Cape Cod National Seashore

whenever we’re not looking

5.11.26 ~ Race Point Beach, Provincetown, Massachusetts
photo by Jon

In May I took a whirlwind trip to Cape Cod and Connecticut to scatter and bury Tim’s ashes. Five intense days of sharing memories and enjoying the family and friends and activities that Tim used to love. It’s taking me a while to recover but I’ve decided to share a few pictures here to help me remember.

On May 11th, 27 of us headed out to Race Point Beach in Provincetown where I scattered some of Tim’s ashes on the beach where he spent many of the happiest days of his life. Tim’s brother Dan shared stories of their childhood adventures in P’town. And many in the gathering took turns spontaneously sharing their favorite memories. Moments after I scattered Tim’s ashes, we heard the particular call of a laughing gull flying overhead, gently reminding me of Tim’s wonderful sense of humor.

While we were there we took advantage of the opportunity, with all of Tim’s remaining brothers gathered, Dan, Matt, Jed, and Josh, to scatter some of their father’s ashes. Erik had died back in 2008 and also had close ties to Provincetown. And Tim’s cousin Allegra scattered some of her mother’s ashes there on the sand, too. Her mother was Tim’s beloved Aunt Delorma, who died in January, only three months after him.

We all have such happy memories of vacationing at the family home in Provincetown. The current owner of 180 Bradford St. was very gracious to allow us to leave two memorial blown glass hearts in the garden. Allegra sculpted them, with some of their ashes inside, the red one is Tim’s.

The next day, Fran, Allegra and I had an amazing family history adventure, locating 72B Commercial St., where Tim and Dan’s 2nd-great-grandparents, Elijah & Zipporah Rodgers had lived. When Tim and Dan were kids they were taken to the house and met the widow of his great-granduncle, Capt. Neadom Oscar Rodgers (1876-1953), Aunt Lil, and Neadom’s son Oscar. (Oscar was Aunt Lil’s stepson.) Allegra was also taken there, as a very small child, on a separate occasion. Tim showed me the place on our honeymoon but my memory of its location got very fuzzy.

As we were checking it out a man came down the grass-covered lane it was located on and, after explaining who I was, I asked him a few questions. One thing led to another and the next thing we knew we were sitting in the dining room of an elderly neighbor who has lived there his whole life and remembered Aunt Lil Rodgers and playing in the lane. Aunt Lil died in 1979. The information we got from him led me to find more information about the house and its occupants online.

That afternoon I took a walk on Beech Forest Trail with my sons and nieces and nephew and some of their spouses. (No one in my generation was up for the hike!) I told them the story of Tim & me taking this walk on our honeymoon, and how we took it again after getting our first digital camera in 2009. The picture of the squirrel on the sidebar of this blog came from that walk, and was my first taste of enjoying nature photography. Sadly, this time, I, and some of the others, came back with a tick.

I’m thinking the universe may be trying to tell me that fewer nature walks and more genealogy research will be my new direction in life…

At the end of this mile-long loop walk my sons discovered a poem by one of my favorite poets under glass on the top of a picnic table. They brought me back to see it and it seemed like a beautiful reflection of my mood about the changes in focus I’m going through in my life.

For example, what the trees do
not only in lightning storms
or the watery dark of a summer’s night
or under the white nets of winter
but now, and now, and now – whenever
we’re not looking. Surely you can’t imagine
they don’t dance, from the root up, wishing
to travel a little, not cramped so much as wanting
a better view, or more sun, or just as avidly
more shade – surely you can’t imagine they just
stand there loving every
minute of it, the birds or the emptiness, the dark rings
of the years slowly and without a sound
thickening, and nothing different unless the wind,
and then only in its own mood, comes
to visit, surely you can’t imagine
patience, and happiness, like that.
~ Mary Oliver
(Can You Imagine?)

…to be continued

first transatlantic wireless communication

10.11.15.0849 — Marconi Beach ~ 10.11.15 ~ Wellfleet, Massachusetts

One of our favorite stops on Cape Cod is Marconi Beach in Wellfleet, part of Cape Cod National Seashore. The last time we were here was in May of 2009 and we were a little startled by how much of the sand scarp had eroded away since then. We knew the Cape had been hit hard by severe storms the past few winters but somehow we still weren’t prepared for how much of the bluff was now missing.

The Marconi Area obtained its name from the famous Italian inventor, Marconi. From a site here, Marconi successfully completed the first transatlantic wireless communication between the U.S. and England in 1903.

Here, the outer beach is famous for its then steep, forty-foot sand cliff (or scarp) located behind it. Swimmers and beach walkers feel a sense of solitude here because the scarp and ocean provide an unbroken, pristine natural scene in all directions.

The uplands above the beach slope gradually westward, and provide a graceful vista of both the bay and sea horizons of this portion of the Cape. A platform above the Marconi station site enhances this view, and offers vistas southward to Eastham, and northward to Truro.

The Marconi operation at this location was initiated by the young inventor in 1901. However, in December of that year, due to a number of setbacks, he had to use temporary facilities on St. John’s, Newfoundland to prove his theory – wireless could cross the Atlantic! Meanwhile, a new station was built in Nova Scotia while repairs were being made to the Wellfleet station, and the first two-way, transatlantic wireless message was made at Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, on December 17, 1902. Not long after, the Wellfleet Station was ready, and on January 18, 1903, Marconi staged another world’s first (and a bit of a media event) by successfully transmitting messages between the president of the United States and the king of England. With rapid advances in technology, the station became outdated in a matter of a few years, and was replaced by a newer station in Chatham, Massachusetts.

