Cape Cod: The Great Dune

The Cape is undeniably better during the winter - many friends, colleagues, and patients have already said as much during our short time in Massachusetts. Sure, there’s something to be said for America’s classic summer vacation: the colorful umbrellas and towels spread over the beach, the slow sunsets and long nights sipping ice-cold lemonade, the ice cream stands, the seedy motels, the fish fry joints. But return to the Outer Cape in the wintertime, and one is greeted by a totally different landscape: elemental, stark, and beautiful. Icy winds howling across the endless dunes and their intervening valleys. Storm clouds blowing in from the Atlantic across Cape Cod Bay. Lines of breakers pounding on the shifting sands. The absence of summer’s two great pests - biting insects and seasonal traffic - don’t hurt, either.

Jane and I drive out from Boston on a Saturday morning for a brief overnight stay on the winter Cape. Fully bundled up with only our eyes exposed to the biting chill, we leave our car by the highway, hiking up into the massive dune system of the Provincelands. Steep as the Great Dune is, the undulating sand, rendered firm by recent snow and ice, is easy to cross. We crest the top of first ridge and turn back for photos toward the bay; the Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown is visible to the south, a sentinel on the horizon. To the north, we catch our first sight of the Atlantic Ocean, a distant, blue-grey haze beyond the series of peaks, some of which are topped by little shacks and wooden fenceposts. We drop down into a trough of wind-blasted sand, descending toward a valley filled with pitch pine, beachgrass, and other dune vegetation. The dwarven trees, clinging to each other amidst ripples of sand and snow, make for quite an otherworldly environment. We walk through this little forest, emerging at the valley’s other end, atop the last rise before the foreshore. The waves are roaring toward us here, driven forward by an offshore storm. Jane walks along the bluffs while I photograph her with the crashing ocean.

After a long return walk to the car, we drive back south and grab a delicious takeout lunch at Mac’s Seafood Market & Kitchen in Eastham (crabcake sandwich and fries for me; a cod sandwich and a bowl of chowder for Jane). Now past mid-day, we retrace our route along the Cape Highway and proceed to Grays Beach in Yarmouth, where the boardwalk over the marsh (a buggy, crowded mess in the summer), is all ours for the afternoon. It is a stunningly cold day; gloves and coats on, we creep to the end of the rime-covered walkway and photograph the ice jam flowing through the nearby tidal inlet. After this, it’s time for dinner and an early, relaxing motel night, with the heater at full blast and the TV on - a well-worn and familiar pattern for Jane’s and my weekend getaways.

Essex: Plum Island

The North Shore in the winter is a special place - bereft of beachgoers and out-of-town traffic, cold, stark, and beautiful. We’re driving up the coast in the pre-dawn dark, through curtains of alternating snow, mist, and empty grey sky. It’s been a busy few weeks in the hospital, and Jane and I are looking for a bit of time - any time, even just a morning - away from the city. Plum Island, in the northeastern corner of Essex County, has been on our wish list for awhile. An prototypical barrier island situated on the Atlantic flyway, Plum Island, with its great marsh and dunes, is a birder’s paradise. Thousands flock to the island’s refuge (Parker River NWR) every year to see shorebirds, seabirds, and migratory visitors from far-flung nesting grounds in the Arctic. For me, the binoculars stay in their pack for most of the morning. I’m mainly here to spend some time with the camera, wander the lonely outer beach, and get lost in the howling wind - and in my own thoughts.

We arrive at the entrace gatehouse shortly after sunrise; after leaving our entrance fee in a little envelope, we walk the short boardwalk over the dune grass to the gently sloping beach. As the sun rises into a bank of purple clouds, the tide is coming up over a narrow bench that separates us from the breaking waves. The water chases Jane up the beach, leaving sinuous curves and gullies in the sand. Light is beginning to show on the beach houses in the nearby village of Newbury. My fingerless gloves prove to be downright masochistic amidst the morning’s severe windchill; I manage to snap some nice compositions up and down the beach, and along the dunes, before we retreat back to the car.

