The Race Point Rambler

Mary Hackett, Untitled, 1942

Sometimes in the winter I fancy that the woodstove secretly powers me, that I am set to the rhythm of its ticking metal parts, that the little pinwheels of flame spinning up through its coals are propelling the engines of my thoughts. It’s what happens when I spend too much time by the fire — too much time tending it and too much time lounging in front of it on chilly evenings like this one. I would like to be out admiring the stars that sprinkled the eastern sky so heavily after sunset, or listening for the screech owl that trilled outside our window until 2 a.m. the other night, but the talkative, yellow-eyed stove has me in its thrall. Faint clicks and clangs — the sounds of metal getting hotter — come from the aluminum pipe that hooks it to the flue, and as the fire burns brighter the pipe beats faster, a fevered metronome that is ignored by the clock ticking on the mantelpiece and the cat washing the back of his ear with languorous movements of his front paw. But I cannot ignore it. It tells me I should shut the damper, which I do. Then come the waves of heat that crinkle the air above the stove. A cobweb on the ceiling twitches in the updraft. Soon the armchair, the ottoman, the right flank of the sofa and the front half of the coffee table will be enveloped in a luxurious pocket of warmth, and the cat will finally fall under the spell of his cast-iron deity on the hearth. Already the contours of his neat black silhouette have begun to slacken. Another log thrown on the fire, another five minutes for the flames to build and he will be lying prostrate on the floor at its feet. He is as much of an idolater as I am — I who eat, sleep and dream by the fire.

In the morning it will be different. In January or February the first thing I look for when I wake up is the red light glowing in the woodstove’s scuffed mica window — a sign that the floorboards will be warm enough to stand on with bare feet and that the coffee won’t go cold in its cup between the slicing of the bread and the buttering of the toast. It is hard to describe what a primal comfort that light is in the bluish dark of a winter dawn, when the wind has been blowing all night long, pasting the windows with snow. But in March it begins to seem less meaningful. It is losing its battle with a more powerful light. Every day for the last few weeks the sun has been getting stronger, firing its own red coals — the cardinals — and in the morning we find ourselves more distracted by the white rays flickering in the curtains than by the stove-light burning on the hearth.  Our attention shifts outdoors — to the gentle conflagrations in the garden, where a ring of purple shoots is pushing up through the stalks of last year’s phlox, and to the sea. At Race Point on Friday, the late afternoon sun showered the water with fat gold sparks. Only on these chilly March nights does the stove-light become vital again, but we know its time is running out. Every day from now on, a little less attention will be paid to the replenishing of the kindling basket, a little less time spent twisting last month’s news into papery hors d’oeuvres for the fire. Then one morning a few weeks from now, we will wake up and hardly even notice that the scuffed mica window has gone dark. The spell will be broken. Spring will be here!

(Saturday, March 19)

Dune shack and buoys

My friend Buddy’s buoy garden is all untidy. It grows in the sand sloping down from his dune shack, an oasis of color — bold, artificial color — in the endless pallor of the place Thoreau called the “Desert” of Provincetown. When the bayberries have shriveled and dropped to the ground and the rosehips are withered in the rosebushes, the buoys are still standing on their long wooden stems — big ones shaped like rockets and smaller ones the size of cannonballs, with bands of red, green, orange, purple, blue and yellow around them. Most of them are lobster pot markers Buddy has combed from the beach. Every lobsterman chooses his own color scheme for his buoys, and Buddy’s garden must represent at least 45 of them — 45 lobstermen who would never know what an exhaustive rainbow they make all put together. Bits of rope and shreds of netting still cling to some of the floats, and others Buddy has embellished with painted-on polka dots, stars and swirls. “Psychedelic” is the look he is going for.

