Wellfleet has always been a hotspot for this sort of thing; the clean cold waters of the harbor are full of good things to eat, and the tidal amplitude can exceed twelve feet. But what’s been happening lately is puzzlingly anomalous, and nobody has an answer.

I’ll be spending the next week or so out there, and will see what I can learn from the professionals on the scene.

Looking northwest, down the hill:

Looking east, out the back door:

I liked the way these tree-trunks along the lane looked in the grey light:

Yesterday I decided to explore the path leading away into the woods from the parking lot at Great Pond. These woods are crisscrossed with old trails and fire-roads, and I knew that one could make one’s way through the forest to a picturesque little kettle-hole called Dyer Pond, though I’d never done it myself.

Here’s a shot of the fire-road right by Dyer Pond:

And here’s the pond itself:

On the way back I stopped by Great Pond to have a look. There was hardly any breeze, and the water was clear and still.

In the summer, Great Pond is a very popular swimming-hole (I do a daily mile there myself), and the water never has a chance to settle. But on these clear calm days in the off-season, it becomes as limpid as glass, and the sandy bottom, undisturbed by all those vacationing feet, takes on lovely rippled patterns. I took a tall shot of the trees and sky reflecting in the smooth surface:

Then I lowered the frame so as just to show the sandy bottom, fading into the reflected sky:

Late in the afternoon today I took a walk down to Great Island, which forms the western barrier of Wellfleet Harbor. At the northwest corner of the “island” (it isn’t really an island at all, but is more of a “tombolo”, connected to the nearby land by a narrow isthmus) there’s a steep hill accessible by a narrow sandy path (I’ve marked it here). I’d never been up there before, and it looked like a fine vantage, so up I went. Here’s the view from the top, looking north. The harbor’s on the right, and the 25-mile breadth of Cape Cod Bay is on the left:

Here’s the same view, from a few yards back along the ridgetop:

By this point the sun was setting over the Bay, with a little sun-dog in the icy clouds over to the right:

After the sun had set, I climbed down and walked out on the beach, looking west toward the mainland over the Bay. The tide was receding, and I was able to walk a long way out:

That’s all for today, I’m afraid. I’m sure there’s plenty going on in the busy wider world, but out here sometimes it’s kind of hard to care.

The coyotes around here, when you do happen to catch sight of one, have a wretched, scraggly, slinking look about them, and they skulk off directly once they realize they’ve been seen. But you don’t have to take my word for it — here’s Mark Twain, in one of my favorite passages from Roughing It:

The cayote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede. He is so spiritless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it. And he is so homely! — so scrawny, and ribby, and coarse-haired, and pitiful. When he sees you he lifts his lip and lets a flash of his teeth out, and then turns a little out of the course he was pursuing, depresses his head a bit, and strikes a long, soft-footed trot through the sage-brush, glancing over his shoulder at you, from time to time, till he is about out of easy pistol range, and then he stops and takes a deliberate survey of you; he will trot fifty yards and stop again — another fifty and stop again; and finally the gray of his gliding body blends with the gray of the sage-brush, and he disappears. All this is when you make no demonstration against him; but if you do, he develops a livelier interest in his journey, and instantly electrifies his heels and puts such a deal of real estate between himself and your weapon, that by the time you have raised the hammer you see that you need a Minié rifle, and by the time you have got him in line you need a rifled cannon, and by the time you have “drawn a bead” on him you see well enough that nothing but an unusually long-winded streak of lightning could reach him where he is now. But if you start a swift-footed dog after him, you will enjoy it ever so much — especially if it is a dog that has a good opinion of himself, and has been brought up to think he knows something about speed.

