I walked up Higgins Hollow in North Truro this morning, a fine old crease of a road tucked away in a glacial valley between two large hills. On my left I passed an old house with a large front porch where a piece of literary history took place in 1920. That summer the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay was vacationing there with her family.
One day the eminent critic Edmund Wilson, then a young unknown writer, visited her and asked her to marry him. She said she “would think about it,” but she eventually declined.
A little further on the pavement turns to dirt, and eventually I turned right onto a paved driveway that climbed a quarter mile or so up to the site of the old Ball summer mansion. In the early 20th century, Sheldon W. Ball, a New York businessman, owned a thousand acres of oceanfront property, running from Higgins Hollow a mile south to Ballston Beach. In fact, the name “Balston Beach” derives from “Ball’s Town” – a summer resort that once included several cottages, a bowling alley, a community center and a dining hall – all gone now.
From this bluff there is a fine view. This area, known as the Truro Highlands, is intensely cratered with dozens of small but steep kettle holes. To the south and north the headlands are steeply tilted to the west; their shaggy, sandy crests rise up like gigantic swells about to crash down on the beach hundred 150 feet below. To the west one can see across the bay to the Manomet Hills in Plymouth.
I worked my way down to the beach, then climbed back up to the crest at Long Nook and walked north. Most of the cliff face in this stretch is uniform and sandy. Along the top of the crest purple asters blazed through red and green mats of fruiting bearberry. Halfway between Long Nook and the North Truro Air Force Base I came upon a deep bowl filled almost entirely with a pure stand of the finest beach plums I have ever encountered. All the bushes were thickly hung with bright, ripe multicolored berries, just asking to be picked. They hung there, waiting for hands. I fell on them, picking over two quarts in less than twenty minutes. I grabbed them wantonly by the handfuls, ripping them off the twigs, crushing some in my haste. Now and then I would stuff an entire, ripe bunch into my mouth, the red juice spurting over my hands and my feet.
My appetite sated, I noticed that the beach plums had what looked like a particularly thick dust or bloom on them. But looking more closely, I saw it was a coating of extremely fine sand, blown up off the beach in a recent easterly wind. The finest sands of all are at the top of these crests, covering leaf, berry, and plants – like mica dust on mountains. It is as fine as silt, yet it remains sand: clean, glistening, like gold dust. It jammed in the creases and veins of my palms even as I tried to blow it away. Like the berries, this land conforms to the contours of my imagination; it holds the lineaments of my desires.
