Pilgrim Landing - Cape Cod

It’s roughly 2 hours from boston to provincetown, but once you enter the inland forests of province lands, everything is different. You step back hundreds of years in time. Unlike the rest of the cape, which was cleared for agriculture and grazing and overtaken by the ubiquitous pitch pine, the forests here are old growth and diverse. Beech, tupelo, red maple and oak ring the low lying wet area.

 

                                         
  

One can imagine what the pilgrims experienced when they arrived in 1620 after spending 66 days crossing the Atlantic. Turned away from their original destination of the Hudson River by the rough seas of chatham, the pilgrims found refuge in provincetown harbor. Before crossing the Massachusetts Bay to their final destination in Plymouth the pilgrims sought food, water, and land. Their escapades within cape cod are memorialized today in the names of places: Pilgrim Spring Corn Hill, and First Encounter Beach and in their diaries. They discovered fresh water Pilgrim Spring in neighboring truro (“and there we saw a deer, and found springs of fresh water, of which we were heartily glad, and sat us down and drunk our first new England water with as much delight as ever we drunk drink in all our lives”), then proceeded to scout Corn Hill Beach where they found and stole bushels of corn stored by the Indians in the sands of the beach (“we digged up, and in it we found a little old basket full of fair Indian corn… we concluded to take the kettle and as much corn as we could carry away with us”). Overstaying their welcome, it was at First Encounter Beach, that the Pilgrims were attacked by Indians armed with bow and arrows. (“we took up 18 of their arrows some whereof were headed with brass, others with eagles’ claws, none of them hit or hurt us, though many came close by us and on every side of us and some coats which hung up in our barricade were shot through and through”). 

Pilgrim Spring

Corn Hill Beach

First Encounter Beach

According to the pilgrim diaries, in 1620, most of the land of province lands was old forest. within a hundred years after their arrival, the white man cut down the forests to make their houses, fuel, and grazing areas for livestock. Without vegetation, there was nothing to anchor the sand. The sand blew everywhere creating a series of dunes which we see today. Nowadays the white man knows better and is planting dune grass to stabilize the coast. A 6 mile bike loop with 2 spurs to Race Point and Herring Cove beaches connects the inland forest to the dunes. For the kids, riding bikes up and down the dunes which range from 30 to 100 feet high provided the proper rollercoaster speed experience they needed to enjoy the landscape.

For me, riding from herring cove beach to the old growth forests was like cutting a transect in time and space. Over the past 5000 years, the waves and winds pushed the gravel and sand from the coasts of the cape northward to form provincetown. That is, as the forearm beaches of eastham, truro and wellfleet erode, the fist of provincetown grows. the dunes by the ocean are linear and form shallow cliffs to protect the fragile ecosystems behind them from the ocean and winds. The parabolic dunes sit inland and form complex bowl and horseshoe geometries that are like waves of sand hollowed out by winds. like ocean waves, the dune waves are in constant flux, they shift 10 feet yearly based on wind action. Despite the shifting sands, vegetation takes root in the parabolic dunes. Crossing the dunes in the spring provides different insights into how the place and ecology evolved over time. temporary vernal pools form in shallow sand pockets by collecting rain water or melted snow. Over time these seasonal pools become small permanent ponds as plant material is collected at the bottom and decays forming a pond liner. Gradually, more vegetation grows around the ponds, and forming more peat. The inland bogs and forests we see are teeming with plant and animal life. Toads breed in them, coyotes slake their thirsts, 3 fingered turkeys, deer which leave V shaped tracks, hog nosed snakes, rabbits and foxes all frequent the ponds. my favorite pond residents were the waterbugs. on the bogs they were hardly visible, but when they moved on the surface of the water, they caused ripples to radiate out.

                                           

                                           

Last time I visited the province lands 25 years ago, I didn’t remember the vegetation being so prominent. Perhaps it was the heat and reflected sun that made crossing the dunes feel like walking the Saharan desert suppressing any experience of vegetation and shade. Perhaps in a thousand years, the dune grass which is planted along the coast will sponsor forests that will retake the dunescape and it will be like 1620 all over again.