~ Cape Cod National Seashore website

10.11.15.0854 — looking out over the Atlantic Ocean

All of these pictures were taken from the top of the scarp. When I was a very little girl, my father and I were standing somewhere near here when he explained to me that if we sailed east all the way across this ocean from here we would end up in Spain. I remember being very impressed. 🙂 I think of that conversation every time I come here.

10.11.15.0858 — peering over the scarp, but not standing too close

10.11.15.0862 — looking down (40′ or 12m) at the beach
at a spot where we were allowed to stand a bit closer

Notice some metal debris, part of the viewing platform now missing, in the picture above. And below, notice the asphalt walkway, abruptly ending at the new edge of the scarp.

10.11.15.0864 — part of a missing structure

10.11.15.0869 — looking north towards Truro

10.11.15.0877 — new railings along the scarp over the ever changing Marconi Beach

It seems no matter how solidly we humans think we may build, no matter how strong the foundation, nature will eventually reclaim what we leave behind. Everything is flowing. Nothing is permanent. Somehow we know this and yet, when the ocean delivers this message so dramatically and suddenly in our own observing lifetimes, it comes as a sharp reminder, not always easy to receive.

10.11.15.0880 — perhaps this sign might need an update?

a mysterious place

10.10.15.0646 — Province Lands
10.10.15 ~ Provincetown, Massachusetts

This is another of those strangely potent places. Everyone I know who has spent any time on the dune agrees that there’s, well, something there, though outwardly it is neither more nor less than an enormous arc of sand cutting across the sky.
~ Michael Cunningham
(Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown)

Almost every time we go to Provincetown we go on one of Art’s Dune Tours to see the Province Lands sand dunes of Cape Cod National Seashore. In the past part of the tour took us down on the beach but we couldn’t do that this time due to severe beach erosion caused by storms the past couple of winters. So we had to be satisfied with exploring the dunes themselves. Unfortunately we weren’t able to book a sunset tour – those have been our favorites over the years.

If I die tomorrow, Provincetown is where I’d want my ashes scattered. Who knows why we fall in love, with places or people, with objects or ideas? Thirty centuries of literature haven’t begun to solve the mystery; nor have they in any way slaked our interest in it. Provincetown is a mysterious place, and those of us who love it tend to do so with a peculiar, inscrutable intensity.
~ Michael Cunningham
(Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown)

10.10.15.0670 — Pilgrim Monument, in the distance, is 252 feet high

10.10.15.0673 — a little tourist from Switzerland

10.10.15.0674 — words left on a shingle in the dune

Our guide kept showing us where the sands have been shifting in recent years, impressing on us the endless flow of nature. How strange that while present there, time seems to stand still, if only for a moment.

10.10.15.0682 — afternoon sun over the dune

we all came from the sea

I really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it’s because in addition to the fact that the sea changes, and the light changes and ships change, it’s because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins, the exact same percentage of salt in our blood, in our sweat in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea – whether it is to sail or to watch it – we are going back from whence we came.
~ John Fitzgerald Kennedy
(John F. Kennedy in His Own Words)

On August 7, 1961, when I was four years old, President John F. Kennedy, a long-time summer resident of Cape Cod, signed a bill authorizing the establishment of Cape Cod National Seashore. Tim & I spent many of our childhood summers at our grandparents’ homes on the Cape, and we have visited the National Seashore countless times as children, and as adults, too, bringing our own children there to explore nature and discover history.

roots

Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward towards consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Meditations of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Into the Green Future)

It has been said that trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment rooted in the ground. But they never seem so to me. I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do. They go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!
~ John Muir
(The Wilderness World of John Muir)

Who do you agree with, Emerson or Muir? I wonder, are trees frustrated by their lot in life, glued to one spot, or are they content to be firmly anchored into the ground? Or perhaps, like people, each tree has a different way of embracing the world…

beech forest

I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.
~ Henry David Thoreau
(Walking)

Yesterday Karma was blogging about red squirrels. Now seems as good a time as any to pull out this old blog and post it here. The picture above is one of my rare successes (in my humble opinion) photographing wildlife.

One of the things we did on our anniversary was take a walk on Beech Forest Trail at Cape Cod National Seashore. It felt so peaceful and invigorating being out in the salty fresh air and filtered sunlight… At one point a little chickadee flew very close to me and landed on a branch at eye-level, just inches from me. I put out my hand but he declined to land on it, disappointed because I had no seeds for him. But he stayed close and talked to me for a bit, posing for pictures on his little branch. Unfortunately the pictures came out blurry! However, a little farther along the trail, someone had put out a few seeds for the birds on a stump, but an adorable red squirrel was hogging that feast! He wouldn’t pose for my camera, but didn’t mind if I got close and tried to get a few shots with the “children and pets” setting. I’m now thinking perhaps the chickadee was asking me to shoo the red squirrel away from the seeds…
~ Barbara Rodgers
(Gaia Community, 12 May 2009)

But indeed, it is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air, that emanation from the old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.
~ Robert Louis Stevenson
(Essays of Travel)