Rockport

We found Rockport by accident, really — a wrong turn off Route 127 that dropped us onto Bearskin Neck just as the fog was burning off the harbor. Lia stopped dead in front of a shingled shack the color of a fire truck, half-sunk on its own pier, and only later did we learn it was Motif No. 1, painted so many thousands of times by visiting artists that locals rebuilt it plank for plank after a 1978 blizzard flattened the original. It set the tone for the whole visit: a town that takes its own postcard beauty seriously, and earns it.

Bearskin Neck and the harbor

The narrow spit of Bearskin Neck is Rockport distilled — a single lane of weathered clapboard buildings, once fishermen’s shacks and net-drying sheds, now given over to taffy shops, watercolor galleries, and a lobster roll stand with a line out the door by eleven. Lia and I ate ours on a public bench at the very tip, buttered claw meat spilling out of a toasted split-top bun while lobster boats idled past hauling traps. Sailboats swung on their moorings in Rockport Harbor, and beyond them the open Atlantic glittered under Sandy Bay’s lighthouse, Straitsmouth Island a low green smudge on the horizon.

Halibut Point and the granite coast

A short drive north, Halibut Point State Park is what’s left of a century of granite quarrying — a flooded quarry pit, startlingly deep and blue-green, ringed by slabs of stone still bearing drill marks. We scrambled down to the rocky shoreline beyond it, where the Atlantic throws itself against granite ledges and, on clear days, you can see all the way to New Hampshire. Lia found a tide pool crowded with periwinkles and hermit crabs; I sat on sun-warmed granite and understood why Cape Ann’s fishermen and stonecutters both called this coast home — it is beautiful and utterly unsentimental about it.

Getting There

Rockport sits about forty miles northeast of Boston, an hour’s drive up Route 128 to Route 127, though the commuter rail’s Rockport Line is the easier option — a scenic hour-and-fifteen-minute ride from Boston’s North Station that drops you a five-minute walk from Bearskin Neck. Logan International Airport is the nearest major gateway. Once in town, leave the car at the visitor lot on Route 127; the whole village, from harbor to headland, is built for walking.