The Cape Cod National Seashore has been in the news recently after announcing a set of new criteria for leasing eight of the eighteen dune shacks that it owns in the Provincelands. Several of the new “evaluation guidelines” for determining who gets to lease these historic shacks and how they can be used have sparked controversy. But the “guideline” that caught my eye and seems blatantly wrong-headed is the specification that, under the new regulations, the shacks can only be inhabited “from Memorial Day through Labor Day.”
Now, anyone who has ever visited the dunes in autumn knows that it is the best time of the year to be out there – when the summer crowds are gone, the air is crisp and bugless, and bird migration is at its peak. It made me wonder how many of the Park Service officials in Philadelphia who promulgated the new criteria have actually been to the dunes in September and October.
Some parts of the new leasing regulations may be revised, but as it stands now, the future renters of the shacks will be prohibited from occupying them at their finest hours. So, in order to suggest what may be lost under the new policy, I’d like to share some of my experiences of staying in the dune shacks in the fall:
September: These are the wine days, the high autumn days on the Cape, and there is no better place to spend them than in the dunes. Thanks to the generosity our friends, Gary and Laurie, Kathy and I are spending a few days at Peg's, one of eighteen remaining dune shacks spread thinly across the broad, sandy expanse of the Provincelands.
Peg's is named after its former owner, Peg Watson, who was a social worker in New York City. After her death in the early 1980s, the shack was acquired by the Cape Cod National Seashore and gradually fell into disrepair. By the time Gary and Laurie leased it, the porch was gone, the floorboards were rotted out and the roof was about to fall in. Today Peg's has been restored to its original soundness with loving care and attention to detail.
In the mornings we wake to unexpectedly inland sounds: the calls of towhees and blue jays poking and flitting among the thick scrub oak and beach plum shrubs that surround the shack. A song sparrow peeks up out of the brush to the top of a bayberry twig to see what is going on, chipping loudly. Hundreds of tree swallows buzz low over the shack, all heading west toward Race Point, skimming within a few feet of my head, as if they were flying bombing patterns. Dragonflies -- hero darners the size of small helicopters -- chop through the soft air, thick with memory.
To the south heavy rains have flooded the cranberry bogs across the jeep trail, turning them all into miniature, deep-blue lakes. Beyond them, along the crest of the High Dunes, the sky-blue water tower and the top of Provincetown's Pilgrim Monument loom like the Dakota and the Plaza Hotel over Central Park, but in reverse scale and situation. Here it is the Park, or the Seashore, which surrounds and contains the Metropolis of P-T0wn.
We are lazy and grateful, basking in the clear, lucent light under high, arching, autumn skies. All day long an old yellow sightseeing plane drones overhead along the dune ridges. By late afternoon deep shadows begin to curl into the north-facing hollows of the dunes. We see deer tracks, and large pairs of paw prints that might be coyotes. In one place the seed stem of a beachgrass plant has been carried by the wind along the smooth flank of a dune, making a jagged lightning-bolt track in its flank.
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Next week Bob will share some more recollections of being a dune shack dweller in autumn.
