![]() Like Eugene O’Neill more than a half-century later, he marveled at its solitude. In the mid-19th century, Henry David Thoreau paid four visits to the Cape, traveling by rail to Sandwich, then by stagecoach to Orleans, before hoofing it to Provincetown. Fishing built towns like Truro and Provincetown, and then, over time, the ocean became more than just something to work. The water has always been the Cape’s calling card. But it did transform it, maybe even saved it, by creating the opportunity for anyone on a beautiful summer day to strike out along a stretch of coastline and feel as though he has an entire chunk of oceanfront to himself. In an era when the summer vacation became an obsession, in a densely populated part of the country that was starved for public lands, the National Seashore opened nature up to the masses and invited visitors to experience a different kind of seaside: unpolished and undeveloped.ĭid the Seashore make the Cape a tourist destination? Hardly. ![]() In the infancy of a development boom that still has not relented, the new park set aside what would become more than 43,600 acres of prime Outer Cape property for public use: beaches and dunes, freshwater ponds and forests, nearly 40 miles in all of untouched Atlantic coastline from Chatham to Provincetown. Kennedy formally concluded a debate that had roiled the Cape for nearly 30 years when he signed into law the creation of Cape Cod National Seashore. The fact that it can is not some lucky accident. Early visitors squatted on the unwanted sands and built the simple dwellings that still dot the landscape. The dune shacks came under control of the National Park Service when the Seashore was created and were entered on the National Register of Historic Places in 2012. The Seashore’s Province Lands area, which has been under government protection since 1714, has for more than a century attracted artists and writers for its seclusion, light, and mood. They squatted on the unwanted sands or slept in the shacks, and mastered the light and the mood. Cummings Jack Kerouac Mary Oliver Jackson Pollock Willem de Kooning and, perhaps most important, Henry Beston, whose 1928 book, The Outermost House, brought attention to the sheer wild beauty among the sweeping dunes. Other artists and writers soon followed and never stopped: Harry Kemp, known as the “poet of the dunes” E.E. ![]() He bought a dune shack, hunkered down in the silence, and set out to write Anna Christie and The Hairy Ape, two of his most famous works. “A grand place to be alone and undisturbed,” is how the playwright Eugene O’Neill described the Province Lands in 1919. I galloped up the sand to find a stretch just like it all around me, an expansive brown landscape that seemed like another galaxy away from Provincetown’s crowded center but in reality was only a few miles from the souvenir shops, bars, and restaurants. I arrived without a plan or a map, venturing along a short path that cut through a thick forest, which eventually led me to the base of a large dune. ![]() Which is how on a weekday afternoon, I parked at the Snail Road access trail off Route 6 in Provincetown and began walking. As public use of the Seashore takes many forms, so does work to protect the area. An empty beach, a quiet forest, an endless expanse of sand and weather-beaten shacks. “You just have to learn to deal with it.”īut there was another Cape, he told me-one you could find if you were willing to trek off the touristed path. “The Cape in summer,” a longtime Eastham resident told me, with the resignation of someone who’d given up hope that the pressure would ever ease. Along the way I didn’t see another soul, a welcome solitude.įor two days I’d navigated traffic and tourists: the throngs of fellow visitors on Provincetown’s Commercial Street the afternoon jam of cars packing Route 6 in Wellfleet the army of beach seekers at Marconi. It had been a meandering journey, slow and uncertain as I traipsed around scrubby trees and wavy patches of dune grass, climbed and scampered down small hills of sand, all in an effort to make it to the sea. ![]() For the past 45 minutes I’d hiked under an intense July sun, through the sandy landscape in a southern section of the Province Lands, a barren, beautiful, 3,000-acre piece of Cape Cod National Seashore in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The weathered dune shack appeared like a beacon, rising out of the sand as though it had been waiting for me. ![]()
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