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A Cape Cod Notebook can be heard every Tuesday morning at 8:45am and afternoon at 5:45pm.It's commentary on the unique people, wildlife, and environment of our coastal region.A Cape Cod Notebook commentators include:Robert Finch, a nature writer living in Wellfleet who created, 'A Cape Cod Notebook.' It won the 2006 New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing.

Honoring the Democratic Impulse of Gathering at Dusk Along the Coast

John Chapman bit.ly/2g7sRAj
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bit.ly/1hYHpKw

I drove down to Paine's Creek at dusk with coffee and a Danish from the nearby Dunkin’ Donuts. The beach was white and clean in the dying light. The marsh grass was all tawny, heavy and thick in the fullness of its growth. It toppled over itself in windrows with its own accumulated mass, weighted like the heavy boughs of the apple tree behind my garden.

The water was calm, almost placid, and rimmed with a translucent collar of slush ice. Small rafts of eiders bobbed calmly on the viscous, unbroken waters of the bay.

Beyond the lines of white bars and sky-blue shoal water, I could see two or three white lobster boats, marked by their pug-like one-man cabins and laden with multicolored buoys and floats. They plied the horizontal waters, leaving long white wakes behind them in neat parallel lines, as if their purpose out there were purely artistic, solely to extend the receding, repetitive patterns of bar lines out to the horizon, and so complete the design. 

The flooding tide ran into the funneled mouth of Paine’s Creek in full, cold, clear, green strength, chivvied along by the faster wind-ripples flying over its surface. The tide was beating in, pulsing in over the sand shelf in rhythmic surges, throwing forward an arm of water, damping and darkening the white sand, retreating momentarily, then beating in again. There was no great advance with each surge, but it was unequivocal, increasing its domain over the beach, foot by foot, with each series of beats.

There were two or three other cars in the parking lot, and we huddled against the coming night, watching as the dark silhouettes of gulls, like windblown leaves, sailed out over Freeman's Pond into the bay. Not only are the gatherings at this landing superficially democratic, with rusty pickups and Lexus sedans parked side by side, but their occupants all come for the most democratic of reasons: simply to see what is there.

There may not be anything remarkable or even specific to see - this evening's sunset, for instance, was dull, overcast, indeterminate - but it is the wideness of the space itself, the openness, and the possibilities of that openness, that draw us down to this spot. Often we get no farther than the front seats of our vehicles, but that is far enough to confront, to some degree, if only in contrast to our own quotidian lives, the uncompromising originality of what we behold. It may not change our lives, but it will be an image we will never be able to lose or ignore completely.

Robert Finch is a nature writer living in Wellfleet. 'A Cape Cod Notebook' won the 2006 New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing.