On the Cape, time is non-linear and direction is topsy-turvy. It'll make your head spin sometimes. Geologically, the Cape is a sandspit, a big one, that will one day be washed over by waves. It was originally pushed out here by glaciers, sort of God's Bulldozer. Since then, parts have washed off and been pushed north (Provincetown) and south (Monomoy).
Cape Cod is a loose spiral
At the Orleans rotary, things begin to change. Houses, weathered and wood-shingled, stand steadfast against the encroaching gas stations and clam houses. The year-round houses look far more comfortable with their surroundings in winter. Only a handful of tacky t-shirt and inflatable beach toy shops reach out garishly at passers-by. Then, after that, it's a wilderness of 100-ft dunes, more scrub forest, small ponds, clouds, sky, and emptiness. Signs appear, pointing to places like Cahoon Hollow, Lecounts Hollow, Maguire Landing, First Encounter Beach, Sunken Meadow Beach, Head of the Meadows, and Truro.
The Marconi Area, chosen by Guglielmo Marconi as the U.S. receiving station of the first trans-Atlantic radio cable in the 1870s (amazing), which stretched from Wellfleet on the Cape to Portugal (?), appears on your right.
Eventually, after another 20 miles or so, you descend down a long hill. All of a sudden, your vision opens up on both sides and BAM! the lighting is what you notice first. Now, the dunes are more barren, just sand and beach plums and dunegrass, almost too-green. The air glows, illuminated by the sun, punctuated by grey clouds suspended like dirty cotton, light reflecting off salt water on both sides of the arcing swirl of sand called the Cape. Droplets of water and salt hang in the air, lit up, aglow. The only other place in the world that I've seen such striking light conditions is San Francisco, another penninsula. But here, it's even more surreal. The otherworldly light is one reason so many artists are drawn to both places. To your right as you speed along, a large saltwater pond nestles in the dunes. It never looks the same twice. The air becomes electric with light and birds. Then, the sand dunes rise 70 feet on either side of the road, right out of the asphalt. On windy days, amber-and yellow- and brown-crystalled sand creeps into the driving lanes, oblivious to the trivial vehicular traffic rushing by. Most of the drivers, tourists from N.Y. and Ohio, don't even notice the sand.
The spiral of the Cape is disorienting, because at one point, you can see Provincetown from atop a hill as you're humming along. It's curling off to the left (northwest), off in the distance about five miles. Then nothing. But then again, ten minutes later, you're there.
On Sunday, when I got back to Provincetown after witnessing so much unsurfable chaos, hoping to skate, I was momentarily crestfallen to see that the roads were still wet, almost puddled in places. My skate, my "land board," would surely not find purchase. A heavy drizzle blew down from the grey nebulous heavens, the back edge of the omnipresent spinning low. I decided to look at art in the countless (and very good) galleries that line Commercial St. (it's a rustic SoHo, where I lived for a time, at the beach), and I had a Bass Ale at the Governor Bradford.
The wind still hadn't shifted northwest and I was still waiting for ridable waves.
I stopped in at Board Stiff, the token skate/surf shop on Commercial St. It's not bad, considering the tourist spot that it's in. It's owned by a friend of a friend, who wasn't there. I looked at replaceble fins (one of my boards has three removable fins. I chatted with the guy working there, who also has spent a lot of time in Vermont, like me, snowboarding.
Then I grew restless and decided to check the waves again.
This time, 3pm, I go first to Lecounts Hollow, through the winding up and down of the scrub forest. I pull into an almost empty parking lot between more towering dunes, and I'm greeted by yet more chaos. I'm once again crushed. In my gut, I feel the old familiar visceral downspin, another spiral. But it's a small one.
Now, there's even more northeast to the wind than earlier. The waves are rendered more unsurfable by the high tide, angry and lumpy. Strong 6-footers roiled toward shore. The lips were thick, 2-feet thick. A thick lip would curl forward, dumping all at once, on the steep sand berm between myself and the sea. It would snap my Becker (or even my 6'8" Xanadu) like a toothpick. Up and down the beach, I saw more of the same, with big tumbling peaks, irregularly washing in as far as the eye can see. The outer Cape is 20 miles of uninterrupted beachbreak and sandbar, a National Seashore, with hardly a house in site from the dunes. And it was all lined by misty backbreaking overhead peaks, with no organization, today, again.
The big low spiraled too close and it spiraled too strong. Had I miscalculated? Or had nature simply outsmarted me again? I had to surf soon.
Seeing as there would be no surfing today, I poured a beer into my insulated travel mug, and I watched the energy happen out there at sea. Of course, I had to make a stop at Coast Gaurd on my way back to my campsite at Nickerson State Park. I pulled into the lot, and saw one lone soul pulling on his wetsuit next to a forest green pickup with a cap on the back and Mass. plates. The lettering on the side said, "Damphousse Roofing and Painting." I park and stroll over the knoll, and, yes, surprise, surprise, more chaos at sea.
The Damphousse guy, not a big guy, about my size at 5'9" 170lbs?, strides for the beach. His buddy, not surfing today, comes a little behind. As I'm approaching after looking at the big shifty, disorganized waves, I say, "I'm waiting for dawn patrol, when the wind will have shifted." I smile.
Damphousse's buddy says, "Yeah. He's just going to paddle out anyway. He's really hungover."
"I hope he's a strong paddler."
"Uhh, he lived in Hawaii for a while...yeah he'll be all right."
A little later, I see Damphousse get clocked by a big mushy overhead avalanche of whitewater. He keeps repositioning anyway, but there's nowhere to position yourself. The handful of tourists on shore were amazed and confused, chirping and pointing like birds.
I decided to head back to my camp, I built a fire, drank a few dark ales, ate some delicious clams, and called it an early night in preparation for tomorrow's waves.
After seeing Damphousse get his ass kicked, I needed some kind of diversion. When the fuck would the wind switch? I hadn't been in the water in two weeks, and I was tempted to just suit up and paddle into the successions of small liquid avalanches I saw off Coast Gaurd Beach right then and there. But now, especially since I'd had a couple of beers, was not the time. Sure, Neptune's blender was an impressive site for the tourists, but did I really want to be the featured attraction out there, tipsy and tossed about alongside my board like a piece of flotsam?
Time was not, as they say, of the essence. Time, here on the Cape as many other places, is malleable. Clocks were invented to help people structure part of the universe, that which involves the Earth traveling around the Sun, and which dictates when light and dark happen. More recently, clocks have been the lord of most people's lives. Clocks determine when people wake up and go to sleep, when they eat, when they go to work, when they get paid, when they see their doctors. I often pride myself in my nonlinear time-keeping, and that's one reason I love the Cape so much.
Because the Cape is a spiral, time is curved and irregular, like the lighting.
I decided to go back to Provincetown while it was still early. Chances are, I'd be able to enjoy a couple of quality pints and still get back to my tent early, get to sleep early, and my eyes would pop open with first light.