The Cape

I've spent the last 2 weekends on the cape. It's about a two hour drive down there, but I don't use the car much once I get there (4 hours of driving on the weekend isn't unusual anyway - bad, I know, but where we live, everything is 45 minutes away anyway - all in different directions). Memorial day weekend I went down just for the day on Sunday (to help my sister's family get their new cottage straightened up), and last weekend we went down for the full weekend (did some landscaping, installed a wireless router, and painted a room). We also had time to take some walks. Lots of walks - we brought the dogs with us. Surprise - the dogs really enjoyed themselves, at least once they realized we weren't leaving them here.

One thing we did was visit the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History. A new exhibit had opened up called, ironically (to me): "A Sense of Place". So of course I had to go. I am now on a quest for new reading material - for some crazy reason, I hadn't realized that Thoreau had written about visiting the Cape. Don't know why he WOULDN'T - it just didn't occur to me - and he's been popping up a lot recently (again). The exhibit was focused on three naturalist-writers from the Cape (or who wrote about the cape): Henry Beston, John Hay, and Robert Finch. Robert Finch's essays are read on WCAI the Cape & the Islands NPR station 3 times a week - twice on Tuesday and once on Wednesday. They are also available via podcast from the radio station.

I have a lot to learn. A lot to absorb. A whole other environment.

This past weekend was another instance of me coming to the realization that what I've been looking for was under my nose all along. I really enjoyed the time we spent in Mississippi - I had never lived that close to the ocean before. Feeling the salt air everyday, watching the water. The shore birds. The clouds drifting in, shifting and either exploding or dissolving as they see fit. While in Mississippi I spent a fair amount of time at the National Seashore just sitting, watching, absorbing. I hadn't realized how important that was to me until now I get it back a little bit. The absorption in the first step in getting to really know a place.

So many people travel, travel, travel. At a quick pace. They bang out various landmarks on a checklist and then rush back into their air conditioned cars to get to the airport. Then they enter the time warp that is air travel. I may not have realized this phenomonon had I not spent time moving around and being forced to start over. Whats the point of the tourists checklist? What did you really learn? There is never enough time - I am never in one place long enough to learn it, to know it. In the end, vacationing is dissatisfying for that reason - I become frustrated more than anything else. You can now say you've "been" somewhere, but that means so little. What does that place smell like in different seasons? How does the late change through the day, throughout the year? What would happen in that alternative reality where you just stay and never go home?

Another thing I realized: your feet toughen up quickly. By yesterday midday, I was hiking barefoot. Which was eye-opening: my feet are the one part of my body constantly in touch with a place. Hiking barefoot brings a whole other dimension to the hiking experience. I had a very tactile hike yesterday. The changing textures under foot made the transitions between sand dunes to marsh to meadow to upland wooded area immediately obvious. The sudden coolness of stone steps, the pillowy softness of the fine sand right before the transition to the meadow area, the hot sand in the sun - it all adds yet another dimension to the experience. Unconsciously, my brain started working in other ways, realizing without internally verbalizing what geomorphic processes may be at work where I happened to be standing. It was not unpleasant.