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PROVINCETOWN — As he trekked across the dunes with half of the fifth-grade class from the Provincetown IB Schools, Mark Adams slowed the pace for a moment to call attention to the ephemeral nature of the Province Lands.
“Everything here is an expression of the wind,” he said. “This is a frozen wave of sand we’re standing on.”
The greens, golds, pinks, and reds of just a few weeks ago have given way to a sepia-toned world, awash in amber, russet, and ash. I pull up to my cottage, step out into the cold, and the silence stuns me. The chatty catbirds and squawking jays are absent. Even the woodpeckers have taken leave. And where are the rabbits? I am alone here, with the winter-knocking wind.
The driving rain and howling winds hardly registered as we moved towards our rendezvous at Race Point beach. Our excitement was too strong; no amount of inclemency could put a damper on that.
Months ago, Shannon and I had applied to stay at a dune shack through the Provincetown Community Compact. Open to all and selected by lottery, community residencies are granted throughout the year. Fate had smiled and now it was our time to slip across the sand and leave modern life behind.
The dune ride to the C-Scape shack was a trip back in time. With every turn of the tires we ventured deeper into the past.
I’ve known these shacks since the third grade, the year my mom drove the orange Pinto packed with my sister and me and all our belongings into Provincetown. We would walk in the dunes right past those mysterious shacks. They must have been inhabited by hermits, I thought. I never asked. Later, my friends and I would pack a lunch and a thermos of iced tea for walks from High Head to Provincetown. We hadn’t yet learned about ecology and conservation. But we knew how to venture on foot past those shacks, nibble on blueberries, take a dip, and spend the whole day outdoors.
Shannon and I were at the “Devil’s Dip,” which I remembered as a daunting challenge for my friends and me when we were just learning to drive. Now it was just another sand hill; our aging S.U.V. effortlessly navigated the incline.
Another corner and the shack came into view, stark and captivating. A fresh pile of wood was splayed out in front, a treasure trove of warmth and comfort in the making. The door, its knob sandblasted and dangling, crashed open at the slightest push. Inside, a simple eye hook is its guardian.
In spite of my childhood ease on these dunes, I had spent some years in New York City, and a certain caution welled up as I looked around the inside of the shack at random boards, cracked windows, and threadbare rugs. There is no electricity here, no running water. A sink with no faucet. A collection of random utensils. Nothing is new, nothing is whole, nothing is fresh. The unsteady furniture reeks of sweaty, salty summer nights, mixed with smoke from the wood stove.
But Shannon was instantly comfortable. A fifth-generation Provincetown native, she had never been inside a dune shack either. She set about making a fire in the stove and as the place warmed up our ramshackle surroundings became an affirmation of where we were and a nod to those who had been there before us, confirming our status as “Shackers.”
The weather let itself be known. Cracks and crevices shrieked with the wind gusts coming off the bluff. They mixed with the moans and groans of the swaying building. Stoking the fire became a full-time job. But Shannon took it on, driven by our need for warmth, but also by satisfaction at what something as simple as a stack of hardwood and a little diligence could do. If she fell short, in no time we could see our breath in the room. We made it through that night, and another, and another.
This was not exactly the vacation I had imagined. Back when we filled out our application, I imagined us naked on the beach. We heard the roaring surf calling from the shoreline a hundred yards away and took the path that leads through beach plum and bayberry to a gap in the dune. There, the angry ocean was visible, a rhythmic spectacle of waves and white water viewed through squinted eyes. We were bundled up and pelted by whipping sand. But seals hunted, shorebirds dove, and our hearts soared.
Further down the path, coyote tracks formed patterns in the sand. We followed their quest and came across a family of deer who sprinted to safety with amazing leaps and bounds.
“Shacking” was magical and therapeutic and cleansing, just as everyone had said. We had stepped out of the trappings for a while. I think Shannon would have stayed forever, if only I could have built her a real bathroom out there. And it was sure nice to come home, turn on the lights, crank the heat a bit, and take a hot shower.
Watching a shorebird is like watching a comet: you have to trick your eye into detecting it. To find a comet, you look sideways at the sky until your peripheral vision — more powerful at night than your regular vision — picks out a blotch of white from the neater points of light around it. To find a sanderling in winter, you look sideways down the beach, pretending to be absorbed in some other view, until a tiny bundle of gray and blue feathers twitches to life against its backdrop of identical colors. The bird will have disappeared by the time you’ve turned to fasten your full gaze on him — patches of wet pebbles, the sheen spread on the sand by a retreating wave, help to disguise him. But if you stand still and wait patiently, the sanderling will eventually stop looking sideways at you, and when he pivots to face you, his pearly white breast flashes, “Here I am.”
A lone sanderling had almost all of Race Point Beach to himself the other day. He was forced to share it with me and with another hiker, whose narrow silhouette roamed the dunescape that rolls westward from the ranger station. It was near sunset. When I first saw the hiker he was loping over the snow-flattened dune grass, carrying a long piece of driftwood in one hand like a staff, with his back to the spectacle playing out in the western sky — an eruption of gold light from the top of a bank of smooth blue clouds. The blue clouds hung low, setting off the color of the snow, and against its expansive whiteness the hiker’s stark outline seemed to contract even as he walked toward me. I was standing at the top of the hill next to the ranger station, and I moved down to the beach as he approached, not wanting to wreck his fantasy about having the place to himself — or not wanting to wreck mine.
The next thing I wrecked was the sanderling’s peace of mind. I had gone down to the edge of the water to look at a ship’s light blinking on the horizon when something flickered in the corner of my eye. The sanderling was foraging at the edge of the waves. He skittered further down when I turned to see if I could get a picture of him, and the next time I managed to locate him he was pacing back and forth in front of a washed-up log. I kept my distance, pretending to watch the ocean while secretly surveilling him. From where I stood he looked not much bigger than the blinking light on that boat 25 miles out.
That was all I saw: one bird, one man, one boat. And not even a whole boat. And not even a whole sunset. By the time I started walking back up the hill to the parking lot, the glow in the western sky had given way to dusk without really blossoming into the kind of rosy lightshow we look forward to in winter. The only color in the landscape came from two yellow squares burning where the ranger station windows looked out at the view — or pretended to.