Back on the refuge road, we drive the length of the island, down to the boardwalk near the Emerson Rocks. I climb a nearby observation tower while Jane warms up in the car. We walk the nearby boardwalk to reach a beach covered in snow - a first for me, after a childhood in California and years of mild weather in the Mid-Atlantic. I find that the demarcation between snow and sand, at the high tide’s strand line, makes an interesting element for black-and-white compositions. Jane wanders down the beach, watching a flock of plovers and sandpipers foraging for breakfast in the surf. After short walk to the nearby bluffs, we return to the car and grab breakfast in town, and are back in Boston by late morning.

Hampshire: Hill Country

The year’s last outing, a quick overnighter, sees us going westward to the rolling hill country of the Pioneer Valley. Ever since my day trip out here in October with Lindsey, I’ve wanted to show Jane the Quabbin, and to spend more time exploring its wooded shorelines. The western part of the state is something special, in that it feels quite identifiably Massachusetts (for the sphere of Boston’s hardscrabble, lobster-loving, history-worshipping influence is long), but also represents something entirely different as well. A touch more Appalachia, a pinch less recognizably New England. You have to get off the Pike to really see the place for its many forms of beauty: the shuttered mill towns with their hardware stores, bus depots, and job marts; the village greens surrounded by steepled churches, old colonial houses, and ancient headstones; the rivers and streams climbing ever and onward into the escarpment. The beautiful, forested landscape. It’s a sort of place one can imagine growing up and growing old in - perhaps without accomplishing much, and without seeing wider horizons, but dying happy, none the wiser.

We leave Boston in the early hours of the morning, cruising down the Pike as dawn colors begin to reflect across the ponds in the central part of the state. Pulling off in Ware, we reach the Enfield Lookout, on the southern shore of the Quabbin, just the sun begins to crest the hills to the east. Where a few months earlier the treeline here had been lined by bright-gold birches, tawny oaks, and fiery maples, the view on this winter morning is one of barren branches, punctuated by glowing, silver birch bark. As the sun rises, Jane and I pace around the lookout, looking for compositions. At the western end of the picnic area, I find a much cleaner shot of Mount Lizzie than I got in October, poking up out of the water to the east. Jane and I track our way across the heather and down a steep path through the trees, where we emerge at the water’s edge. We set up for a selfie here (the aluminum tripod legs nearly freeze my fingers off) before climbing back to the car.

Continuing our tour around the Quabbin, I take Jane to the hilltop observation tower and Winsor Dam before we head into Belchertown for coffee and breakfast. In the late morning, we drive up the western shore of the reservoir and stop in New Salem, a tiny New England village with a classic green ringed by a town hall, a little library, a cemetery, a firehouse, and a few churches. We take a little path past the firehouse to a picnic area, where we get a lovely view of the the islands at the Quabbin’s northwestern corner. In the afternoon, we drive down toward Deerfield in the Connecticut River Valley, first stopping just across the river in Sunderland to visit the Buttonball Tree, an unbelievably old and massive American sycamore - the largest east of the Mississippi. At Lindsey’s suggestion, we wind up checking out the liveliest thing happening in South Deerfield - the post-Christmas sale at the Yankee Candle Village, a gargantuan complex of home goods, holiday toys, and flammable material. Tired from a long day of driving and winter hiking, I find myself staring dazedly at a band of flannel-wearing animatronic rednecks singing Christmas carols while Jane careens giddily from store section to store section. She somehow winds up buying nothing before we check in and pass out at the motel next door. We spend the evening watching TV and relaxing; the most notable news of the night comes to my email shortly after 9 PM - I receive an invitation to schedule my first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine for New Year’s Day.

The next morning, we drive a short distance east to the river and climb to the top of nearby Mt. Sugarloaf. The switchback footpath to the summit is narrow and icy, but we make it up shortly after dawn, and are greeted by a commanding southward view across the valley - the Connecticut River curving away toward ridged peaks of the Mount Holyoke range. Jane and I take some photos together on the mountaintop before walking down along the access road; after breakfast in Greenfield, it’s a long drive back to the Boston via Route 2, completing a circuit of the state and our last little road trip of 2020.