One day earlier this month, I took a walk out to the Marconi Station Site in South Wellfleet by way of Wireless Road. It was along this road that Guglielmo Marconi brought the materials to build his radio towers on the ocean bluff, the site from which he sent the first transatlantic wireless message to England on January 18, 1903. The Marconi Site is only a “site” now, since virtually all of the remnants of the towers and station have tumbled down to the beach. Even the miniature replica of the station that the Cape Cod National Seashore erected on the site in the early 1970s has disappeared in the face of relentless and increasing beach erosion.
As I walked east along the half-mile track to the site, the still-leafless woods became increasingly open and stunted, changing from oak to pitch pine, to juniper and scrub oak and bayberry, until at one point my eyes were startled by a disk of deep blue water rising between the trees.
When I came to the site, I walked down the boardwalk to the bluff overlook – about 40 feet above the beach. There, about a half-mile out to sea, a flock of fifty or sixty gannets were diving and feeding over the water. A stiff southwest breeze rattled the offshore swells, but the gannets in their ceremonial black and white plumage, dove and rose, dove and rose in alternating rhythms, suggesting an avian ballet.
Then, flying out of the flock towards shore, twisting and turning and half-somersaulting directly at me, was a large bird, hawk-like, with dark-brown mottled plumage. It was somewhat larger than a red-tailed-hawk, and it had a narrow falcon-like tail, though it was also substantially
larger than a peregrine falcon. It veered off to my left so that I didn’t have a chance to definitely identify it, but I wondered, could it have been a gyrfalcon? Though rare on the Cape, they are occasionally spotted along the dunes and marshes of the Outer Beach.
The bird headed north, flying low over the dunes and finally disappearing over the Cooks Cottage Colony. Cooks is, as far as I know, the last of the old tourist beachside colonies, at least in its appearance. A half-dozen or so simple, bare shacks float on a desert of sand, without so much as a discernible footpath connecting them. They have only scattered tufts of dune grass for vegetation, and not much of that. Big chunks of the bluff had been ripped away by winter storms, but the cottages, most of them set considerably back from the edge, sit in serene tranquility. For all that one can see, it might be a scene from 1923 instead of 2023 – except, of course, for the lack of Marconi’s radio towers.
