Stellwagen Bank

I've been down in the graveyard, most days this winter, thinking about our forefathers, our foremothers, the future and what might meet us there. It is February in Provincetown, on the outer reach of the Cape Cod peninsula. The wind whips in with the accumulated energy of three thousand unbroken miles across the Atlantic, the sun slips over the horizon early in the evenings—there's time to think about things. I read names and inscriptions, figure ages from dates, search for some sort of story, some kind of clue. Something more about the lives these stones are meant to memorialize—something more about that dash between the dates. Something of the hope and grief of these generations, the mothers and fathers who worked themselves to the ground and grave to carve out lives for their daughters and sons. Something of the people dedicated to the wealth and the liberty of a small plot of land by the sea—here on this spit, this curling arm of sand—here on the edge, the tip, the end, the very end, of this continent.

For years, resourceful men and women scavenged what washed ashore of shipwrecks all along the outer arm of the Cape. These are dangerous, shoal-riddled waters, and there was never any shortage of plunder. In 1840, after the Franklin wrecked in shallow waters just off Ballston Beach, people came down to the dunes and watched for days as lifeboats tried and failed to save the doomed passengers and crew. An old man who lived out in Wellfleet opened a chest that washed up and found several unmarked packets of seeds. Seeing opportunity, he took them home and planted them in his garden. Months later, when Henry Thoreau happened to pass through, the old man and his wife had been living all summer off of the foreign plants that grew from those seeds. Henry spent the night, and as he was leaving the next day, the old man took him gently by the arm. You're a man of science. You've seen some things. Come on out to my garden and tell me what we've been eating. So Henry went out to the garden with him and gave a name to each plant in turn. The mystery was revealed as if a cloth had been pulled off the garden plot, as in a magic trick. Broccoli. Cabbage. Parsley.

On the edge of the sea, we are all of us scavengers. Crabs pick at bones. Gulls squawk and drop urchin shells on the graveyard road to shatter. What can we salvage, drag home over the dunes? I want to plant the washed-up seeds. See what comes up. Harvest the stories of the dead. What can they tell me of the life that lies ahead, a future that seems to grow more uncertain by the hour?

On a tomb set in the side of a hill beside the graveyard road, three names share one granite plaque: Captain James Small and his two sons, James and Joshua, Lost at Sea, September, 1846. There is one other plaque set in the side of the tomb: Betsey, mother and wife. Who died seven months later, according to the inscription, broken hearted at her loss.

But how did her heart break, I need to know. Did it shatter? Did it crack? Did it tear along the seams? Did it rust out slowly, in the salt air, or did Betsey, overcome by loss, walk out into the ocean one morning, out towards her sons and husband, and simply let her heart fill up with seawater?

In the deep ocean, there falls a snow: tiny bits of bone and teeth and scale, the remains of plants and animals always sifting, always swirling through the strata. We here on land have not much more than this—fragments, slivers, chips of bone—but it is all we have to work with. I am beginning to think that it all may come down to something about grief.

Dorothy Bradford, I think of you.

From atop the Small family's hill in the graveyard, one can look out over...