Exploring Historic Cape Cod’s Pristine Beaches and Dunes

“A storm in the fall or winter is the time to visit it; a lighthouse or a fisherman’s hut the true hotel. A man may stand there and put all America behind him.”

So read the last lines of Henry David Thoreau’s “Cape Cod.” The book, written in the 1850s, records the impressions that Thoreau gathered during three visits to what he called the “Great Beach”--in 1849, 1850 and 1855.

His penetrating eye took in the landscape, its flora and fauna, as well as the scattered denizens of Cape Cod.

And he did not miss the frailness of its beauty; he wrote of the need to respect and preserve this rare landscape. As if heeding his words, the federal government established the Cape Cod National Seashore in 1961.

Stretching the 42 miles from Chatham in the south to Provincetown in the north, the national park will eventually encompass 27,000 acres. With the exception of Nauset Inlet, the beach fronts the Atlantic Ocean in an unbroken line; inshore its dunes hide ponds and pine forests, bike paths and hiking trails.

Visitor’s Centers

To explain the history and ecology of the cape, the National Park Service has established four visitor centers. The southernmost, at Eastham, overlooks Salt Pond, where varieties of shellfish are cultivated in floating nurseries.

A paved, two-mile bicycle path winds from the visitor center north to Coast Guard Beach. Shorter walking trails wend through the marshes.

In the museum are exhibits portraying the history of the cape, and in its auditorium is a film demonstrating the cape’s geology. At the visitor center a little book, “The Outermost House,” by Henry Beston, is for sale.

In 1927 Beston had a friend build him a 16-by-20-foot, two-room house. He chose a site on Nauset Beach in Eastham just north of the inlet, that narrow break where the sea enters, forming Nauset Harbor and the lagoons and ponds that steal into the “elbow” of the Cape.

It was a sturdy house--it had to be, for it stood on a mound just 20 feet above the high-tide mark. “Fo’castle,” he called it. Beston had intended to use it as a temporary retreat, but when he arrived in September “the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go.”

Response to Seasons

He stayed a year, chronicling his response to the seasons--their effects on the birds, the sea and surf, the beach and all its tiny organisms.

Life on the great beach was not always tranquil. A northeasterly storm descended in February, when “Fo’castle stood solid as a rock, but its wall thrummed in the gale,” and in June a thunderstorm ripped through the cape. Beston wrote of “the violent, inhuman light . . . on the great solitary dunes staringly empty of familiar shadows.”

A gifted writer, Beston hones the reader’s sensitivity to the sometimes violent, sometimes subtle world of the great beach.

The house was destroyed in a hurricane of 1978. Declared a literary monument, it had been moved farther inland, but even that precaution could not save it.

Two miles north stood a Coast Guard station, and its crew provided the main source of Beston’s contact with his fellow man.

He would take long walks and then join the crew for a cup of coffee, while the men, patrolling the beach at night, would often knock on his door and be treated to the same.

Seamen Rescued

The “wardens of Cape Cod,” he called them; these were the “surfmen” who risked their lives in the most difficult weather to rescue seamen clinging to disabled or wrecked ships in the storm-tossed water off the cape.

And they were kept busy: During that winter five ships went down, with a loss of at least 10 lives.

The outer cape is 30 miles from the mainland of Massachusetts and its long arm of beach, unprotected against ocean storms, flanks an active shipping lane used by East Coast ports.

Some 19th-Century Cape Cod residents were accused of “mooncussing”--waving lanterns on a moonless night to attract ships to the rocky shores; the salvage from a ship run aground could be highly profitable.

No one knows how prevalent this infamous practice was; it is true that some residents objected to the building of lighthouses. But no one can question the heroic record built up by the cape’s Coast Guard stations.

In crews of eight housed in stations five miles apart, they kept patrol by day and night over their section of beach. The station Beston frequented at Coast Guard Beach has been converted to a museum. The history of the crews is detailed, and the equipment they used is on display.

Mayflower Passed By

Undoubtedly the most famous ship to sail through these waters was the Mayflower, and it was just before the landing at Provincetown that the New World was first sighted off Nauset Beach.

“After many difficulties in boisterous storms, at length, by God’s providence, upon the 9th of November we espied land, which we deemed to be Cape Cod, and so afterward it proved,” read the firsthand account.

On the bay side of Eastham, 2 1/2 miles from the Atlantic, is First Encounter Beach, so named because a party from the Mayflower met Indians for the first time there. An unhappy meeting it was: musket fire and arrows were exchanged.

Just north of Eastham lies the town of Wellfleet; here, at Marconi Beach, the first transatlantic wireless communication was transmitted, a greeting exchanged between England’s King Edward VII and President Theodore Roosevelt.

The Italian physicist Guglielmo Marconi, recognizing the geographical advantages of this lonely bluff in Wellfleet, had built his first station here in 1901.

When high winds off the cape brought down its wooden towers he built another, this one of steel, and on Jan. 19, 1903, made contact with a sister station in Cornwall, England.

Steady Erosion

The federal government closed Marconi Station during World War I and later, due to the steady erosion of the cliff, had it dismantled.

The National Park Service, in this, its Marconi Station area, has built a model to demonstrate the creation of the famed inventor. Several of the original concrete bases can still be seen; those on the ocean side have slipped partway down the bluff.

Cape Cod’s narrowest point here, only a mile across. Just to the north it widens, then thins out at Truro, the “wrist” of the Cape Cod “arm.”

Pilgrim Heights is here, the third area managed by the National Park Service; it marks the route of the first explorations conducted by the Pilgrims after they landed in Provincetown.

At the “fist” of the cape, close to the northern tip of Race Point Beach, is the Province Lands visitor center, its first floor devoted to historical and environmental displays, its top floor serving as an observation deck. The busy community of Provincetown lies to the south but the rest of the view is beach, dunes and open ocean--those timeless vistas that first attracted Thoreau nearly 150 years ago.

“It was with singular emotions that we first stood upon it and discovered what a place we had chosen to walk on,” he wrote.

Desolate Area

Starting from Eastham and covering the 30 miles or so to Provincetown, he turned inland now and then, in part to find accommodations, for along the beach he saw not one house. He stayed with a Wellfleet fisherman one night and at the Highland Light in Truro another night.

Thoreau wrote as pointedly of the cape’s few inhabitants as he did of its landscape, its animal and plant life. On some days the scene struck him with such clarity that, as he says, “We thought we could see the other side” (the coast of Spain).

Today’s visitor cannot follow exactly in his footsteps: 100 years of wave activity have shifted the sands, so that Thoreau’s route lies 400 feet offshore.

But thanks to the Cape Cod National Seashore, one can still walk for miles along pristine beaches and dunes and still feel the pulse of life, the raw beauty, that brought Thoreau, Beston and countless writers and artists to the cape.

The visitor may well experience the kind of journey’s aftermath that Thoreau mentioned after he returned to Boston: “I had a gill of Provincetown sand in my shoes . . . and I seemed to hear that sea roar, as if I lived in a shell, for a week afterward.”

The Eastham Chamber of Commerce, Route 6, Fort Hill Road, Eastham, Mass. 02642, phone (617) 255-3444, has listings of available lodgings and restaurants for that area, and Orleans B&B; Associated, Box 1312 C, Orleans, Mass. 02653, phone (617) 255-3824 lists bed and breakfast places.

Directories for the entire Cape may be obtained from B&B; Cape Cod, Box 341, West Hyannisport, Mass. 02672, phone (617) 775-2772, and B&B; House Guests, Box AR, Dennis, Mass. 02638, phone (617) 398-0787.