But the garden is untidy at this time of year. Winter storms have scoured the hillside, leaving some of the buoys on shaky footing or with the leggy look of untended houseplants. Windblown sand has rubbed the paint off in places and pitted the Styrofoam underneath. Worst of all, dune bandits have made off with a few specimens, perhaps wanting to expand their own buoy collections. Buddy will know how many are missing when he conducts his buoy census in the spring. Spring is the time for all gardeners to get to work, and on the first warm, dry day in May I will find him barefoot on the deck, with a crooked-bristled brush in one hand and a cup of paint in the other, touching up a stripe here, a polka dot there, and adding flourishes where needed. He cannot abide shabbiness in his buoy patch. Opposite the door to the dune shack, the rosebushes are beginning to bloom; on the path to the bluff the beach pea is preparing its purple flowers. It will be a bountiful season in the desert of the dunes!

Four o’ clock fox showed up at teatime today. FOF is a red fox with black velvet triangles on the backs of her ears and long black gloves on her front legs — very proper attire for tea! Her coat is a sumptuous sunset color. Her tail always looks freshly fluffed.

FOF visits the same house I visit when I am in need of a cup of tea, and she usually arrives at the same time I arrive. She has an appointment to keep with the pile of birdseed under the birdfeeder. If she is lucky, she will also meet up with a hard-boiled egg or a turkey meatball, complements of the neighborhood patron of hungry foxes. I watch her, while I am sipping my tea, through the squares of the wide glass window that overlooks her breakfasting spot (at four o’clock I believe she is just beginning her day). She eats daintily and precisely. First she points her narrow snout at the grass and sniffs out the delicacy hiding there. Then her small sharp teeth go to work. She is a very small fox. She is so small that in some circles she is known as “Foxling.” When she sits on her haunches she is barely two feet high.

FOF disappears into the dusk just as the pinks and oranges and scarlets of our Rococo winter sunsets are beginning to suffuse the sky over Cape Cod Bay. Perhaps she finds them distasteful. They really are no match for her own resplendent hues.

‘Til next time, fox!

The goal of every walk should be a lighthouse. You are less apt to walk in circles when you are walking to a lighthouse. Because of its position in the landscape, a lighthouse naturally invites concentration; its glinting tower is the focal point of the promontory, the cliff, the curving sandspit. Even if you can’t see it ahead of you, it looms at the end of a long line in your imagination — a line you follow, into the bitter wind if necessary, because it takes you home to a notion. For some it is a notion about history, or geography, or architecture, or solitude; for others it’s the notion that, even in the remotest place, someone or something is there to lend itself as a guide to those who are in danger of becoming lost. I’ve been walking to Race Point Light for so many years that it has taken me home to many notions. Lately it has got me thinking about Mr. and Mrs. Osborne Hallett and their 55 cats.

I first heard about the Halletts when I went to Race Point Light one brisk spring morning almost 10 years ago. That was the spring the lighthouse was restored. When I arrived, it was all picked at and hanging open. Workers had been sandblasting and painting the white brick tower and scraping and polishing its iron balcony until the black stanchions gleamed like piano keys. Doors and windows had been removed to make way for new ones; ladders leaned in the sand; the smell of whitewash hung in the stairwell. Up in the glass-paneled lantern room, all of that human industriousness seemed inconsequential next to the landscape that swelled into view: to the south and east, nothing but sand dunes and wind-whipped marshland; to the north and west, all water.

I was there to interview the head of the local chapter of the New England Lighthouse Foundation for a newspaper article about the restoration, and after coming down from the tower I joined him in the kitchen of the keeper’s house, a slant-roofed cottage next door. He and my friend Paul, caretaker of the cottage, and two other members of the lighthouse foundation were sitting around a table talking over coffee and plates of Entenmann’s pastries. It was such a comfortable, civilized scene to be unfolding in that derelict place; it was like stumbling across astronauts having breakfast on the moon. The men began a conversation about the domestic details of the lighthouse keepers’ lives, and that’s when Paul, whose uncle knew everyone in Provincetown, mentioned that the Halletts were the most effective at keeping down the mice and rats.

Mr. and Mrs. Osborne Hallett lived at Race Point Light 60 years ago.

