduring allure of a place like Cape Cod? What makes more people than ever cross the Cape Cod Canal bridges at all seasons in search of something they believe lies in promise for them here despite ever-increasing traffic jams, crowded beaches, the continuing proliferation of honky-tonk tourist traps, and the ongoing fragmentation of woodlands and waterfronts by commercial and residential development?
Over the centuries the universal and nearly perfect image of Cape Cod as a flexed human arm has provided an ambivalent symbol for what its settlers and visitors have hoped to find here. For the fearful yet hopeful Pilgrim passengers on the Mayflower it both beckoned and threatened, offering religious liberty and land for settlement, yet at the same time presenting, in William Bradford’s words, “a wild and savage hue,” a “hideous and desolate wilderness” that many of them would not survive.
To their maritime descendants the Cape offered seemingly endless abundance from the sea and a springboard to personal fortune; yet at the same time it proved to be a treacherous barrier to sea traffic, a graveyard for hundreds of ships that fell victim to the Cape’s treacherous rips and shoals, or to fierce northeast storms and gales. It was not by chance, or merely to escape the wind, that most old Cape houses are built well back from the shore. As Rowena Myers, an 88-year-old lifetime resident of Orleans once explained to me, “The old people didn’t like to look at the sea once they were ashore. It held too much pain for them.”
Winds and tides constantly move the sands, tearing down dunes and creating new ones.
Today Cape Cod beckons as never before to a Nation increasingly starved, in Henry Beston’s words, “for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot.” Seventy-five million of us live within a day’s drive of Barnstable County. During the past 30 years the Cape’s permanent population has risen from 70,000 to 190,000, a figure that nearly triples during the peak summer season.
Some come to walk the spacious curved length of the Great Beach of Cape Cod, which Thoreau claimed was a place where “a man may stand and put all America behind him” (though at many public beaches in July and August it may seem as if one has most of America in front of him!). Others seek quieter places like the soft pine barrens of the interior woodlands, or one of the Cape’s hundreds of clear kettle-hole ponds, or the dune country of the Province Lands with its eccentric and colorful community of dune shacks—an ever-shifting landscape of mirages and stark, unexpected beauty.
Still others find, along the Cape’s many well-preserved village streets, in its old farmhouses and meandering stone walls of glacial boulders, its lighthouses, fishing shacks, and aging fleets of sea-beaten draggers and lobster boats, a deep sense of that earnest, abiding, communal history that flourished here for so long and which we seek to borrow to help anchor our more modern, shifting lives.
Many are attracted to the energetic and often outrageous bohemian diversity of a place like Provincetown, or to the Cape’s many art galleries, theaters, concerts, and museums. Some may hope for a glimpse of the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport or a movie star on the bench in front of a local general store. Others look forward to a Cape Cod lobster and clam dinner (which may, in fact, have come from the waters off Maine or Alaska) at a waterfront restaurant, or the seemingly endless array of gift shops, night spots, and tourist diversions (including increasingly elaborate miniature golf courses with waterfalls and “historic reproductions”)—much of which have little or no indigenous connection with Cape Cod and can be had elsewhere, but which somehow seem to mean more when experienced here.
One element that seems to embrace and permeate all of the Cape’s attractions is natural change. Change, of course, takes place in any environment, but here on the Cape it seems peculiarly pervasive, visible, and dramatic, particularly along the ocean shore. I like to point out to people who want to retrace Thoreau’s famous walk along the Outer Beach that they are likely to get pretty wet if they try it, since Thoreau’s original path now lies several hundred feet offshore!
In stark contrast with the sandy shorelines, the upper Herring River in Wellfleet is rich in vegetation.
We are subject to great periodic sea changes on this peninsula. Tides rise and fall up to nine feet twice a day, sweeping out in places in Cape Cod Bay to reveal tidal flats over a mile in extent. Waves and currents continuously undermine and cut into the great glacial cliffs of the Outer Cape, removing an average of three feet a year from our eastern boundary. Autumn and winter storms rearrange the ocean beaches, undermining the foundations of lighthouses, beach parking lots, and shorefront cottages, strewing the beaches at times with the carcasses of thousands of sea creatures, from whelks to whales. Tides and winds build and unbuild ridges and bowls of sand dunes, which in turn march across the land, threatening to bury marshes, forests, ponds, roads, and, in the past, whole villages and harbors. Major storms, like that of the Great Blizzard of February 6-7, 1978, change the very outlines of Cape Cod, cutting barrier beaches in two, creating new islands, flattening entire dune systems, creating new inlets, and plugging up old ones. The Cape is a river of sand into which we can never step twice.