The cayote will go swinging gently off on that deceitful trot of his, and every little while he will smile a fraudful smile over his shoulder that will fill that dog entirely full of encouragement and worldly ambition, and make him lay his head still lower to the ground, and stretch his neck further to the front, and pant more fiercely, and stick his tail out straighter behind, and move his furious legs with a yet wilder frenzy, and leave a broader and broader, and higher and denser cloud of desert sand smoking behind, and marking his long wake across the level plain! And all this time the dog is only a short twenty feet behind the cayote, and to save the soul of him he cannot understand why it is that he cannot get perceptibly closer; and he begins to get aggravated, and it makes him madder and madder to see how gently the cayote glides along and never pants or sweats or ceases to smile; and he grows still more and more incensed to see how shamefully he has been taken in by an entire stranger, and what an ignoble swindle that long, calm, soft-footed trot is; and next he notices that he is getting fagged, and that the cayote actually has to slacken speed a little to keep from running away from him — and then that town-dog is mad in earnest, and he begins to strain and weep and swear, and paw the sand higher than ever, and reach for the cayote with concentrated and desperate energy. This “spurt” finds him six feet behind the gliding enemy, and two miles from his friends. And then, in the instant that a wild new hope is lighting up his face, the cayote turns and smiles blandly upon him once more, and with a something about it which seems to say: “Well, I shall have to tear myself away from you, bub — business is business, and it will not do for me to be fooling along this way all day” — and forthwith there is a rushing sound, and the sudden splitting of a long crack through the atmosphere, and behold that dog is solitary and alone in the midst of a vast solitude!

It makes his head swim. He stops, and looks all around; climbs the nearest sand-mound, and gazes into the distance; shakes his head reflectively, and then, without a word, he turns and jogs along back to his train, and takes up a humble position under the hindmost wagon, and feels unspeakably mean, and looks ashamed, and hangs his tail at half-mast for a week.

Wait a minute — what the hell is that thing on the beach? I climbed down for a closer look. Here’s a closeup:

Another angle:

What is it? It’s a mola, also known as an “ocean sunfish“: weird critters that are little more than a gigantic swimming head. (They look like this when they aren’t decomposing on the beach.) This was a small one, maybe about about four-and-a-half feet long — but they can grow to truly enormous size, as you can see here.

I’d heard that they’d been washing ashore in these parts lately, but this is the first one I’ve seen.

While it’s hardly the Bridger Wilderness, the conservation area offers a lovely trail through pine forests down to the salt marshes at the edge of the bay. I snapped a few photos (of varying quality, I’m afraid).

Just past the trailhead at Pilgrim Spring Road, the path passes a steep bank, and gives us a good look at a common Outer Cape soil profile. It’s called by the Russian name podzol, meaning “ash soil”. In podzol soils the colored materials — dark-brown humus from decaying plants, and oxides from rusting minerals — have been leached away down into the sandy ground, leaving an ashy-looking layer that is light grey or even white. You can see it in this photo, sort of:

The ashy layer is right at the surface in many places along the path:

Although the climate in the Outer Cape is more temperate than the mainland’s, there aren’t very many trees that can flourish in the sandy, nutrient-poor soil. Mostly it’s pitch pines and scrubby little oaks. We see both as the path ascends from the trailhead into the forest:

Once we get deeper into the woods, the scrub oaks thin out, and the understory opens up:

Here’s another shot of these quiet pine woods:

Mosses and lichens seem to do well here. Here’s a pale-green lichen, well-established on a fallen pine:

Here’s the common lichen Usnea, also known as “Old Man’s Beard”:

More Usnea, on a pitch-pine branch:

Here’s a young pitch pine that had managed to produce exactly one pine-cone:

After a mile and a half or so the trail approaches the bay:

And here we are, near a little bend in the shoreline called Whalebone Point. We’re looking southeast, more or less, toward Old Wharf Point, Loagy Bay, and Lieutenant Island:

Here’s another shot from the same place, looking a bit more to the east:

Wellfleet’s a small place — the Cape is only about five miles wide here at its widest, and narrows to only a mile or so just south of town — but thanks to its fabulously convoluted bayside coastline and its rolling glacial-moraine “knob-and-kettle” topography, it has more secluded hollows, woodlands, ponds, marshes, islands, beaches, creeks, coves, and inlets than you’d ever imagine possible. I’ve been poking around out here for more than 25 years, and still haven’t seen them all.

Just before sunset I took a mile-long swim in Great Pond — almost certainly my last of the year, and by far the latest in the season I’ve ever done so. After a full September of cool and lengthening nights, the water was cold — but given the gift of a golden, late-summer day in the second week of October, how could I resist?

Soon the nights will turn cold for real, and the chill November storms will strip the leaves from the trees and batter the backshore beaches. But today was a day outside of time, a dreamlike, elongated present in which the world seemed to stand still. And as presents go, we couldn’t have asked for a nicer one.

