“Yes, I’ve been to Cape Cod. Drove all the way to Provincetown and
back. There’s absolutely nothing to it, you know. Nothing but sand and
scrub pine. How anyone could live there, or how anyone could choose to
go there even for a visit is more than I can figure out!”
Every Cape Codder has probably been subjected to some such remark as
the above from some “authority” who has taken all of a half day to
rush down one side of the Cape and up the other, expecting who knows
what miracles and side-shows, but seeing nothing anyway. It is a time
to grit the teeth and be glad, at least, that they won’t be back. And
yet you wish for a minute that you could show them, show them where
the little lane they just passed so quickly led to a view that would
be breath-taking in beauty and good for their souls, show them any of
a thousand things that are waiting for those who would see. For where
under the sun, if not on Cape Cod, could anyone find such infinite
variety of landscape and seascape crowded into so small an area? Some
of the new highways will be uninteresting, it is true, but so they
are anywhere else for they are built for the age of speed when it is
essential to go somewhere in a hurry and there is no time for looking
around. But the new highways were designed by gentlemen with slide
rules far away and they have nothing to do with the old roads that are
still there to give pleasure.
There is, for example, a way of getting all the way down Cape to Truro
and beyond and you need hardly touch any of the Main Roads in doing it.
There is variety enough for anyone. You pass resort-type settlements,
quiet ponds and hidden lakes, farmlands, beaches, vast panorama of two
separate seas, flat plains and rolling dunes, salt meadow and fresh
water brooks, dense pine woods and wind-swept clearings where the pine
and the oak were gnarled and gaunt, but unbeaten. You can stop for a
bit because there is no hurry and you can walk on a special stretch of
beach along the Bay where there are no cottages and no people and the
birds are many and varied. There the Bay smiles broadly all the way
westward to where the protective arm of Wellfleet Harbor curves into
the sea and northward to where the golden prow of Lieutenant’s Island
cuts the water. Here is a beach to be combed, filled with all manner
of treasure, a thousand romances of the sea at your feet. Here is air
that is clean and fresh as it was in the beginning, swirling over a
blue-green Bay, a white strand, and a salt marsh that is honey-colored
in the sun and shot through with veins of brilliant blue by the high
tide.
Leaving the beach to continue down Cape, you come suddenly upon the
strangest scenery of all, where the moors of Wellfleet and Truro
swell out of the Bay in fantastic shapes, and merely condescend to
allow the old County Road to pass through them--which it does not
do easily. The hills have been softly rounded by time and the wind,
and they rise sometimes to great heights, only to fall off into
sheltered valleys where the scrub pines grow. It is a crazy-quilt of
topography and color, nearly smothered by a blanket of wild cranberry
that is glossy-green in summer and scarlet in winter. The road is a
roller-coaster, crossing and recrossing the railway, climbing tediously
upwards and rushing suddenly downwards, winding snakelike, and almost
repeating itself through the moors. And rounding each blind curve you
come upon another sweeping view of the Bay, and of the flat hook of
Provincetown in the distance. And always around you are the sand hills,
like great ocean swells.
On some hills there are houses, so precariously perched that one
expects to see them disappear like a ship into the trough of the
waves. Sometimes the rains tear at the slopes and leave jagged scars;
sometimes the blanket of wild cranberry is lifted to show the sand
beneath, rose-colored in the sun. The telegraph poles along the
highway stretch doggedly but insignificantly across the moors, black
silhouettes that have adapted themselves to the surroundings until they
look as if they might always have been there.
The moors have the look of old lands that might have been in at the
writing of history. The encroachments of civilization upon them look
temporary and out of place, and the sand hills have that about them
which is eternal. These moors looked out upon the Mayflower in 1620
and felt the pioneer feet of Miles Standish and the other Pilgrims who
set out from Provincetown to explore the Truro shore. At Corn Hill
they discovered the Indian corn cache that was to mean so much to them
in their struggle for survival. In these lands they found the strange
grave of a white man indicating that not even Europeans were a novelty
to these old hills. To the south, at Eastham, they had their first
encounter with the Indians. It was this Bay shore that provided them
with spring water, food, and the feel of land beneath feet that were
weary from the motions of the ship. Looking for the familiar they found
these dunes to be reminiscent of Holland, and they carefully gathered
and took back to the ship any vegetation which looked like that of
home. Then, with new courage, they turned their backs on home. They
turned their backs on these moors that had given them succor. And then
they sailed westward, into immortality.