I was standing on Uncle Tim’s Bridge the other afternoon, a wooden pedestrian bridge in Wellfleet Center that spans Duck Creek linking the island of Cannon Hill to Commercial Street. The tide was high and the air was calm, so that the sky, brilliantly blue, was reflected like a mirror in the water.
Great blocks of white cumulus clouds drifted across the reflected sky like abstract forms of old packet ships that once sailed up this creek. Clouds – those suggestive piles of water vapor – water vessels moving across moving water…
What a watery place this Cape Cod is! I remember a day, many years ago, when a friend of mine first took me up in her private plane for a flight over the entire Cape. I was aware, of course, of the number of ponds, creeks, marshes and estuaries that dot the Cape landscape, but from a height of several thousand feet it looked not so much like a solid landform as a thin, tattered sheet of sand floating on the ocean, with blue showing through in hundreds of places.
Over the years the Cape towns that have attracted me most have also, it seems, been the most watery ones. The first town I lived in here was Orleans, and what appealed to me about it, then and now, is how it is invaded by the sea on almost every side: by Pleasant Bay on the south, Nauset Harbor to the east, Town Cove to the north, and Namskaket and Rock Harbor Creeks to the west.
Brewster, the town where I lived the longest, has abundant clusters of fresh-water ponds peppering its landscape. But even more, it is the town where the land at low tide pushes furthest out into Cape Cod Bay. I read once that Brewster has the largest area of tidal flats on the East Coast, in places going out well over a mile from dry land.
Wellfleet, where I live now, also has a marvelous collection of ponds as well as the Herring River system, but its true watery identity has been hidden for well over a century. That, however, is about to change. I’ve spoken before on this program of the Herring River Restoration project. This is a joint effort by the Town, State and Federal Governments to reverse the effects of the dike built at the mouth of the Herring River in 1909 in an ill-conceived effort to control mosquitoes and create more arable land. The actual effect of the dike was to greatly reduce the tidal flow into the Herring River estuary, and thus reduce the original salt marsh ecosystem to a fraction of its natural state.
Last fall the Wellfleet Library held a series of seminars on the project. John Portnoy, a retired scientist with the Cape Cod National Seashore who has been spearheading this project for years, spelled out the benefits of restoring the original tidal flow. What struck me most was a map of the town projected onto a screen which showed the original – and anticipated future – extent of the Herring River salt marsh and its tributary creeks. It was remarkable. It reminded me that Wellfleet is not so much a contiguous block of upland dotted with wetlands as a series of small islands connected by roads but otherwise separated by creeks, marshes and estuaries. It may take a century to realize fully, but it represented a marvelous watery mosaic that our grandchildren may one day see in all its restored glory.
