Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown Read Online Free PDF Page B

administration as a recreation area and nature preserve. Whatever our feelings about John F. Kennedy as president, we can be grateful to him for that. The town cannot expand past a certain point; no one can build a resort hotel in the dunes or on the ocean beaches. The dunes are an intact ecosystem, as particular unto themselves as Zion in Utah or the Florida Everglades, though unlike Zion or the Everglades they were formed, in part, by man. Early settlers felled the trees for fuel and lumber, and replanted the landscape with pitch pine and scrub oak. With the big trees gone, a sand-sea began working its methodical way in from the beaches, and what you are seeing in this sedate landscape is actually an ongoing process of erosion.
    The best way to go through the dunes is on a bicycle, which you can rent from one of four places in town. A single snake of trail, not conspicuously marked, starts from the far end of the parking lot at Herring Cove and winds through the dunes. The dunescape is simultaneously verdant and lunar. It is dotted with brush and scrubby, stunted pine. It has a smell: pine and salt, with an undercurrent of something I can only describe as dusty and green. In patches the landscape is almost pure sand, pristine as sugar. The sandy areas seem primeval in their silence and shadows, though they are, of course, not ancient at all—they weren’t like this a hundred years ago; a century from now they will be visibly different. Still, I often feel when I’m out there that I’m palpably on the surface of a planet, with a thin illusion of blue overhead and the universe beyond. It is especially wonderful to ride through the dunes at night, when the moon is full.
    In these same dunes but miles up Cape, too far for biking, is the place where Guglielmo Marconi first tested the telegraph—where a human being was able, for the first time, to send and receive wireless messages across the Atlantic. The building in which he conducted his experiment has since fallen into the ocean, but a weathered gazebo bearing a plaque stands today to commemorate the spot where, over a hundred years ago, Marconi sat day after day and night after night, convinced that he could communicate not only with those living on other continents but with the dead as well. He thought sound waves did not vanish over time; he believed he could find a way to hear the cries of men on ships sunk long ago, the voices of children whose own children were ancient by then, the musket reports of Columbus’s men as they showed the Tecumwah tribe what terrible new gods had arrived on their shores.
    The Marconi Station, however, is a separate trip altogether, one that would require a car. This trail you’re on is merely a meandering, four-mile-long circle that takes you back, ultimately, to the East End of Provincetown. It offers only one choice, at roughly its midpoint. You can go straight ahead, through the beech forest and ultimately back to town, or you can turn left and ride out to Race Point.
    R ACE P OINT
    The beach at Race Point is, to my mind, superior to the one at Herring Cove, and I, who enjoy a beach full of gay men, have often wished my brothers had elected to colonize Race Point instead. Its sole disadvantage is the fact that it is several miles from town, and you can get there only on a bicycle or in a car. If you drive, you may very well find the parking lot full by ten A.M. on a summer day.
    The beach at Race Point arcs north to northwest. It is more directly canted toward the open ocean than the one at Herring Cove, and so the water there is prone to do something more exciting than just plash quietly up against the sand. It has actual waves, though you’d have to go farther still, to the beaches of Truro and Wellfleet, before encountering anything that could be called surf. To get to the beach, you lope down a bank of dunes, on which patches of low grass have drawn windblown circles around themselves in the sand. The beach is broad and