Journey to Dogtown
A few chapters from the walk of my life.
The author (Photograph by Jason Grow)
How Bad Had It Gotten?
Some years ago, on a wintry day toward the end of February, I went for a walk.
I’d been driving into town the back way, over Cherry Street, listening to the morning news. The four white cops who’d pumped 19 bullets into an unarmed African-American man had just been acquitted of any crime. A group of Indian soldiers had slipped across the border into Pakistan where they’d slaughtered several families — men, women, and children — beheading some. The economy was tanking, and I was on my way to Main Street to pick a fight with my bank, who’d just been bought by a bigger bank, who now wanted me to spend hours reapplying for my commercial loan at a higher interest rate “in order to improve service for our Valued Customers.” It was raw and drizzling. Spring would never come.
I pulled the car to the side of the road and sat there with my foot on the brake, engine idling, thinking about my commercial account, taking a moment to get myself together. But this would not be the work of a moment. I had no heart for shot-up black men or Hindu massacres or plunging markets or corporate mergers. I wouldn’t be seeing the banker this morning.
I’d been thinking about this walk for quite a while. I kept telling myself that, one day, when the time was right, I’d drop whatever I was doing, head into the woods and commence my career as a walker of Dogtown. It just never seemed that the time was right. I came close on a few occasions, bright mornings of seemingly infinite prospect. But then the world would close in and the walk would occlude from reality. The best I could manage was to carry the idea with me like an emergency telephone number. Now, on the least propitious of days, the idea broke through. I turned the motor off, locked the doors, put my gloves on, hunched my shoulders against the wet wind, and started walking up the blacktop road that angled into scrubby woods and disappeared. This was the road to Dogtown.
In the past few years I’d garnered thousands of airline miles tending to commercial schemes of my own devising, traveling from the east coast to the west. To the UK. To Europe. If I’d wanted to, I could have spent the New Year flying over the North Pole, watching the calendar flop over everywhere at once. This month, for just a few thousand dollars, I could take a trip with fellow college alums to the sources of the Nile, or with my local public radio station hosts to the Galapagos Islands. For thousands more I could run a marathon in Antarctica or die slowly of altitude sickness while standing in line with three dozen other extreme tourists, waiting to ascend to camp IV on Mt. Everest. There was practically no place in the world I couldn’t go. But in terms of my own experience, that walk in the woods was more remote than any of the capital cities of the west, and at least as far away as the most exotic destinations on the planet. In the past two years, I’d been to London eight times, Dogtown none. That was how bad it had gotten.
The sad thing was that I couldn’t have lived in a better place for a walk. Cape Ann is a glacier-scraped peninsula of granite that juts about ten miles into the Atlantic; a stumpy northern thumb of Massachusetts, in apposition to the long crooked finger of Cape Cod to the south. Occasionally, when a flight into Boston’s Logan Airport is delayed, the holding pattern swings north. All along the peninsula’s rock-bound coast you’ll see black squares of roofs, bigger squares of lawns, glints of sun off car tops, and an occasional strand of road. Patches of congestion mark two of Cape Ann’s towns — Gloucester, the fishing port, and Rockport, the tourist village — hunched around their respective harbors. The interior of the entire land mass appears uninhabited, nothing but a canopy of lush green or sere brown. This is no illusion. Through a combination of historical accident and the efforts of visionaries, about 6000 acres in the center of Cape Ann are undeveloped wilds. This interior area is known locally as Dogtown. Over the years, many residents have walked there; some are aficionados of the place. But I suspect, for most of Cape Ann’s inhabitants, the circumstances of life have conspired to make Dogtown as distant a destination as it had become for me.
“But I suspect, for most of Cape Ann’s inhabitants, the circumstances of life have conspired to make Dogtown as distant a destination as it had become for me.”
I’d last been to Dogtown 25 years before, but I still had a mental picture of it. The blacktop entrance road went up a short distance, then turned into a dirt and gravel road which, after a few hundred yards, opened on a field in which stolen automobiles and broken refrigerators could be abandoned, burned, and shot repeatedly by members of the general public. On the far side of this recreational area, the road ascended and opened to a large rolling heath known as Dogtown Common. Adding to the visual appeal of the Common’s romantic terrain was the fact that it had been inhabited throughout the 1700s into the early 19th century, making it one of the few, and certainly one of the first, of New England’s deserted villages. A miasma of legend — tales of witches, suicides, freed slaves and martyred heroes of the Revolutionary War — emanated from the overgrown cellar holes and stone foundations dotting that blasted heath. Paths branched off to such exotic-sounding locations as Whale’s Jaw or the Beaver Dam, either of which might have been a suitable destination for this morning’s walk.
