Provincetown

This photo of Race Point Beach was taken by Tom and Maggie, not me. Gotta start carrying a good camera instead of pilfering from the internet, I suppose.

I went to Provincetown for a night by myself back in April. I almost didn't, because I couldn't afford it, but I had been longing for such a night away for years and years, and something told me it was time.

April is a wet, chilly month in New England, and the grasses were not yet as green as those in Tom and Maggie's picture. It was too early in the year for vacationers, and the day I drove down was supposed to be full of rain. As I left town, making my way past King's Beach, the waves were huge and choppy, breaking spectacularly over the seawall, but before I even hit the tunnel that hugs Boston and heads to the South Shore, the dark clouds broke up and I could turn the wipers off.

Three hours later I was in Provincetown. I sat in my car in the parking lot of the inn where I was staying, eating a lunch of olives, crackers, and cheese that I had packed up back home. The wind was whipping in all directions but the sky had remained blue, and it was surprisingly warm. I put my hair back in an elastic and walked a bit toward the breakwater. On a better day I could walk it out to Long Point, which curls into Cape Cod Bay, but not that day, the wind was too fierce.

In the other direction was the road to Herring Cove Beach. Not far along it was a barricade; it was closed to both cars and foot traffic. It had been a particularly tough winter, and the road was not yet cleared of brush and sand. I got in my car and headed for the other side of the penninsula, the ocean side, and Race Point Beach.

I love the quiet on the very tip of the Cape. I love having ocean hugging close on three sides. It feels fragile and remote. I often wonder how living in a place like this would change me, city-dweller that I am, so used to things being solid and overwrought.

The parking lot was mostly empty. Some college-aged kids were playing touch football on the beach, and couples were walking their dogs. Curiously, the wind was nothing more than a light breeze there, although Race Point faces the open Atlantic. I started up the beach in the direction of Race Point Light, the very tip of the Cape.

I followed other people's footprints for a while, then past where they had turned to go back and the footprints disappeared. The dunes curved gently to my left. The ocean glittered widely to my right, somewhat choppy. It took a while, but after almost an hour, I started to notice the puffs of mist here and there over the dashes of foam. By the time I could see the lighthouse rising up over the dunes, I knew I was seeing whales out there, and quite a few of them, too.

The wind was fierce again when I rounded the bend and could see marshes and Herring Cove spread out before me; a couple of women sat on the sand with their dogs. I had seen no one else for almost an hour, and didn't care to see them, or them me, as they didn't acknowledge me at all (which makes Provincetown sort of funny...some people smile and say hello as you pass, and some ignore you like it's Boston). I turned and headed back.

The sun was warm. It was dipping lower down the sky as it was getting close to four, but the slices of clouds managed to stay out of the way. Flocks of birds dotted the wet sand at the water's edge. I kept my path as close to the dunes as the feds permitted (there are markers along them to keep people out), not wanting to disturb them. The whales weren't breaching, but I could sometimes spot the tip of a tail or the edge of a back as they came up to spout. Birds circled the air wherever there was a whale (that's one way to spot them--a crowd of birds over a choppy piece of ocean).

It was an amazing stroke of luck...whales, birds, sand, sun, and quiet solitude.

The rest of my night away was pleasant and restful--an excellent dinner at the renowned Lobster Pot, a little shopping for salt water taffy and whatnot on Commercial Street the next day, and a meandering drive home along the coast (Truro Light, the both quaint and opulent town of Chatham, and so on)--but the unexpected two hours on Race Point Beach was why I came.

It made all the reasons why I needed it fall away.

I discovered only the other day that what I had been seeing was an unusually large number of right whales congregated in the waters off of Cape Cod. There are only 473 North Atlantic right whales in existence. 201 were counted in Cape Cod waters off of Provincetown on April 20th (here's the link: http://www.coastalstudies.org/whats-new/4-20-11.htm , which I can't make any prettier because a kitten got on the keyboard and killed my plus-sign key).

My bank account was screaming "don't go", but my gut feeling was insisting "GO", in that firm and inarguable way it has with insisting things. My gut feeling does not lie (which will be the subject of another post someday, I am very sure). Thank you, gut feeling (although my bank account didn't lie, either, and I'm still a little behind, but I'm used to that sort of thing anyway)...

Thank you, whales.

(You can see the top left corner where Race Point Light is, Race Point Beach along the top left, Herring Cove Beach down the left side, and the hook of sand down the bottom where Long Point is, into Cape Cod Bay. This view is south-north, not north-south.)

Ariel view of a North Atlantic right whale--

The Lighthouse

I went down to the lighthouse this evening. That place has always been particularly special to me. My father would take us kids down there after supper as often as once a week when it wasn't the dead of winter. He'd say, "Let's go to Chandler Hovey Park and throw rocks in the water!" One of my favorite pictures of me is age three, standing at the base of the lighthouse with a warm coat and hat on, smiling. It's a nice perspective--someone must have squatted down quite low to get it, as it looks up at my face and at the lighthouse rising above me.

The waves were crashing hard--there must have been a storm out to sea; we were supposed to get rain today, but got nothing much more than a low, gray sky--and the white foam shone in the dusk. I sat in the car, parked down the end of the lot looking out toward the open sea rather than the harbor and Beverly. It was too cold to wander out on the rocks and not be distracted and shivering, but warm enough to sit in the car for quite some time with the engine off and just be quiet.

Nobody else came the entire time I was there. I think sitting at the lighthouse tonight was the first time in a long, long time I have completely stopped and been where I was--not in my head, but in a place. My head is often in good shape, so I can be up there fairly comfortably with all my thoughts rattling around each other in a gentle way, and I don't tend to seek solace in places anyway. I've got my notebooks for that, and music, and driving around when the traffic isn't a hinderance (I used to love very early Sunday morning when the sun was coming up). I remember being a kid and knowing all the rocks and tree roots in the backyard, and finding them magical, but those days are long gone and have not been replaced.

Tonight I watched the waves, and after a while it came to me that I was the only human being on the entire planet witnessing them. This small, jagged bit of land on the edge of an ocean was mine, for this short time, because it had no scruple about sharing itself with me.

Dusk had turned to night by the time I left, and I thought of the edges of land and water all around the continents, and the people along them looking out over the expanse of dark water and choppy seas like mine, either now or yesterday or tomorrow, and there was some tremendous comfort in that. There's something about feeling deeply connected that gives me peace.



Edit: The next morning, the 8.9 earthquake and tsunami had devastated Japan. Which has nothing to do with me posting about coastlines and permanence the night before, but gave me a bit of a start. Coastlines can change. Nothing is permanent. Practice peace in the turmult. Easier said than done.