About a third of a mile east of Route 6 in my hometown of Wellfleet, one comes upon the longest remaining continuous stretch of the original King's Highway, the first road deliberately laid out down the entire length of Cape Cod. This road gets its name from the fact that in 1660, King Charles II of England gave a royal grant to have this road constructed.
Over the past three and a half centuries, most of the original King’s Highway has been widened and paved, or simply lost and obliterated. But here, for over a mile, one can trace the old route along its original contours. Here the ancient colonial road is no more than a narrow dirt cart path running through shady and quiet woods. It seems indistinguishable from any of the other wood roads that labyrinth their way through this section of Wellfleet.
At one point, it climbs over a fairly steep hill that would have been difficult for wagons and coaches to negotiate. Here the roadbed has been worn down three or four feet below the bordering shoulders by the traffic of centuries. Along the road there are a couple of 18th Century Cape farmhouses, the sites of old stagecoach inns, and ancient pear and apple orchards that still grow heavy with fruit in late summer. All these things give evidence that this out-of-the-way cart path in these semi-isolated woods was once a vital artery running through active settlements.
If you walk along this stretch of the Old King’s Highway in mid-summer you’re likely to hear music to the east. The secluded pine woods ripple and hum with the muted and overlapping sounds of drums, cornets, mandolins, violins, guitars, and other instruments. The varying and broken strands of music that filter through the afternoon air have an informal, lackadaisical quality to them, starting and stopping in mid-phrase, like birdsong. I like to fancy that they are produced by Wellfleet’s local community of Hobbits. In fact, they emanate from a scattered, extensive community of summer cottages, most of them older ones predating the National Seashore. These structures are strung out around the cluster of unexcelled freshwater ponds at the head of the Herring River and along a bewildering complex of sand roads.
In these haphazard rhythms and snatches of melody one can sense the strong role that these woods and houses that they hide perform for their seasonal inhabitants. It’s a role that they can never play for those of us who, like myself, live here year-round, because it’s a strictly seasonal role. For these summer refugees from the cities and suburbs, this must be a place out of their accustomed life, a place out of regulated time, removed from the resigned and inexorable flow of weekly schedules and jobs. I imagine it provides them with a setting of wide margins, where they can be lost in a maze of unregulated soft dirt roads and sky-blue ponds, their location identified only by some rough wooden sign tacked to a pine trunk at an unnamed intersection in the woods. It’s a place where, for a weekend, two weeks, a month or a season, these summer people can still be who they once dreamed they were, relaxing and making tentative music for its own sake, music that now echoes anonymously back and forth across the waters that separate them.
