The Salt House Read online

  From Monomoy to Race Point, surfmen once walked this beach, night and day in all weathers. Twelve Coast Guard stations were strung across a forty-mile stretch, with halfway houses spaced between, where the patrols would meet and turn back. Each night their lights moved north and south, beams of oil lanterns and electric torches, and often a red flare sent up to signal a wreck. Back then these dunes were considered wasteland, though people from Provincetown would sometimes tramp across to cook picnic suppers over a bonfire of wreckage. Townsfolk called this “the back side,” the town facing otherwise toward the harbor, and only the Coast Guard walked the beach at night.

  Every spring, when the town starts to fill up with people and our winter’s lease runs out, we pack up our books and winter clothes to store in a friend’s basement and begin assembling provisions for the summer. Out here, the pump handle is screwed together and coaxed into operation, the outhouse retrieved from bushes where it rested on its side, and set up at a discreet distance from the shack. When all is ready, we load our gear on to our friend Bill Fitts’s four-wheel-drive truck and move out to the dunes. I unpack what we’ve brought: rice and oil, and beans, and canned things, books, flashlights, radio, sweatshirts, and things for the beach. Everything fits, in a corner or on a shelf, stowed neat and tight as on a small boat, which is what Euphoria most nearly resembles. I fill the oil lamps while Bert fixes the propane tank to the stove and we’re in business. It’s a forty-minute walk to town, uphill and down in soft sand—far enough so the summer crowds won’t reach us. From here on, we carry our supplies overland in knapsacks—and carry our garbage out—along the old Coast Guard supply route, Snail Road, now just a ghost trail in the sand.

  On a still evening, when the wind picks up from the south, we may hear the traffic from the highway pumping into town. From the back shore, it’s only two or three miles at any point across to Provincetown Harbor, where the town hugs the bayside and keeps the dunes at its back, and where Route Six, the mid-Cape highway, ends in a parking lot on a public beach. In summer the town fills with tourists and the narrow streets throb with voices and engines. We aren’t so far from any of it—the big blue water tower sits on one horizon with the lights of the town ranged beyond it, and Park Service rangers drive down the beach every morning in their green pickups. All summer Air Force pilots train against attack of this coast; their loops and turnings overhead remind us who owns this shore. Grey, sluglike tankers carrying oil from feudal kingdoms lurk on the horizon, and fishing boats trail oil and purple spumes of gasoline. The radar domes in Truro glow at night above the dune called Ararat, and Highland Light sends its white flare around and around, cutting through the clouds with its peremptory beam.

  When we have returned from our winter rooms, at the end of another year’s wandering, we settle ourselves for a look around, fill the small blue cups with water, and watch as evening comes on. Then it is time to light the lamps, and, not so much later, to put them out.

  TWO

  Dreamers

  I always wanted to live here, even before I knew such a place existed. I dreamed of a cabin: a miniature, makeshift home, and of being a writer and living alone beside the sea. In the dream I assumed I would somehow get here through purity of character and natural destiny, and would live, I suppose, like the lilies of the field— which, I had neglected to notice, curl up and die every winter. The reality is quite different of course, and didn’t come by any straightforward means, and not through any virtue of mine to be sure— rather by a combination of luck, accident, and misadventure—real life in other words. Real life provides a sense of progression that dream forgets, a gradual unfolding which in retrospect is liable to seem nearly logical, though we know better. I came here obliquely, by writing poems which I could not publish, holding a series of dead-end jobs, moving around, falling in love many times badly, and finally giving up and falling in love by accident quite well.

  Bert and I met at a cookout, my first night in Provincetown. I remember a fire in an oil drum, its metal grill adorned with charred chicken legs and Portuguese sausages blistering with fat, the smell of charcoal and burned meat. I was standing uneasily at the edge of a group of strangers, wondering how soon I could go back to my room without seeming rude, when he approached, holding out a can of beer by way of introduction and looking to my mind like rescue.

