The 19 dune shacks in the Peaked Hill Bars Historic District of the Cape Cod National Seashore might be the most famous Outer Cape landmarks that many people have never actually seen.
They’re visible in the distance on dune tours to Race Point. If you have the stamina, you can hike to them from the trail at the end of Snail Road. They are unforgettable to anyone who has been fortunate enough to stay in one, whether through a residency or family connection or good luck in the lotteries held by the Provincetown Community Compact and the Peaked Hill Trust that allocate a handful of reservations every year. For most of us, though, they remain inaccessible.
The dune shacks have fascinated photographer Jane Paradise for more than 15 years. Her new book, The Dune Shacks of Provincetown, brings them into sharper focus and in more detail than they have ever been depicted before — while still preserving the magical quality that has captivated imaginations for the past century.
Paradise says she examined “probably thousands” of photographs to select the nearly 200 in her book. They include not only exterior and interior photographs of the shacks themselves but also views of the landscape that surrounds them through the seasons and in every type of weather.
The images are paired with quotations from the artists, writers, poets, naturalists, and Outer Cape residents whose families have owned and loved their dune shacks for generations.
“It’s really a cultural history of Provincetown and the people who have stayed in the shacks over the years,” Paradise says.
She designed the book in collaboration with New York-based artist Joanne Dugan, and they paid careful attention to detail. In researching the material to accompany the photos, Paradise says, she created a spreadsheet to collect hundreds of anecdotes, observations, and musings about the dune shacks and the Outer Cape.
The quotations constitute a veritable who’s who of luminaries with connections to Provincetown and Truro: “Notable visitors to these windswept shores include Mary Oliver, Norman Mailer, Eugene O’Neill, Anne Patchett, Edmund Wilson, E.E. Cummings, Jackson Pollock, Tennessee Williams, and Jack Kerouac, who wrote part of On the Road here,” writes Paradise in her foreword.
But there are many less familiar names as well. “It was important to convey the cultural history of the back shore while not neglecting stories of local families, who sometimes feel forgotten with all the emphasis on the artists and writers who have stayed in the shacks,” says Paradise. “That’s why there’s an essay by Mildred Champlin, who’s in her 90s now. She’s had a dune shack with her family since the 1950s. Her essay is about what it’s like to really live out there in the dunes.”
For Champlin, each structure has its own character, developed over generations. “We’re lucky enough to spend months and years experiencing the wonderful environment, the reward for the dues we pay in hard work,” she writes. “Each shack is distinct from the others, reflecting the minds, imaginations, and personalities of the people who worked so hard on them.”
In his introduction, Michael Mailer describes the annual ritual of moving into one of the shacks with his mother and brother. The journey from their home on the east end of Commercial Street to the dunes took on an epic quality:
“Every summer, usually in June, my mother would book a week in either of the dune shacks, Euphoria or Thalassa, owned by Hazel Hawthorne … We would then pack up and load our week’s worth of supplies into a friend’s four-wheel-drive truck and embark on our journey across the dunes to get to our shack. Often the shortest route was dicey, for it involved traversing the highest of the sand dunes that only the sturdiest of trucks with enough speed could mount. I felt as if I were Lawrence of Arabia crossing the great and impenetrable Nefud Desert.”
The range of observations — from the pragmatic to the poetic — creates a book that is more than just a visual chronicle: it falls between a collective memoir and a kaleidoscopic portrait of a community.
“I like to think of our community as a tapestry, with the families and individuals as the warp, some long threads, stretching back over a half century, some a bit shorter, but just as important in the overall pattern,” writes Champlin. “The weft is the associated way of life that we have had in common, raising our families, creating beautiful things, working hard at the tough problems we all face in the unique landscape.”
In the end, Paradise’s project conveys the reassuring continuity of the shacks, which have survived decades of harsh weather, occasional neglect, and outside change. The seemingly ephemeral structures have become still points in the turning world that is Provincetown and the Outer Cape.
“The shacks will outlive us,” writes Paradise. “They have so far. We must believe that.”
Jane Paradise’s The Dune Shacks of Provincetown will be published by Schiffer Publishing on Dec. 6, 2022.