“They had cats,” Paul said — 20, 30, maybe more. While their owners polished brass and swept sand off the floors, the cats chased away the rodents. Under their watch, Race Point earned a reputation for being vermin-free, unlike the other lighthouses in Provincetown, he said.

I went ahead and filed my story later that day, but I had to leave the Halletts and their cats out of it. There were too many unanswered questions. How had the cats gotten there? How did they feed them all? It would be impossible to keep that many cats in the house. Did they live in the dunes? Would they go to the beach? What does the ocean look like to a cat? And so on. I have circled back to these questions on my walks to the lighthouse over the years, and I was reminded of them the other day, when my husband told me a story about running into a wharf rat on the West End breakwater when he was young. “How big was it again?” I asked. He held his hands apart as if to indicate the length of a small coffee table. A rat in the Halletts’ neighborhood would never have made it to that size, it occurred to me, and then I started thinking about the Race Point cats again and wondering what had happened to them. This time I decided to investigate further, and on perusing the local library archives I came across this announcement printed in the Advocate in April 1955:

“Mr. and Mrs. Osborne E. Hallett, keepers of Race Point Light for the past 10 years, were faced with a difficult problem when they received word that they were being transferred this week to Nobska Point Light. Mr. Hallett is extremely fond of pets and during the years accumulated a large number of cats … so many that he decided some tramp cat must have put the ‘cat mark’ on his back door. He took excellent care of all that came, buying large quantities of milk and cat food by the case. But he couldn’t take them with him so he put the problem up to Agent Hilliard Hopkins of the North Harwich Animal Rescue League. The agent was assisted by Howard Lewis of Provincetown, who with his beach jeep brought from the Light 55 cats. Mr. Hallett kept a pair of his pets to keep at Nobska.”

Walking to Race Point is like walking to the end of the world. How unexpected it would be to reach the end of the world and find 55 cats waiting for you. If you had to live there, I suppose it would keep life interesting; it would keep it from feeling, in any case, like the end of the world. If I knew what the tramp cat’s mark was, I would put it back on the door.

Provincetown, East End

A belated Christmas present was delivered to me the other day. The reason it was late is that it took 30 years to make – 30 years and the combined talents of two starving artists and a crack beachcomber. One of the artists is a close relative of mine; she practices decoupage and can knit a sweater that looks like a Kandinsky. The other artist, her good friend, paints, sculpts and sews and worked years ago as an illustrator for the Provincetown Advocate. The beachcomber is my friend Buddy. He’s also a carpenter, an ex-lobsterman and an astute observer of dragonflies and tree swallows, but it was his eye for the oddity in the sands of the East End that led him to discover what would become my Christmas present.

One day back in the 1970s Buddy was kicking around the beach near the house he shared with my relative; we’ll call her Kandinsky. This particular stretch of shoreline in Provincetown was rich, at the time, in pottery shards — relics of the shipping trade that bustled in and out of the harbor all through the 1800s. Savvy treasure seekers would poke around the pilings behind the old ice house, where a creaking wharf once stood, and come up with bits of tile and porcelain and china, the crème de la crème of beach debris. A nice wedge of blue-and-white transferware beat sea glass any day.

From this Amarna of the Outer Cape, Buddy unearthed a tiny china doll. It was really just the head of a doll, about the size of a hazelnut, its black coiffure and Lilliputian features rendered in faded paint. He gave it to Kandinsky, who tucked it away in a safe place (she’s not just an artist, she’s a collector). Time passed and they broke up and moved on to other relationships and other houses, but she never lost track of the china doll. When she returned to the Cape a few years ago, after living for a while in Pennsylvania, she’d ditched 95 percent of her possessions, but not the doll.