  I was rebounding—I might as well say ricocheting—from a series of upheavals in what passed for my life at the time. I was newly divorced, after two confusing years during which my husband was more or less missing; that is, he was traveling in India, but I didn’t know exactly where he was for months on end. Occasionally he would write to me, on those thin blue, almost transparent air letters that fold over three times on themselves, making a puzzle of their intentions. The letters described temples and train rides, festivals and studies of Sanskrit and Pali, but made no mention of return. Meanwhile, I’d had a brief try at graduate school (I wasn’t yet sane enough to discuss the literature I loved, or dutiful enough to read what I didn’t love) and a succession of romantic adventures in Michigan, Vermont, and New York, until I was beginning to feel like a poster child for serial monogamy.

  I’d left New York that morning, abandoning my bartending job and rent-controlled apartment, along with my last hopes for a foundering love affair, to spend the winter in a single room writing poetry. I arrived with a manuscript, a nine-year-old manual Smith Corona, and two suitcases: all that was left of my material life since college. The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown had offered me a writing fellowship for seven months: this distinction afforded me a room above an old lumber yard, with bare floors and ancient, noisy plumbing, two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and the company of other writers and artists in similar straits. This gift of time and good company, which I accepted warily and with little expectation, turned out to be one that would change my life. Within days I decided I would live here forever. This break caught me by surprise and seemed to my mind an unprecedented revelation; I soon learned that it happens quite regularly to people who come here.

  Bert was one of the artists who had come and stayed, a sculptor who destroyed most of his own work. He told me he worked outdoors, building sculptures in the dunes and woods, structures of driftwood and branches mostly, materials he gathered along the back shore. I was impressed by the impractical nature of his work, its obvious indifference to any market economy, and all the virtues that implied. We stood talking in the fire-lit dark as people came and went around us. Tall and thin, in a loose sweatshirt and paint-spattered jeans, his pale hair falling forward over the rims of his glasses, he appeared friendly and candid, if perhaps just a little bit excitable. His voice rose and his gestures spilled away from him in all directions as he talked about the landscape where he worked, its miles of dunes and bogs, beaches and scrub woods, insisting that it could not be described. “When I take you out there, you’ll see,” he promised. It seemed already taken for granted that he would be my guide.

  Further conversation revealed that our lives so far had followed similar trajectories, his touching down in several states before coming here, and including two broken marriages and an undisclosed roster of former lovers. We’d both had more addresses than we had lines in our address books. Good sense should have dictated that we take a long look at each other and start running in opposite directions. But that kind of good sense has never interested me. I only remember how he kept looking straight at me the whole time we talked, his eyes, hazel with glints of green, magnified behind thick lenses, as he gestured excitedly with a chicken leg in one hand, toward the side of an empty coal bin, beyond which, I might imagine, stretched the whole wide world.

  We met in October, and in December I moved from my single room into the two and a half rooms Bert had rented over a parking lot just off the beach. In love, I fell into slow time, lulled, dreaming of harbors. All night the fog horns kept repeating their hollow assurance: “I am here.” The green light of Long Point blinked past the bedroom window an
d I curled in the dark, motionless, like a mussel anchored to a rock, letting the currents play over me. Day, night, day—where were we being carried? I wondered, dreamed, reached out in sleep to feel for Bert lying next to me, afraid we might drift too far and wake on separate shores. Mornings, Bert went off to his job, scraping shutters and repainting decks scoured by summer traffic, while I trudged up the street to my lumber yard studio. I worked for hours in that dark, high-windowed room, not so much as glancing up to read the sky, or to follow a flight of wild ducks past the gables of the next house; I worked slowly, greedily, amazed that so much time could be all my own, until a late lunch broke the spell and I surfaced to test the air, throwing the door open with a bang as the wind caught it out of my hands.

