Thoreau’s Cape Cod

He was a comical little figure, Chaplinesque in his baggy suit and flapping coat. He twirled an umbrella as he strode.

Yet even for Henry David Thoreau, man-about-town of Concord, whose two years of living in the woods led to his masterwork “Walden,” his attire seemed curiously inappropriate on that day. The New England author, eccentric and naturalist had set off to walk not a city street but the 25 miles of uninterrupted beach stretching along the Atlantic coast of Cape Cod from Eastham to land’s end in Provincetown.

The date: Oct. 11, 1849. Rain squalls drove over the beach. Thoreau would take three days to reach his destination at the tip of Cape Cod, spending nights on the way in the cottages of an oysterman and a lighthouse keeper.

Ever since that blustery fall morning, a trek along the outer Cape has been called “Thoreau’s Walk.” And last October, starting out in much the same kind of weather Thoreau had encountered, I followed in his tracks.

On the map, Cape Cod has a singularly distinctive outline. It juts deep into the Atlantic from mainland Massachusetts like a bent, arthritic arm. Eastham can be found just above the elbow; Provincetown in the palm of the fist.

Created by Ice Age glaciers, shaped and reshaped by wind and tide, the peninsula’s shore is a hiker’s paradise. “A wild, rank place” without “flattery” is the way Thoreau described it in his posthumously published travel memoir, “Cape Cod.”

Like Thoreau, I arrived in the wake of a great northeast storm that had lashed the coast. But I came equipped with Gortex rain gear and waterproof boots. I toted a light rucksack containing a change of clothes, some water, bread and cheese.

Thoreau also had carried a knapsack, I recalled, but as much for his sewing materials and fishing line as for his bread and “junk of heavy cake.” As he walked, he would sometimes fish or forage for food. Once, to his later regret, he roasted a large surf clam over a driftwood fire.

“Though it was very tough,” he recorded in his journal, “I found it sweet and savory, and ate the whole with relish.” Later, however, Thoreau noted dryly, “In the course of the evening I began to feel the potency of the clam . . . and I was made quite sick by it.”

*

I began my journey at the old abandoned Coast Guard station on Nauset Light Beach in Eastham. Now part of the Cape Cod National Seashore, the beach lies a mile and a half east of the National Park Service’s Salt Pond Visitor Center and Museum.

From Eastham to Provincetown, all of the shore I was to hike upon is under federal jurisdiction. A few privately owned houses are still to be seen--but no more can be built. Long after Thoreau’s time the Cape’s coastline remains pristine, isolated territory, removed from development: a primal landscape of sea, dune and salt marsh with a great surf crashing upon the beach.

This is the so-called outer beach on the eastern side. And to the west, the Cape’s inner shore presents a far less turbulent look. For about 40 miles, an elongated crescent of hardened sand edges a calm and shallow bay--in effect, an adjunct sea separating the Cape from mainland Massachusetts.

Yet regardless of the coast, on Cape Cod the fall sea retains a vestige of its August warmth. This is the season when bayberry, plum and scrub oak turn crimson and bronze, when the summer crowds have left, when nearly deserted beaches beckon the occasional surf fisherman--armored against the wind in waders and muffler--casting for bass.

Now and again a solitary walker nods a greeting as he passes, kicking up a spatter of shells--although in three days of tramping, I met no more than a handful of fishermen.

As I stepped out onto the sand at the beginning of my trek and headed north, I could hear a powerful autumnal roar along the outer beach. The tide was high; the storm-roiled surf thundered onto the foreshore in swirls and geysers of chalky foam.

On my left as I walked, the dunes--although steep--had been carved away at their base by surging tides. On my right, the overfall of surf washed so insistently up the shore that I fled from relatively firm footing at the ocean’s rim to a loose, shelving beach below the bluffs.

I quickly began to tire. I had underestimated the drag of trudging ankle-deep through sand. To my dismay, it had taken an hour of calf-aching effort to cover the first mile.

Beneath Nauset’s lighthouse I stopped briefly to rest. Soon I could detect the first withdrawing flow of an ebbing tide. As the beach widened, the walking became easier. At water’s edge, sandpipers skittered in front of me. I chased up flights of gulls. A smell of sea wrack filled the air--that peculiar perfume of kelp rot and salt.

*

The sun was doused in a gunmetal sky; the wind had a chilling bite. Ahead, dunes fringed with grasses the color of straw curled to the horizon like a long, low wave about to break.

Morning gave way to afternoon, and when I reckoned from the map I had hiked six miles, I opted to call it a day. A notch in the bluffs--I identified it as Lecount Hollow--opened out of the murk and funneled inland a mile on macadam to Route 6, the Cape’s main highway.

