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.