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A Cape Cod Notebook can be heard every Tuesday morning at 8:45am and afternoon at 5:45pm.It's commentary on the unique people, wildlife, and environment of our coastal region.A Cape Cod Notebook commentators include:Robert Finch, a nature writer living in Wellfleet who created, 'A Cape Cod Notebook.' It won the 2006 New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing.

Our Modern World: Hoping for Uber to Arrive on the Dunes

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Last winter, two friends from Oregon visited us for a weekend. On Sunday I took them out to the dunes of the Provincelands, following a series of familiar sand-marks that I have traced across this ever-changing and forever-unchanging landscape for more than half a century.

We parked at the Snail Road entrance off Route 6 and walked beneath the leafless canopy of oaks until we came to the remarkable Sand Ramp. The Sand Ramp is a structure over a hundred feet long that looks like an engineered runway of sand, but it was actually created by casual foot traffic and is maintained by wind blowing sand through a cut in the dunes. In other words, it represents a serendipitous dynamic tension of human and natural forces. We climbed the ramp to the dune field proper, a great wall of slanted sand that is slowly, patiently, inevitably burying the trees in its path. Then a ten-minute slog up the wide flanks of undulating dunes took us to the summit of Big Dune.

Here an enormous blowout has formed over the past several decades, creating a bowl a hundred feet long and thirty feet deep, across which we trekked like ants across the sand-pit trap of a giant ant lion. Then a sudden vista to the north, like coming upon a town one has been away from too long: the dramatic ridge-and-valley landscape of the outer dunes, the ridges sculpted into fantastic stop-action shapes by the wind, the valleys covered with a tattered carpet of dwarf pitch pine and scrub oak, pocked with flooded bogs of wild cranberry, where foxes, deer, black snakes, and box turtles creep, bed, slither, and hide.

Eventually we came to a grand intersection of several sand roads, overarched and blessed by a single, desiccated, constantly-dying but never quite dead scrub oak. Beyond this, scattered east and west for over three and a half miles, are the eighteen remaining dune shacks perched like limpets on the final ridge of sand. And then, at last, through a cut in the foredunes, we gained the beach.  

From there we walked east a half-mile or so to a spot where, through most of the winter, a herd of some three hundred gray seals had hauled out at low tide, but that day there were none to be seen. As we stood, speculating on where they might have gone, we saw a couple walking towards us. They were young and tall, perhaps in their late twenties or early thirties. The man was ruggedly handsome, with thick curly black hair. He wore a pressed black suit, a silk tie, and black leather boots. The woman was fashionably wrapped in a large black silk shawl. The man had a camera with a huge telephoto lens slung around his neck and was staring at his cell phone. He approached us and asked:

“Is there a road nearby?”

“A road?”

“Yeah. My GPS shows a road near here.”

“Well,” I said, “there’s a sand road just behind the foredunes – beach buggies use it.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, you see, we’ve walked the beach from Head of the Meadow, hoping to see seals. We must have walked three or four miles. I don’t suppose there’s any chance I could call an Uber and have them pick us up and take us back to our car?”

Robert Finch is a nature writer living in Wellfleet. 'A Cape Cod Notebook' won the 2006 New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing.