6 beaches national seashore cape cod1/2/2024 ![]() ![]() Kennedy formally concluded a debate that had roiled the Cape for nearly 30 years when he signed into law the creation of Cape Cod National Seashore. The fact that it can is not some lucky accident. Early visitors squatted on the unwanted sands and built the simple dwellings that still dot the landscape. The dune shacks came under control of the National Park Service when the Seashore was created and were entered on the National Register of Historic Places in 2012. The Seashore’s Province Lands area, which has been under government protection since 1714, has for more than a century attracted artists and writers for its seclusion, light, and mood. They squatted on the unwanted sands or slept in the shacks, and mastered the light and the mood. Cummings Jack Kerouac Mary Oliver Jackson Pollock Willem de Kooning and, perhaps most important, Henry Beston, whose 1928 book, The Outermost House, brought attention to the sheer wild beauty among the sweeping dunes. Other artists and writers soon followed and never stopped: Harry Kemp, known as the “poet of the dunes” E.E. He bought a dune shack, hunkered down in the silence, and set out to write Anna Christie and The Hairy Ape, two of his most famous works. “A grand place to be alone and undisturbed,” is how the playwright Eugene O’Neill described the Province Lands in 1919. ![]() I galloped up the sand to find a stretch just like it all around me, an expansive brown landscape that seemed like another galaxy away from Provincetown’s crowded center but in reality was only a few miles from the souvenir shops, bars, and restaurants. I arrived without a plan or a map, venturing along a short path that cut through a thick forest, which eventually led me to the base of a large dune. Which is how on a weekday afternoon, I parked at the Snail Road access trail off Route 6 in Provincetown and began walking. As public use of the Seashore takes many forms, so does work to protect the area. An empty beach, a quiet forest, an endless expanse of sand and weather-beaten shacks. ![]() But there was another Cape, he told me-one you could find if you were willing to trek off the touristed path. ![]()
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