For whatever reasons we come, the continuing attraction of the Cape to tourists and new residents (known as “washashores”) has proven a mixed blessing, providing a valuable source of income to the local populace but also bringing an increase in development and commercialization that threatens the very things we seek here: clean air, unpolluted waters and beaches, the harvest of the sea, unspoiled vistas, a sense of rooted historical continuity, the free interplay of natural forces and wild inhabitants, and the opportunity for discovery and self-discovery in a landscape that has had a perennial allure for the human spirit for over three and a half centuries.
It was with the intent of preserving this experience for the public at large, and not for just a privileged few, that the idea for the National Seashore was born more than 30 years ago. The formation of the National Seashore was unique among the creation of the Nation’s public parks. Prior to its establishment in 1961, national parks, forests, seashores, and monuments had been created from land already owned by federal or state governments, or from land or funds donated by private individuals. No federal monies had ever been spent to create such places.
Today Nauset Light alerts mariners off Eastham’s treacherous Atlantic coast. Since the days of the earliest Indian inhabitants, Cape Codders have plied the bay and ocean for food and related marine products. Commercial fishing boats still work out of Provincetown, Chatham, and Wellfleet within the National Seashore.
On August 7, 1961, when President John F. Kennedy signed the legislation establishing Cape Cod National Seashore, he declared: “I ... hope that this will be one of a whole series of great seashore parks which will be for the inspiration and enjoyment of people all over the United States.” Since then, others indeed have been created and Cape Cod National Seashore has become one of the most popular of the Nation’s public parks, with more than five million visits each year. The diligent and dedicated participation of the Seashore’s Advisory Commission, composed of 10 state, county, and town representatives, helped park officials devise the first comprehensive master plan for the National Seashore. Nonetheless, the “balancing act” of preservation, recreation, and local rights has not always been an easy or a smooth one. Debates continue over recreational demands versus conservation, controversial uses such as beach buggy access, and development within the park. But there are relatively few who do not recognize not only the economic importance of the Seashore but the critical role it has played in realizing former Senator Leverett Saltonstall’s dream of maintaining Cape Cod “so that other Americans, in dire need of the natural grandeur of the clean, open spaces, will find an outlet from their crowded, grimy, urban lives.”
What you will find here is a different experience from what is offered in our national parks and most of the other national seashores. There is stunning scenic beauty and wildlife in abundance, to be sure, and the chance to explore and enjoy them on foot, horseback, or bicycle, in a canoe or a sailboat, on a guided walk, at an interpretive talk, or, if you like, simply lying on a beach before the rolling waves.
But there is also, by design and intent, the ongoing presence of man, in the hundreds of historic houses, lighthouses, Coast Guard stations, and summer cottages that remain within the Seashore, and in the continuing traditional uses of its lands and waters, such as commercial fishing, lobstering and shellfishing, hunting and berry picking.
On a cloudy day, the Cape’s most obvious icon, the codfish, keeps track of the wind. With a change in the weather, Nauset Marsh glows in autumn light.
The boundaries between Seashore lands, private property, and community facilities are not always obvious. The Provincetown airport and the Nauset Regional High School in Eastham, for instance, both lie within Seashore boundaries. Visitors are asked to observe the “Private Property—Please Respect Owner’s Rights” signs they encounter along many of the Seashore roads and trails. A number of the more popular beaches require local town parking stickers. Cape Cod National Seashore, in other words, is not so much a protected pristine preserve as an ongoing experiment in cooperation between the Federal Government and local communities and their residents who continue to live, work, and play alongside, and often within, the park itself.
Whether you choose to join the summer crowds, or seek a solitary walk along the winter beach, we hope this handbook will acquaint you with enough knowledge of Cape Cod’s rich historic and natural heritage so that your visit here, whether brief or extended, will be more rewarding.
Part 2
A Great Arm in the Sea
Pages 20-21: This satellite view clearly shows the flexed arm shape of the Cape.
Overwashes of sand become readily apparent from the air over North Beach off Chatham.