Navigating Cape Cod on foot

June 17. 

This morning had for breakfast fresh eels from Herring River, caught in an eel-pot baited with horseshoe clams cut up. Crossed Herring River, and went down to the shore and walked a mile or more eastward along the beach. 

This beach seems to be laid down too long on the map. The sea never runs very much here, since this shore is protected from the swell by Monomoy. The Harbor (?) of West Harwich is merely some wharves protected by a shoal offshore. Passed a place where they had been taking bluefish with a seine and, as usual, had left their backbones on the beach. There was a scup also, a good fish. 

A fish hawk (?) or eagle sailed low directly over my head as I sat on the bank. The bank is quite low there. I could see Monomoy, very low and indistinct, stretching much further south than I expected. The wooded portions of this, and perhaps of Nauset Beach further north, looked like islets on the water. You could not distinguish much without a glass, but the lighthouse and fishermen's houses at the south end loomed very large to the naked eye. 

I soon turned inland through the woods and struck north to the centre of Harwich. At a retired house where I inquired the road to Brewster, a woman told me that if I wanted to go to Brewster I had come a good deal out of my way, and yet she did not know where I had come from, and I was certainly taking the right course to keep in the way. But they presume that a traveller inquiring the way wishes to be anywhere but where he is. They take me for a roadster, and do not know where my way is. They take it for granted that my way is a direct one from village to village. 

I go along the settled road, where the houses are interspersed with woods, in an unaccountably desponding mood, but when I come out upon a bare and solitary heath am at once exhilarated. This is a common experience in my travelling. I plod along, thinking what a miserable world this is and what miserable fellows we that inhabit it, wondering what it is tempts men to live in it; but anon I leave the towns behind and am lost in some boundless heath, and life becomes gradually more tolerable, if not even glorious. 

After passing the centre of Harwich, with its seminary, I struck north to the ponds between Harwich and Brewster. Saw some white pond-lilies open that had been dropped by the roadside. Disturbed a very large water snake sunning on the bank of a pond-hole. 

At what is called on the map Hinckley's Pond, in Harwich, met with the first cranberry-patch. A man told me there were twelve acres here in all, in one body, owned by Albert Clark of Boston, and by others, and this was the largest patch on that part the Cape. They formed a handsome, perfectly level bed, a field, a redeemed meadow, adjoining the pond, the plants in perfectly straight rows eighteen inches apart, in coarse white sand which had been carted in. What with the runners and the moss, etc., between, they made a uniform green bed, very striking and handsome. 

Baker had complained that the cranberry vines were seriously injured by worms, would be, perhaps, destroyed. He and some others had turned theirs into English grass. They also are apt to become too thick and cease to bear well. They then sell them to others to set out for $5.00 a square rod, as another informed me by the pond. This was a large and interesting pond. 

A little further, I came to Long Pond, and passed between it and Bangs Pond by a low beach, and took my lunch on a pine hill with a flat summit, on the Brewster side of Long Pond, near the house of one Cohoon. This is a noble lake some two miles long, as a man there told me (the Historical Collections say the chain of ponds is three and two thirds miles long), with high, steep, sliding sand-banks, more or less wooded, and is the source of Herring River, which empties into the sound on the south. Connected with Bangs and Hinckley's Ponds. 

This high hill with a flat summit, on which was an open pitch pine wood, very suitable for picnics, appeared to be the best point to view it from. You could see at least three ponds at once. Situated about half way between the two seas, on the shore of this noble lake, it appeared to be the best place for an inland hotel on the Cape. What was that slender, succulent, somewhat samphire-like plant in the sand-bank by this pond? After bathing, I abandoned the road and struck across the country northeast by chart and compass, for Orleans, passing between this and another large pond called Sheep Pond, on the north, the country being at first woody, then open. 

After passing Sheep Pond I knocked at a house near the road from Brewster to Chatham to inquire the way to Orleans. This house was about a quarter of a mile from the road, in the fields, and the usual Sabbath like serenity reigned around it. There was no beaten perhaps, because the husband was gone to sea with his dirty boots. I inquired the way of another woman who lived on the road near by, who was just setting her dinner-table when I thought it must be mid-afternoon. 