  Afternoons, I began to walk the beach and the trails leading out from town, and on fine days to climb the slopes of the dunes, their horizons opening before me, one on another. Shaken, the pitch pines gave off a fine white dust of sand from the deep ridges of their trunks, and the heavy dunes lay still up against the sky. I went with Bert when he gathered sticks on the back shore to use for his sculptures, or picked his way through frozen cranberry bogs, scouting the lay of the land. Other days I went alone, along back roads beside marshes where phragmites waved pale, fringed plumes at the sky, down narrow paths pressed by bay and huckleberry, and further out into the dunes, across to the ocean and back again. The winter beach was bare and the ocean glared a cold, metallic grey. The north wind lashed the beach, flinging sand up into my face when I tried to walk against it. There was majesty there, but bleak and forbidding. The back country drew me, with its open, austere spaces; its silences seemed to nurture a suspended life, a place containing more than it revealed. There were no roads there, no electric wires, and because of that, hardly any people, and if it did belong to the federal government, they were mostly leaving it alone. Feeling I could walk there forever, I set out to try.

  That first spring arrived in a raw blast of wind and noise as the March winds blared across our narrow strip of land. Skunks paraded out of cellars to pad leisurely down Commercial Street at twilight, their eyes glowing red and unrepentant in the sudden glare of headlights. The town woke up, grew noisy and brusque; hammers rang ownership and prior claims, while shop owners tore the shutters off their buildings and began selling clothes imported from Mexico, and cold soups containing flowers. I blinked in the raw light, like someone waking from a dream. It seemed we had come to the end of something, but where had we arrived? This opening wasn’t for us: not for us were mattresses being aired, rugs shaken and window boxes repainted. The price of our two-room apartment spiked upward, renting by the week for twice what we’d paid in a month, and already fully booked through Labor Day. My fellowship was ending, where would I go? What would happen to us? This lack of a home, of any place to be, seemed to me to signal a deeper poverty, an inability to grasp my life and to attach myself firmly to any place, person, or course of action. Perhaps this new life was just another drifter’s dream. I had yet to learn that a dream could anchor me, that I might continue to move around a hidden center, and that I would be guided from that center. An idea was just forming: not an idea, but a vision, unsupported by logic or resources, a hope small and dense as a seed; the idea of a life authentic and particular, answerable to nobody, and a home here with Bert, plain and bare, with windows facing seaward. I wished for a sign, and dreamed instead that Bert was standing on a high ladder leaned against a waterfront hotel, holding up a hammer. A huge wind rose out of the sea, and the ladder swayed violently; he called my name and the wind blew his words away.

  Hazel always claims she dreamed the shacks before she ever saw them. She was working in New York as an artists’ model in the early 1920s while her husband was away crewing on a sailboat. It was a terribly hot summer, and during the long, sweltering nights alone, she would dream of the ocean, picturing a sand bank with a shack perched at the top, and when her husband came back she made him go with her to look for the place she had been dreaming. Having very little money, they walked down the coast from Portsmouth, sleeping on the beach, until they reached Province-town. At Snail Road, Hazel spotted Agnes O’Neill, whom she knew from New York, coming out of the woods with a suitcase. “Hazel, what are you doing here?” she exclaimed, and Hazel recounted her dream. It so happened that Agnes and Eugene O’Neill were living in the old Peaked Hills Life Saving Station that summer, and Agnes directed them to walk out to the new Coast Guard station. “Tell Mr. Mayo, who’s the skipper there, that Gene and I said you were to have one of those little cottages,” Agnes told her. The “cottages” rented for twelve dollars a month. Hazel and her husband moved straight into the shack Thalassa, which she later bought for seventy-five dollars. Euphoria came later, years after the husband had gone away for good, and Hazel was firmly enmeshed in another life. But I do think that beginning made her sympathetic to anyone who was actively looking for what they most desired, and ready to take it when they found it.