But I had not walked in Dogtown for a long time. I was out of practice. I couldn’t remember how to get to Whale’s Jaw, and anyway I was so busy dealing with the unraveling of my mental picture of Dogtown that I didn’t have time to think about destinations.
The paved entrance road didn’t peter out the way it was supposed to, and it didn’t empty onto that comical shooting range of rolled-over cars. It just kept going up. There were houses (houses!) a few yards to my left, ill-concealed by a curtain of shivering, undernourished saplings. Finally, when the houses stopped, probably where the stolen cars of yesteryear had been deposited, was a paved parking lot. There were no cars in it, of course. No one but world-weary middle-aged men avoiding their bankers were out on nasty mornings like this. But if there had been cars, they would have been unshot and intact.
The blacktop finally petered out and a swinging gate constructed of five-inch steel pipe made it clear that I was officially entering Dogtown. But it was no Dogtown I’d ever seen. There was no rolling field with cellar holes and boulders and ghosts. It was all scrubby growth and fog and drizzle on my glasses. Behind me I could hear the roar of traffic on the highway that connected Cape Ann with the world. Ahead of me, a late morning commuter train was clattering from Rockport to Boston. Off to my right came the sound of earth movers clawing at the glacial rubble in the burgeoning industrial parks at Pond Road and Blackburn Center. The sense of the boundedness of this natural preserve was palpable, painful. All around me the world from which I sought escape was closing in. The uninspired visuals and raw weather drove me down inside myself. The way seemed overlong, arduous, and boring. Nothing like what I’d expected. Everything had changed.
Back in the 1970s, when I first frequented Dogtown, my house had been small, and warm, and crowded with people and animals and domestic noise and squalor. Once or twice a week in the winter when the weather tended to keep us indoors, I’d get my exercise skiing on the trails. We had some good snows in those years, and I’d take my cross country skis — this was back when skis were made of wood, and needed to be covered with a layer of pitch, and then with a foundation wax, and then with a surface wax that matched the type of snow that had fallen — I’d take my skis and make a grand production of this ritual, inexpertly applying whatever wax seemed called for, and throw them in my jalopy, and set off for Dogtown.
That was probably why the trails of Dogtown seemed so different to me now. I’d have moved faster on skis. Perhaps the deep snows made the landscape seem more open. The passage of time could have burnished the surfaces, and might account for that recollected brilliance of the colors, the stillness, and even the rich odors of those woods. In my memory of Dogtown in the winter, the dry leaves and bark had their smells, as did the pines and even the snow (dusty). And there was that one splendid isolated memory of a late afternoon, skiing home through deep, hard-surfaced snow, across an open scrubby patch, when my skis crushed the tops of bayberry bushes, and the perfume of bay leaves surrounded me as I moved through the purple twilight.
Why shouldn’t Dogtown have changed? Everything else had. In the mid-1970s we were still reeling from a spectacular bear market, but I hadn’t known anything about markets then. I simply had an abiding sense of the approach of the end of the world. I alternated odd jobs with food stamps and welfare. My girlfriend and I hoarded sacks of grain and tubs of miso against the approaching famine. Gas prices and unemployment rates soared, and we cheered them on. It was all coming true! I scavenged household goods from the trash and snitched firewood from the edges of Dogtown, dragging it back to my squalid, happy hovel. And when I needed relief I repaired to this magical, perfect place. But it hadn’t been an escape back then. It had simply been a part of my life.
Now, decades later, in the midst of my journey through that life, I was looking for it again. I mean, that February morning I found myself searching for my old winter skiing trail, and the wonderful, restorative place that contained it. It wasn’t that I wanted to go back to my old life. I had no desire to reprise my career as a muddled innocent. It felt more like I was looking for something I’d left back there; something that I needed now. Dogtown and this trail were a way to where it was.
