Cape Cod — Massachusetts | Shared Latitude

A crooked arm of Massachusetts flexed out into the Atlantic, all dunes and cranberry bogs and weathered-shingle villages gone silver with salt. Lighthouses blink at the fog, oyster shacks steam behind the marsh grass, and the light does something to the water that painters have chased for two hundred years. We came expecting quaint and found something wilder underneath.

Lia and I arrived on Cape Cod convinced we knew what it would be — postcards of grey-shingled cottages, hydrangeas the impossible blue of hydrangeas in ads, a lobster roll held up to the sun. All of that turned out to be true, and none of it was the part that stayed with us. The part that stayed was the first morning, when we walked out to the beach at Coast Guard and found the Atlantic completely erased by fog, the surf audible but invisible, and a lone seal head bobbing just offshore watching us with an expression of frank suspicion. We stood there in the wet grey air, and I remember thinking that this was a coast with weather in its bones.

The Great Beach

Henry David Thoreau walked the Outer Cape’s ocean shore and called it the Great Beach, and it is still, astonishingly, almost exactly as he left it — forty miles of unbroken sand and cliff protected as the Cape Cod National Seashore. We hiked down from Marconi Station, where the first transatlantic wireless message left America, and the dune cliffs fell away in tawny walls streaked with clay. Lia found a whole sand dollar, unbroken, and carried it the rest of the day cupped in both hands like something that might escape. The beach was almost empty. Just the two of us, the wind combing the beach grass flat, and the grey shoulder of the Atlantic heaving in from three thousand miles of nothing.

The dune cliffs of the Cape Cod National Seashore dropping to an empty beach

Provincetown at the tip

Right out at the curled fingertip of the Cape sits Provincetown, and it is nothing like the hushed villages behind it. Commercial Street was a joyful crush — drag performers handing out flyers, gallery windows, the smell of fried dough and sunscreen, the Pilgrim Monument standing over it all like a granite exclamation point. We climbed the monument (116 steps and 60 ramps, and yes, we counted) for the view back down the entire bent arm of the Cape, sandbars glowing gold in the shallows. Then we ate fried clams on a wharf while gulls conducted open warfare over a dropped chip, and Lia declared it the best meal of the trip, which she does roughly every meal.

Colourful clapboard shops and the Pilgrim Monument rising over Provincetown

Oysters and the marsh at Wellfleet

Everyone told us to eat Wellfleet oysters where they’re pulled, so we did — at a raw bar on the harbour, a dozen of them cold and briny and tasting exactly like the water we’d been walking beside all week. Afterward we drove out to the marsh at low tide, when the whole world drains to shining mudflats laced with silver channels, and men in waders bent over the oyster grants like a scene that hasn’t changed in a century. A great blue heron stood frozen in the shallows. Lia sketched the marsh in the little notebook she pretends she doesn’t carry, and the light went that long buttery Cape Cod gold that I finally understood the painters had not been exaggerating.

Low tide over the Wellfleet marsh, silver channels winding through green grass

Getting There

Cape Cod hangs off the southeast corner of Massachusetts, and most people drive down from Boston — about ninety minutes to the bridges over the Cape Cod Canal, longer on a summer Friday when the whole state seems to be heading the same way. Once across, Route 6 runs the spine of the Cape to Provincetown. In high season, consider the fast ferry from Boston straight to P-town and skip the traffic entirely. Come in June or September if you can: the water’s swimmable, the shacks are open, and you won’t spend your holiday sitting on the Sagamore Bridge. Bring a fleece — the fog rolls in without asking.