Cape Cod

The footsteps of Thoreau.

I am browsing through a copy of Henry David Thoreau’s Cape Cod that I received as a gift.  He wrote consistently through his life.  He read consistently too.  He read in many languages and had a broad, scholar’s grasp of the available literature of antiquity.

I have read Walden, to a point.  I find Walden so thick with philosophy and deep thought that it is hard to read as a continuous narrative.  It is not so much about Thoreau’s time at the pond as it is about Thoreau’s inspection of the universe and all its philosophy.

The deep meanderings of Walden are not the only writings of Thoreau.  He also liked to explore.  To go on mini-adventures of his countryside. When he was traveling he kept a journal.  These journals were made into small travelogues.  Cape Cod is one of them and was his first book.

Most of Thoreau’s work is now in the public domain.  If you make your way over to Librivox.org you can find two pages of his poetry, his works of civil disobedience that were read by Gandhi and even Walden read into audio that you can download for free.  Free.  The words and thoughts of one of the most interesting minds, you can get for free.

In this age where we glorify the anti-intellectual, this stuff could be part of the cure.

Another I have read is “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” where he gets into a small boat with his brother in 1839 and floats down the Concord River to the Merrimack and out towards the sea.  I find these local travelogues interesting because I can drive 5 miles from my house and execute the same trips.  His descriptions of the riverbank cities in the book are familiar to me but 200 years removed.

There is a familiarity in his descriptions that could describe any number of summer days of my own.  So it is with Cape Cod:

Cape Cod is the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts: the shoulder is at Buzzard’s Bay; the elbow, or crazy-bone, at Cape Mallebarre; the wrist at Truro; and the sandy fist at Provincetown, — behind which the State stands on her guard, with her back to the Green Mountains, and her feet planted on the floor of the ocean, like an athlete protecting her Bay, — boxing with northeast storms, and, ever and anon, heaving up her Atlantic adversary from the lap of earth, — ready to thrust forward her other fist, which keeps guard the while upon her breast at Cape Ann.

He is a scholar and student at heart and in practice.  His writings and descriptions feel almost scientific in their detailed exactness.  Behind the travel narrative are theories and criticisms and philosophies as they hit him almost as an outgrowth of the act of writing.

He will be describing the erosion of the seashore and mid-paragraph quote the Iliad in Latin or some archaic Champlain expedition note in old French.  It’s a curious blend of matter-of-fact realism and philosopher meandering. With his scholar’s mind so full of knowledge it necessarily leaks out the sides into his descriptions.

This combination of intellectual curiosity, a poet’s pen and local familiarity draws me to his work.

In Cape Cod he travels the length of the Cape taking in the landscape and the people and describing it all like it was some curious foreign land.  Cape Cod is only 20 miles from Boston but in those days of limited conveyance alternatives it might have been a foreign land.  Even today the Cape stands apart from the rest of the state in climate and culture.

He talks about the changing nature of the land and the sea on the Cape.  How sand bars will appear, disappear and move about with the storms.  He describes the growing beaches of Monomoy and Chatham.  He talks about the cliffs and dunes of Truro falling into the covetous sea.  He recounts local stories of ship wrecks being buried but then reappearing many years later.

I recognize these places.  Every year in the summer I try to do a long run on the point of the Cape’s elbow, in Chatham, by the Coast Guard Light across from Monomoy.  I see it too.  The beach is reconfigured each winter by the storms.  I get the impression that in the current era the beach is mostly taken away.  I see ocean breaches now where once there was miles of unbroken sand and bars.

At the Light House the tourists crowd about, but once I get out a mile or so I’m all alone except for a few solitary walkers.  Eventually I’ll come to a place where there are no more people and it is just my unbroken footprints in the wet sand.  At that point I become the solitary traveler, the poet and the philosopher.  It could be 1849.  The shells and pebbles would be the same.  The Earth abides.

I suppose that’s the point.  The more things change the more they stay familiar.  Even with familiar things change is always constant.  The Cape Cod of the 1840’s is still there, much as it was described by Thoreau.  There ae fewer lighthouse keepers and more affluent people sipping coffee.  In the winter the Cape is still quite a sharp place that tests the locals.

The rivers of Concord still flow into the Merrimack and on to the sea.

We can’t hope to stop that change, but we can slow down to observe and paint pictures and dream of philosophy.  That we can do.

When was the last time you went for a long walk in the woods or on the beach and lost yourself in the times crash of the Atlantic waves?  When was the last time you took 20 minutes to crack open a work of philosophy or poetry or any ancient narrative?

Push your boat off from the shore, cast off the lines and find your adventure.