  From the ’20s on into the 1960s, Hazel spent her summers in the dunes, walking out from town and back at all hours. She had many lovers, which scandalized the townspeople, then a new husband, and then she wrote about it all in two novels, which scandalized everyone further. The bookstore in town even refused to sell her second book, which told of her life in the dunes. In her sixties a slow, crippling illness forced her to stop walking the dunes and she moved into a cottage in the Provincetown woods and began to rent her shacks by the fortnight. Finally, at eighty, she talked of closing them down. Unless, perhaps, someone would like to take them over, stay out there all season… Thalassa was spoken for, in fact, but did we want Euphoria? It was a hint, an invitation—no, it was an outright gift. We said yes without taking a breath.

  Hazel’s offer came seemingly from nowhere and seemed to be the very sign I had prayed for. Perhaps she saw in us a shimmer of the passion she had always had, a love of this place itself, along with that longing for freedom which had become almost a first principle of her being. She let us have Euphoria because we were artists, and poor, and in love; because she already knew and liked Bert. But mostly we were right there in front of her and ready to say yes without hesitation. I think I have never wanted anything so much. And so, in fact, it was desire that brought us here, and the dream proved more powerful than any logic, after all.

  So we got married and moved to the dunes, joining the ranks of those who lived here before, who built, begged, or borrowed their shacks, stayed as long as they could, then handed them on. I know their names, and some of their stories; many of them have died. There are Frenchie Chanel, Sunny Tasha, Peg Watson, Boris Margo, Dune Charlie, Phil Malicoat, Mr. and Mrs. Roy Hunzinger, and of course, Hazel. Charlie Schmid moved here from New York in the 1950s and bought a shack for one hundred dollars. Charlie lived for his tree swallows; for thirty years he kept logs of their nesting and migrations, built houses for them all around his shack, banded them, and filled pages with records of their broods. His shack is a cantilevered, tilting fantasy of a structure, built from the sky down and balanced against all odds three stories high, empty now, posted off limits by the Park Service. Phil Malicoat came out here to paint great moody, roiling seascapes; he struggled mightily under the influence of his teacher, Edwin Dickinson, like a man who has once touched genius and never found himself the same again. Frenchie rescued birds, nursed wounded animals, and spoke with the dead. Peg Watson, crippled by arthritis, died one winter crawling up the side of a dune after her Jeep stalled on a hill and refused to start again. Harry Kemp drank and strode over the hills with a cape and a staff and wrote awful poems which he signed with a seagull feather, and a man I know only as Louie sat in a fetid single room piled high with paperback detective novels and empty soup cans, its windows scrubbed opaque by years of blowing sand, and listened to shortwave radio eighteen hours a day. Anything was possible. Surely there was room here for our own story to begin.

  THREE

  Waves

  Our first night back, we
stumbled over boxes we were too tired to unpack before dark. The room filled with moonlight reflected up from the sand. The clock ticked too loudly, and I got up to put it outside. What possessed me to bring a clock at all? It ends up in the outhouse, singing to itself, time’s cricket in a cage, counting the hours with lunatic devotion.

  Days pass; we live by the sun. Morning finds us huddled in our bunks, curled against the chill that is May on the North Atlantic. Rising stiffly to feed newspapers and driftwood to the stove, I hear Bert moving in his bunk. “I’m awake,” he says, then turns over and begins to snore. I set the kettle on to boil and step outside to brush my teeth on the deck. The screen door bangs shut; a bird cries in the bayberry, far away in its life. A red t-shirt flexes on the clothesline, beach roses open silky petals to the cold salt air, and below the bright, distant sun flickers on the water, glistening blue and white.

  The view from the doorstep is perfect, unobstructed in all directions. To the east, a narrow footpath slips between two rose bushes, and winds downhill to the pump. A meadow of beach grass stretches along the foredune, cut by the soft white line of the path that climbs toward the horizon and disappears. The beach itself I can’t see, because it drops off beneath the hill, undercutting it. Behind me, sand dunes lift and heave up bare, one beyond another, softly mounded forms, sixty, sometimes eighty feet high, that loom and bulge up against the sky.