[For many up
here in New England, summer means a trip or twelve to the Cape—Cape Cod, that is (with no disrespect to
the beautiful Cape Ann). So this week, I’ll AmericanStudy five Cape Cod
stories—share your own summer favorite places and their stories for a
crowd-sourced weekend getaway, please!]
On two
complementary reasons to read Thoreau’s often-overlooked Cape Cod
(1865).
Between 1849 and
1857, Henry David Thoreau traveled four times to Cape Cod (no quick or easy
journey for any Concord resident in those days, much less one who preferred walking to the
train). He was as taken by the place as have been so many of its visitors, and
eventually compiled his observations and reflections on those journeys into a
single book manuscript, treating the four trips as one symbolic meta-visit to
the Cape. Not yet published upon his untimely death in 1862, the book was
released in 1865, but has I would argue been largely forgotten in the century
and a half since; when the Thoreau canon is expanded beyond Walden and “Civil Disobedience” to
include his travel writing, the choice is often A
Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). A Week, like all those works, deserves our attention to be sure,
but there’s a case to be made that Cape
Cod offers two significant contributions of its own to our collective
memories.
For one thing,
it gives us a far different Thoreau. As was known even to his contemporary Concordians
and has become clearer and clearer ever since, the Thoreau of Walden and the like was a carefully
constructed persona, an imagined version of the self created in order to model
a perspective and identity for those neighbors
he was hoping to wake up. Whereas I very much agree with scholar Henry
Beston (in his
Introduction to an edition of the book) that in Cape Cod we find “Thoreau as a human being,” and more exactly “what
he was at the time, a Concord Yankee gone traveling.” He was also one of our
keenest observers of and writers about nature, both scientific (particularly
as a botanist) and human—and while he included those observations in all
his works, the lack of an overt moral or social purpose to Cape Cod allows them to take center stage in a particularly
compelling and successful way. Cape Cod
may not be as immediate or authentic as Thoreau in his Journals, but it’s a far more
concise work and one written with audience engagement in mind, and thus it complements
his other published books with a more intimate glimpse into Thoreau than we
otherwise get from them.
Moreover, Cape Cod also offers an important
glimpse into both the natural landscapes and human communities of the region
prior to its full development as a tourist getaway. In Chapter IV, for example,
Thoreau finds himself on a Wellfleet beach that would become part of the Cape
Cod National Seashore (on which more tomorrow): “In short, we were traversing a
desert, with the view of an autumnal landscape of extraordinary brilliancy, a
sort of Promised Land, on the one hand, and the ocean on the other. Yet, though
the prospect was so extensive, and the country for the most part destitute of
trees, a house was rarely visible--we never saw one from the beach--and the
solitude was that of the ocean and the desert combined. A thousand men could
not have seriously interrupted it, but would have been lost in the vastness of
the scenery, as their footsteps in the sand.” And in the very next chapter,
he ventures inland to converse with one of the most finely observed human subjects
in all his writing, “The Wellfleet Oysterman.” Taken together, these two
chapters give us a striking glimpse into Cape Cod in the mid-19th
century, a world quite apart from Concord and the rest of Massachusetts, and
one captured with the unique precision and power of which Thoreau was capable.
Next Cape story
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Summer favorite places you’d highlight?
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