I’ve been thinking about a walk I took in the Provincelands last September, just before the end of that month’s long drought. I parked the car at the Snail Road entrance and walked up the sand ramp into the dunes. The trek up to the top of the first dune is moderately strenuous, but when you reach it, it affords you an unimpeded few of the vastness that is the Provincelands – an uninterrupted, three-square-mile expanse of dune ridge and dune valley.
What struck me that day was that, as far as I could see in both directions, there was literally not a single square foot in this expanse of sand that did not bear the imprint of a human foot. Normally, I would have felt discouragement – even despair – at such a visual statement of how this fragile land lies under the heel of human domination. Instead, I unexpectedly felt comforted, even reassured. In part this was because I knew from past experience that the next wind storm or heavy rain would wipe out every footprint and return these sandy slopes to a pristine state. But even more I took comfort knowing that, in late September, this would be the last massive accumulation of human presence on the dunes - until next spring.
This was not the smug satisfaction of a year-rounder at seeing the seasonal crowds leave – “Good-bye – Have a nice long winter back in the city!”– but rather a recognition of the seasonal nature of the dunes. In season – that’s the clue. The dunes are one of those places that people go to, and then leave, and that seasonal rhythm is part of their attraction. Leaving a place allows one to enrich it in one’s memory and cultivate the anticipation of one’s return.
But the seasonality of the dunes also has value for those of us left behind when the crowds leave. When I first came to live here, the whole Cape was much more seasonal than it is now. The 4th of July was still the traditional beginning of the tourist season, and Labor Day was its close. Since then The Season, in capital letters, has gradually extended, wrapping its tentacles around both ends of the year until it now threatens to encircle it completely. And in doing so Cape Cod becomes less and less itself, and more and more like anyplace else.
The dunes remain seasonal in a way the Cape once was and is no longer, and that for me is their greatest value. They represent not only a limited but a periodic use of the land. Such seasonal use recognizes the need for a recovery period in our dealings with the land. We need to grant a place some time to recover from our presence there, some time that is not ours, as a farmer leaves a field fallow through several seasons in order to ensure a future crop. It is important, for both its life and ours, that the winds here blow untrammeled, that the dunes move unmanaged, that the rabbits, fox and deer move unseen through the low pines, the seals haul out on the beaches unmolested, and that the handful of fragile dune shacks scattered across its expanse brave the winter storms uninhabited.