As always: should we not make it, dear Readers, thanks for coming round to visit these past seven years. It’s been a pleasure.

Here.

I just got back from the Indian Neck flats, where in the pale January sun the air was mild and still, the bay calm and quiet save for the crying of the gulls, and the tide was low and bounteous. On the exposed harbor bottom lay happy, healthy Wellfleet oysters in multitudes beyond reckoning.

Here’s a snapshot (click the image to zoom in):

In forty minutes or so I had about four dozen in my pail. There’s a medicine for melancholy!

Oh well, life has its ups and downs, they say.

If the prospect of live music, arts and crafts, and of course the opportunity to enjoy Wellfleet’s matchless mollusc served up in every way imaginable weren’t enough to draw immense crowds, there is also the festival’s annual Spelling Bee, where your humble correspondent will be defending his crown tomorrow just after midday.

It’s a cool and blustery October weekend here, with brooding skies, bursts of rain, and a piercing gale. I took a walk along the harbor earlier today, but didn’t linger by the water for long in the chilly blast and stinging, wind-borne sand. It was a dramatic scene, though, and I snapped a photo of it with my cell-phone:

For you Edward Hopper fans, this vantage point is about a hundred yards from where Hopper painted Capron House, shown below. The little shed at the far left of Hopper’s image is the same one you see in the photo’s right foreground. (The Capron house was home to the keeper of the peripatetic Mayo Beach light; the large building in the background of Hopper’s painting is the old Chequessett Inn, which stood on a wharf in the harbor and was destroyed by ice in 1934.)

The tide will be high as Earl approaches, and the heavy seas are expected to do a lot of damage to the area beaches, which were already thoroughly scoured by last winter’s wrathful nor’easters. Several houses along the high marine escarpment on the backshore have already gotten perilously close to the bluff-edge in recent years, and this is not going to help.

We are tucked away on the lee side of the peninsula, and the storm appears to be tracking slightly farther east as it moves north, so we’ll probably be fine, though we may lose power for a few hours or days.

If we don’t make it, though: thanks, readers. It’s been a pleasure.

Now it’s late, the house is quiet and dark, and the pine trees outside are whistling and moaning. The gale is alive and full of sea; when I go outside it feels as if I’m standing on the deck of a ship.

Out here, on this slender wisp of sand, the great ocean all around you never lets you forget that you, like Cape Cod itself, are just a fleeting thought.

It being December, we had the place all to ourselves. (Well, almost, as you’ll see below.) It was very beautiful. I took a few pictures, shortly before sunset.

Here’s the view looking north:

Looking out to sea, to the east:

And to the south:

And here’s a shot looking north, along the foot of the tall marine escarpment:

As we walked south, we met this little fellow, wriggling his way back to the water from the base of the cliff:

I even made a little seal-pup movie, if you’d like a look. Here. (You may need to right-click and save the file, then play it with QuickTime.)

Twenty-four hours earlier I had been sitting in my little cube on the 8th floor of a skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan. What a world!

The weekend after Columbus Day is when the town hosts its annual Oysterfest, a two-day celebration of our renowned local mollusc. As you can see from the schedule of events, there are concerts, lectures, exhibitions and competitions (including a lively oyster-shucking contest and the annual Spelling Bee); there are also dozens of booths set up along Main Street where local artists and craftsmen hawk their wares, and where local charities do lucrative sheep-shearing. First and foremost, though, there is food, and above all there are Wellfleet oysters everywhere, plucked fresh from their briny slumber in our scenic harbor and served up in every way imaginable.

The weekend forecast was not auspicious: not one, but two nor’easters loomed, with temperatures expected to rise no higher than the forties, and it looked as if the whole thing might be a washout this year. But Saturday was the eye, so to speak, of the storm, and although it was grey, windy, chilly and damp in town, there was no rain at all most of the day, and the turnout seemed almost unaffected. Here’s a shot of the crowds in the main area behind Town Hall, by the food tent:

As mentioned above, among the festivities is the town’s annual Spelling Bee, held in the late afternoon at the Wellfleet Public Library — which, by the way, has been cited by whatever organization is responsible for such things as one of America’s finest small libraries (unsurprisingly, as Wellfleet has always been rather a magnet for writers, and has been home to a great many of them of the years). I’ve entered the Bee each of the past four years, and after a rookie mishap in 2006, I took top honors in 2007, and came in second in 2008.