She directed me by a road or cart-path through the woods that ran due southeast, but I knew better than to follow this long. Concluded she meant the south part of Orleans, and so I struck off northeast by fainter cart-paths through the woods. I kept on through uninterrupted wood by various paths some what east of north for about an hour, avoiding those that ran southeast, because I knew by the map that there were large ponds east of me which I must go round on the north. 

At length, seeing no end to the woods, laying down my pack, I climbed an oak and looked off; but the woods bounded the horizon as far as I could see on every side, and eastward it was several miles, for on that side I observed a great depression where a large pond lay concealed in the forest. All the life I could see was a red-tailed or hen hawk circling not far above my head. This gave me a new idea of the extent of Cape Cod woodland. 

After a while, travelling by compass alone, without path, I fell into a more beaten path than I had left, and came very unexpectedly upon a house on the shore of the pond, in the midst of the woods, in the most secluded place imaginable. There was a small orchard even. It was mid-afternoon, and, to judge from appearances and from the sounds, you would have supposed that only the hens and chickens were at home; but after my first knock I heard a slight stir within, and though all was still immediately, they being afraid, I knew better than [to] give it up, but knocked all round the house at five doors in succession, there being two to a stoop, and by the time I got round to the first again there was a woman with a child in her arms there ready to answer my questions. 

I found that I had not come out of my way. 

Of the woods of the Cape which I walked through in Yarmouth, Dennis, Harwich, and Brewster, it is to be said that they are dry pine and oak woods, extensive but quite low, commonly, with an abundance of bear-berry and checkerberry in the more open parts, the latter forming an almost uninterrupted bed for great distances. 

I soon came out on the open hills in the northeast part of Brewster, from which I overlooked the Bay, some two miles distant. This was a grand place to walk. There were two or three more of those peculiar ponds with high, shiny sand-banks, by which you detected them before you saw the water, as if freshly scooped out of the high plains or a table-land. The banks were like those of the sea on the Back Side, though on a smaller scale, and they had clear sandy shores. One pond would often be separated from another by low curving beaches or necks of land. The features of the surrounding landscape simple and obvious. The sod, so short and barren, affords the best ground for walking. 

Brewster is much more hilly than Eastham. The latter is, indeed, quite flat. In short, Brewster, with its noble ponds, its bare hills, gray with poverty-grass and lichens, and its secluded cottages, is a very interesting town to an inlander. Saw a woman mending a fence nearly a mile from a house, using an axe. 

Barber appears to be mistaken about seeing both seas from the county road in this town, — to have misunderstood the Massachusetts Historical Collections. I passed over some hills there where pine seed had recently been planted with a hoe only, about four feet apart. At first I thought the turtles had been laying their eggs there, but I observed them in straight lines and detected some little pines an inch high just up. Some of the Cape roads are repaired with the coarsest bushes and roots, with such earth as adheres to them. 

Jeremiah's Gutter is what is called Boat Meadow River on the map. I saw the town bounds there. There, too, was somebody's Folly, who dug a canal, which the sand filled up again. 

About a mile north of this, I left the road and struck across west of the road to near the Eastham Meeting-house, crossing a part of that "beach" where once wheat grew, and by Great Pond, where a canal has been talked of. Passed some large tupelo trees. The greater part of Eastham an open plain, and also the southwest part of Wellfleet. 

Put up at the Traveller's Home (Cobb's), so called, at the Camp Ground, just within the woods. Cobb says he has known formerly one man in Eastham export twelve hundred bushels of grain from his own farm. Twenty of corn to an acre is an average crop in a fair year in his neighborhood, which is better soil than usual. Thought likely there was not more raised in the town now than used. 

Cobb thought the Nauset lights not of much use, because so often you could not see them, and if you could they would not prevent your coming ashore. Sailors preferred to depend on the "blue pigeon" (lead). He said that the inhabitants lived on the West or Bay Side, though no more fertile or fishy, because their harbors were there. On the Back Side they could not get off to fish more than once a fortnight, but on the West almost every day. He thought the Cape wasting on both sides there. That the Truro Insurance Company had a hard time to meet their payments. They import cedar posts from Maine, which, with rails, make a fence costing about seventy-five cents a rod, but they are not so durable as formerly, being made of younger trees. 

According to Pratt's History, first camp-meeting in 1828.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 17, 1857