Kandinsky has the resourcefulness of a true Lower Caper, and this talent really shines through at Christmas. She may not be a person of means but she is one of the best gift-givers I have ever known. She can find sterling silver in a pile of rusty cans at the swap shack and rare prints in a stack of moldering ephemera at the local thrift shop. If you need a pair of mittens, she’ll knit them for you; a pair of curtains, she’ll find some luxurious fabric somewhere and make them for you. Sometimes she’ll dig out something of her own and give it to you. This past Christmas she got it into her mind that I should have a doll.

Out came the bauble Buddy had combed from the beach in the East End. All it needed was a body and some clothes. Enter Margo: old cohort of theirs from Provincetown. Margo makes her living now as an artist in Eureka Springs, Ark., but she’s still attached to the Cape. Every now and then she sends me tokens of her time here — a pair of silver earrings hammered into the shape of codfish skeletons, a framed photograph of the sea with its lip on the great curve of Race Point. Anyway, it turned out Margo had found a doll’s head or two of her own when she lived here, and she welcomed the chance to dress this one up. The precious knick-knack was packed up and and sent off to Arkansas.

This is what Margo sent back:

The lonely doll head that was tumbled like a pebble through the waters of Provincetown Harbor before it landed in a box of odds and ends, to be tumbled about for another 30 years, now has arms, legs, feet, shoes, a dress, a necklace and a bouquet. I’m told she even has underwear on. And Margo kindly provided her with a place to live when she’s not on display: a box painted with scenes of beach roses and Long Point.

I’m writing to say thank you. It’s not just a gift from Buddy and Margo and my relative; it’s a gift from Old Provincetown, that generous, eccentric, unmistakable place lying underneath the place we think we live in. Fragments of it come to the surface now and then. If you’re lucky, they can even come to life.

Watching a shorebird is like watching a comet: you have to trick your eye into detecting it. To find a comet, you look sideways at the sky until your peripheral vision — more powerful at night than your regular vision — picks out a blotch of white from the neater points of light around it. To find a sanderling in winter, you look sideways down the beach, pretending to be absorbed in some other view, until a tiny bundle of gray and blue feathers twitches to life against its backdrop of identical colors. The bird will have disappeared by the time you’ve turned to fasten your full gaze on him — patches of wet pebbles, the sheen spread on the sand by a retreating wave, help to disguise him. But if you stand still and wait patiently, the sanderling will eventually stop looking sideways at you, and when he pivots to face you, his pearly white breast flashes, “Here I am!”

A lone sanderling had almost all of Race Point Beach to himself yesterday. He was forced to share it with me and with another hiker, whose narrow silhouette roamed the dunescape that rolls westward from the ranger station. It was near sunset. When I first saw the hiker he was loping over the snow-flattened dune grass, carrying a long piece of driftwood in one hand like a staff, with his back to the spectacle playing out in the western sky — an eruption of gold light from the top of a bank of smooth blue clouds. The blue clouds hung low, setting off the color of the snow, and against its expansive whiteness the hiker’s stark outline seemed to contract even as he walked toward me. I was standing at the top of the hill next to the ranger station, and I moved down to the beach as he approached, not wanting to wreck his fantasy about having the place to himself — or not wanting to wreck mine.

The next thing I wrecked was the sanderling’s peace of mind. I had gone down to the edge of the water to look at a ship’s light blinking exactly on the horizon (as if to announce that this was the horizon), when something flickered in the corner of my eye. The sanderling was foraging at the edge of the waves. He skittered further down when I turned to see if I could get a picture of him, and the next time I managed to locate him he was pacing back and forth in front of a washed-up log. I kept my distance, pretending to watch the ocean whilst secretly surveilling him. From where I stood he looked not much bigger than the blinking light on that boat 25 miles out.

That was all I saw yesterday — one bird, one man, one boat. And not even a whole boat. And not even a whole sunset. By the time I started walking back up the hill to the parking lot, the glow in the western sky had given way to dusk without really blossoming into the kind of rosy lightshow we look forward to in winter. The only color in the landscape came from two yellow squares burning where the ranger station windows looked out at the view — or pretended to!

can you see the sanderling?