I’m happy to report that I am king of the hill once again. In second place was a lanky fellow, also named Malcolm, from nearby Truro. Though a doughty foe, he stumbled on staphylococcus in the last round, leaving out the ‘y’. My nemesis Maria, who won in 2006 and 2008, was eliminated rather early on, having, in a moment of inattention, inexplicably substituted a ‘b’ for an ‘n’ in some relatively easy word. I was sorry to see her knocked out that way, as she’s a damned fine speller, but such is war.

I did survive a bit of a scare in the late rounds, when there were only three of us left: the master of ceremonies, apparently growing frustrated with the unflappability of the remaining contestants, turned to a list of words that had been muffed by finalists in the National Spelling Bee. The first word given was papilionaceous, a word meaning “shaped like a butterfly”. I was rather disappointed that I hadn’t got that one, as I knew how to spell it, but was glad to see it knock out the contestant to my right, leaving only two of us. Next, however, I got the word gnathonic, a word I had never seen before, meaning, apparently, “fawning or flattering”.

One often, when given an unfamiliar word and its definition, can puzzle out what the correct spelling must be by thinking about possible roots and etymologies, or by searching one’s mind for related words, or cognates in other languages — but try as I might I couldn’t come up with anything. I figured that the word must be “tricky” in some way, or I wouldn’t have been given it, so “n-a-t-h-o-n-i-c-” must be out. I made some guess — I can’t remember what it was — but it was wrong^†.

My fate now hung by a thread; if Malcolm from Truro to my left now got his word right, all would be lost. But he too tripped over his word — I think it was onomatopoetic — and all three of us were alive again. A few rounds later the crown, and all that goes with it — incandescent fame, gnathonic adulation, access to local females, and an inscribed copy, this year, of The Famous Beds Of Wellfleet: A Shellfishing History — were mine once more.

Today the second of the weekend’s storms charged in, with howling winds and torrential rain, and Day 2 of the Oysterfest was pretty much washed away (though when I stopped off in town this afternoon the food tent was still up and running, sheltering a few merry and undaunted celebrants keeping warm with beer and chowder). Over at the backshore, atop the cliff at White Crest Beach, the conditions were fearsome indeed: a ferocious gale laden with wind-driven sand, and down below a chaotic, foaming sea. It was all I could do to get out of the car for a few seconds to take the picture below; indeed, so fierce was the wind that despite my considerable physical strength I could hardly push the door open. Here’s the view:

And here’s a shot of nearby Newcomb Hollow beach, taken by my lovely Nina:

This is a side of the Outer Cape that the summer crowds never see; the fury of these fall and winter storms is a sobering reminder that this quaint and friendly place, for all its delicate beauty, is, after all, just a fragile wisp of sand flung far out into the tempestuous and unforgiving North Atlantic. It’s getting dark now, and the storm shows no sign of abating; the house creaks and shudders as I write, and the pine trees outside are swaying and moaning in the wind and rain.

There’s no place I’d rather be.

1. † As it turns out, the word comes from a character named Gnatho, in Terence’s play Eunuchus, which by some inexcusable oversight I’ve never read; reflecting on it now I imagine that the character himself got his name from the Greek ‘gnathon’, meaning “jaw”, which also was the source of the name Agnatha, given to a class of (mostly) extinct jawless fishes. Having had a lifelong interest in paleontology I’d heard of those fishes, of course (their modern descendants are the hideous hagfish, and perhaps the lampreys), but this connection quite escaped me in the heat of battle. That’s interesting, actually, because the clue I missed to the word that killed me last year — periostracum — also had to do with a Greek word, ‘ostrakon’, which was the root for the name given to a group of extinct fishes called Ostracoderms. Small world.

