Walk on the Wild Side - Cape Cod

You drive. you walk a loop. you get back to the car and drive home. It’s boring to go in circles. And if you write about a hiking experience that way, it’s tiresome for the reader and even more tedious for the writer to recount it. In reality, if you have a meaningful hiking experience, you should return from a loop a different person. Your perceptions are altered and your experiences push you to evolve. 

A great hike isn’t just about walking. Anyone can hop on a treadmill for a walk. A good hike is a meditation on how the place came to be, a time to reflect where you are going and what you are doing in life. It’s a time to ask questions and figure things out. Like what does it mean when there’s a bright orange sign in the middle of the trail that reads, “Warning firearms range ahead beyond this sign you will be down range.” Does that mean a bullet may fly over our heads at any moment? Is it better to be up range or down range? Should we proceed beyond a “No trespassing rifle and pistol shooting range” sign post? Or are we just asking to be shot? Why are there a series of neat piles of branches and sticks in the forest? Is there some military cult activity here? Why did someone put a barbed wire fence around a dilapidated building in the middle of the forest? Why is that building so important? or when we see a “CAUTION Ground Wasps in Area. TREAD CAREFULLY” are the wasps active in springtime? Or is that a sign leftover from the summer?

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To J, it was a time to voice his concern, his disdain for hiking. “daddy, why are we hiking here. Isn’t it dangerous? Let’s go back to the car. Let’s go home (and play hours of video games)” He already complained of itchy eyes and allergies. Any sensible parent would’ve relented, but I hid my fear and alarm for our safety and walked a little quicker so as not to be susceptible to stray bullets or ground wasps. In truro, you feel like you’re in the mountains when you’ve only climbed 250’ vertically because the air is cold and driven by the ocean. As it howls through the trees it sounds like waves themselves. Nestled within the pitch pine forests, a strange mixture of pine needle sand floors, lichen, cold war era military barracks and firing ranges. 

Pushing through fear, we came to the beach side of the forest. Our prize for bravery, the entire coast to ourselves. A 360 panorama of the waves coming in. not a soul in sight north or south down the beach. J took a seat on the cliffs. He sat on a 6” fissure in the sand. It looked like an ominous fault line. Peering over the edge of the cliff, I saw tumbled down trees and rocks strewn haphazardly 100 feet below. Evidence of previous landslides. I tell J, “maybe it’s not such a great idea to sit on the downslope side of the fault line.” I think to myself how it would suck to fall 100 feet, get buried in sand, or drown in the freezing atlantic ocean.

 

As we continue along the great dunes trail, we come to certain points where the trail just goes off the edge of the cliff. At some point, that portion of the trail fell down the cliff in a landslide into the ocean. We make our way bushwhacking shrub oak to connect to a trail further inland and notice craters where large portions of land just tumbled down. Anything that is beautiful will bring you to the edge… and make you risk something to experience it. Whether it’s flash floods at antelope canyon, the sneaker waves of black sand beach, or a sudden loss of footing while taking a selfie at horseshoe bend, or the landslide prone cliffs of Truro… beauty seduces, and sometimes tragically.

The shrub oak branches are dense and annoying. J mumbles disgruntledly “do you know where you’re going?” I answer ‘of course!” when I had no idea. we finally see the continuation of a trail connect to the spiderweb network of Truro trail pathways that connect Wellfleet to Provincetown. I hope J sees one day that value of danger and literally hiking on the edge. No one hikes these trails today. “Just the few, the proud, and the family with the kids without virtual screens.”