From there it was a short walk to a respite of profound and dreamless sleep in today’s equivalent of a Thoreauvian fisherman’s cottage, a 30-room motel on the outskirts of a onetime whaling village, Wellfleet.

Next morning, I tallied my reserves of stamina. Robust, I decided, but not unlimited. I wisely trimmed some distance from the trek. A Thoreau purist would have doubled back to Lecount Hollow and resumed where he had left off. Instead, I strolled along the springy shoulder of Route 6--north about a mile--veering east on Cross Hill Road.

I rejoined the beach at a map coordinate called Newcomb Hollow, managing to save three miles’ hiking in sand. And by timing my arrival for ebb tide, I found ample beach to walk on.

The day was cold but windless, the sky overcast. In the hard sand between the tide marks I quickened my pace through a storm debris of shells and driftwood. North of the mouth of the Pamet River the rollers crested in staggered volutes, folded back on themselves, collapsed in booming bursts of froth and foam.

There was, however a new, steadier rhythm to surf and waves. The breakers spilled up the coast in broad, scalloped sheets. They impressed me as relics--or harbingers--of the sea’s destructive power.

Over the centuries, thousands of vessels have fallen prey to this battered and barren shoreline at an incalculable cost in human life. I recalled Thoreau’s observation that in a Pamet graveyard alone he had come upon a memorial to dozens of Cape fishermen lost in a single autumn gale.

Later, as he roamed the neighboring town of Truro, he dared not speak of the sea or ships. “Who lives in that house?” he asked in one memorable exchange. “Three widows,” was the reply.

*

My journey up the great beach was drawing to a close. After a second night’s lodging inland on Route 6, this time in North Truro, I made an early morning start over local roads for the final leg on a falling tide.

I reached the shore well up the forearm of the Cape at Head of the Meadow Beach, near North Truro, with its undulating sweep of eroding bluffs. Here the peninsula began a long parabolic curve westward eight miles to the headland of Race Point Beach, and I faced another two-mile walk into the center of Provincetown.

(Provincetown is a thriving tourist haven in summer, but in the fall the town begins to turn quiet, as its year-round population is a modest 4,000.)

Striding out with an easy motion, I reveled in the world around me. Today it was a world of elemental pleasures. The sun had broken through low-lying mist; patches of dune scrub rioted with October color.

It took little imagination to picture Thoreau plodding north on his own last day, scanning the horizon for a storm cloud or a schooner sail. I reminded myself of his parting encounter with the outer beach:

“There is naked nature,” he confided to his journal, “nibbling at the cliffy shore”--precincts, he added in tribute, where a walker “may stand . . . and put all America behind.”

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GUIDEBOOK

Cape Walk

Getting there: You can fly nonstop from LAX to Boston on American or United airlines and connect on Cape Air or US Airways Express to Hyannis Airport for $592 round trip. Car rental firms are at Hyannis Airport. Take Route 6--the principal Cape Cod road--to Eastham.

Where to hike: Begin “Thoreau’s Walk” in Eastham, where there is free parking at the Cape Cod National Seashore’s Little Creek Staging Area on Doane Road near Nauset Light Beach. In Provincetown, at the walk’s end, the Plymouth & Brockton Bus Co., telephone (508) 778-9767, provides return service to Eastham from MacMillan Wharf for $5. Except in storm conditions, the beaches along the Atlantic side are generally accessible at high tide. But the Cape Cod National Seashore does not permit overnight camping; hikers must seek lodging inland.

Where to stay: Ideally located for the end of the first day’s walk is the Mainstay Motor Inn, 2068 State Road, South Wellfleet 02663; tel. (508) 349-2350. Fall room rates: $48-$52. For the second night’s stop, try the Truro Motor Inn, P.O. Box 364, North Truro 02652; tel. (508) 487-3628. Rates: $39-$69. Cape View Motel, P.O. Box 114, North Truro 02652; tel. (508) 487-0363. Rates: $46-$59.

Where to eat: Lighthouse Restaurant, 317 Main St., Wellfleet; tel. (508) 349-3681. Whitman House, Route 6, North Truro; tel. (508) 487-1740. Seafood entrees--fried clams, oysters, boiled lobster, scallops, swordfish kebab, filet of sole--start at about $14.

For more information: Eastham Chamber of Commerce, P.O. Box 1329, Eastham, MA 02642; tel. (508) 240-7211. Provincetown Chamber of Commerce, P.O. Box 1017, Provincetown, MA 02657; tel. (508) 487-3424.