Cape Cod is, geologically speaking, a “terminal moraine”. When the vast ice sheets receded at the close of the last Ice Age, they left behind the piles of debris that they had scraped up and pushed before them as they expanded. The Cape and Islands (not to mention much of Brooklyn) were shaped by this process. Here, taken from Arthur N. Strahler’s excellent little book A Geologist’s View of Cape Cod, is a helpful diagram:

As the glaciers liquefied, the meltwater carried silt and fine debris to the east, forming what is known as an “outwash plain”. The shoreline of the early Cape was broad and irregular, as we see below:

Over time, though, the rising sea began to cut back the low sandy shoreline of the outwash plain, and even to eat away at the base of the moraine itself. This resulted in a high marine escarpment along the Outer Cape’s edge:

One result of this erosion of the moraine was that the gullies (usually called “hollows” around here) that formed as the glacial meltwaters found their way to the sea were cut off high above sea level, forming “hanging valleys” at the edge of the marine escarpment. In the Truro highlands, the highest (and narrowest) part of the Cape, is one of the prettiest of these, called Longnook Valley:

At the end of Longnook Road is a small parking lot, where the hollow meets the sea. Getting out of the car one glimpses the blue Atlantic, framed by a notch in the dunes:

Below are two more views, the first looking directly down at the beach 60 feet below; the second looking south.

The Outer Cape is to most people a summer place, but I think it is in many ways at its most beautiful in winter, and perhaps fittingly so: it is the ghost of a departed world of ice.

There are several things to comment on — including a tendentious defense of Islam, by Vartan Gregorian, that I’ve just read, and a provocative post over at Kevin Kim’s about parallel worlds — but for now the memsahib and I have a full schedule of unwinding and getting re-acquainted.

The Outer Cape in December isn’t everybody’s cup of tea — it’s cold and windy, the beaches and ponds are deserted, most of the businesses are closed for the season, and there aren’t many people around — but for those who don’t mind a little isolation, it is a place of deeply restorative peace, and singular natural beauty.

Speaking of Wellfleet, I’ve just run across an online collection of old photos of our little village. Have a look here.

In the lovely seaside village of Wellfleet, Massachussets there stands, at the edge of the harbor, a charming little Victorian house. It’s just half a mile or so from my own modest little shack, and I pass by it often. I’ve long known that it was once a lightkeeper’s house — and indeed, until very recently one could see a circular foundation in the yard where the lighthouse itself once stood. I knew that there hadn’t been a lighthouse there for quite a while now, and had always assumed it had just been demolished. But lo and behold, it turns out that our doughty little sentinel is still on duty, and mighty far from home: it has been discovered to be standing at Point Montara, California, where it now makes its vigil at the edge of the vast Pacific.

Here’s a photo of the lighthouse in its original situation, before its removal in 1925:

And another shot, rather older, I think:

And now a more recent picture (though still thirty or forty years old, I’d guess):

And now, here it is standing proudly in its new home:

You can read a brief history of the light here (the source of the first three photos), and the item sent by Jess is here. There are also a couple of views of it in this collection of old Wellfleet postcards.

Raw Wellfleet Oysters with Lemon Wedges & Cocktail Sauce

Ingredients:

Oysters (crassotrea virginica)
Lemons
Ketchup
Prepared horseradish (e.g. Gold’s)

Oysters:

• Go to Wellfleet, Massachusetts. (You will never wish to leave.)
• Buy a shellfish permit.
• Assemble the following supplies: bucket, screwdriver, submersible shoes, and gloves.
• Go to a bay beach at low tide (I prefer Indian Neck Beach).
• Splash around in the shallow water, gathering clumps of oysters from the seabed.
• Pry them apart with your screwdriver, tossing back the little ones.
• Throw the big ones into your bucket. When you have enough, leave.
• Rinse them off when you get them home.
• Place them into a container of some sort, bottom side down, and refrigerate them. They will now enter a sort of suspended animation, and will stay perfectly fresh for at least a week if kept cold.

Cocktail Sauce:

• Put some ketchup in a bowl.
• Add horseradish and lemon juice to taste.

Lemon Wedges:

• Using a knife, slice some lemons into longitudinal segments.

To Serve:

• Shuck the oysters, preferably without injuring yourself. A tutorial on oyster-shucking is beyond the scope of this document.
• Present the shucked oysters, supine and beckoning, on as attractive a platter as you can manage, accompanied by lemon wedges and a bowl of cocktail sauce.^†

1. † Some fancy-pants Big City types will tell you that it is an abomination to use ordinary cocktail sauce on such exquisite molluscs. Shun them. They are mistaken.