I plunged ahead, crooning old songs, talking to myself, chuckling, in a frenzy of recollection of those early years, following a route whose landmarks returned to my memory with iconic clarity. There was no sense of distance, just sequence, one landmark after another. Each landmark brought with it images of my past life.
My girlfriend and I, with a little help from our friends, had it all figured out back then — how we’d organize into neighborhood tribes when civilization fell apart. When the old, sick order ended, as it surely must, we’d make a new community that would carry us over unharmed into the new world, and we’d have new positions, new meanings, that would refute our twenty-something marginality and more closely represent the importance and meaning we held in one another’s eyes. Our little society would become the world.
The lovely thing was that the world did end for us. But not in the way we were so sure it would. What happened was ... we grew up. We got married, had kids, took jobs, and found our own ways into our own lives. Without our realizing it, those new lives became our worlds, and spelled the end, as surely as any cataclysm, of the innocent communal huddle that had defined our first few years on our own. My sense of the world ending had been correct, but only metaphorically correct.
I took a left at the bottom of a grove of red pines, onto a rutted dirt road under gentle beech trees, (Had it been Steely Dan? No, that was later ... The Band and Van Morrison. Janet Planet!) and suddenly realized I was utterly and completely lost. Where the hell was the reservoir? Could I only have gotten there on skis? And where, for that matter, was the Dogtown that should have accompanied these memories? Had it really changed so much? Or had Dogtown never really been Dogtown at all? In which case, what had happened to me? And was it me or was it it? And what was it that I needed here? What was going on, anyway? What time was it? Where was I? What was for lunch?
That was how bad it had gotten.
“In my imagining of it, this Dogtown fascination would be a journey of sorts, to a physical place, but also a search for the spiritual landscape it mirrored.”
(Unfinished)
I popped out of those woods as toasted as the legendary Swiss chemist who’d accidentally discovered LSD. This new Dogtown experience had upset my bearings, had somehow be-wildered me, and for a petrifying moment I couldn’t tell where, or when, I was. I stood, dazed and derelict, on a rise at the end of a cul de sac overlooking a mangy cluster of cheap split-level houses already beginning to show their age. Wood smoke hung in the mist, front yards were littered with bright plastic kiddie toys. Disconsolate dogs yowled in back yard pens. Perhaps, I reasoned, picking my way carefully out to the main road, this was some kind of time-warped acid flashback. Or perhaps I had experienced a long-delayed eruption of the infamous “mid-life crisis” that caused men of a certain age to enroll in divinity school or take up with 22 year-old girls. Whatever its cause, the inchoate urgency of my Dogtown questions were impossible to ignore. I understood instinctively that, for my own good, they would have to be answered.
The emergence of an interest of this scale had an immediate and salutary effect. I went to my dreaded meeting with the banker the next Monday and it turned out to be effortless, perfunctory, just something to be accomplished, after which I rooted around a used book store on Main St. looking for a trail map of Dogtown. I could once again feel the mass of those woods in the center of everything on Cape Ann, beating like a heart whose secrets were waiting to be discovered.
I recalled a passage from a book I’d recently read, Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams. Lopez wrote about the quality of attention an aboriginal hunter brings to the Arctic landscape. This attention depends upon knowing what is important and what can be ignored. But it has also to do with the very literal sense of the hunter’s existence being linked to the land around him. In fleeting moments the particular attention a hunter brings to his work might yield glimpses of something that suggests a spiritual landscape existing within the physical landscape. I knew damned well such a spiritual landscape existed, and I knew such an attention was possible. But it seemed like a long time since I’d had a glimpse of it.
So, in my imagining of it, this Dogtown fascination would be a journey of sorts, to a physical place, but also a search for the spiritual landscape it mirrored. I suppose, in this regard, it had much in common with all the journeys and voyages that have been recorded in the literature of travel. Awaiting my discovery were the hundreds of years of human history and eons of natural history contained in those woods, not to mention some portion of my own unknown reaches (how vast those were remained to be seen).
The site of my prospective journey was a mere five minutes from my front door. No matter how fascinating it seemed to me, it was in fact only a few miles wide and a few more long. The most this journey would require in the way of material provisions would be a pair of shoes. I knew I’d meet some people along the way, but it never occurred to me that many of the central characters in my adventure would be long dead, or that my two gurus of Dogtown studies would actually show up, albeit posthumously, for the gig. I hoped this adventure would change me, and I was not disappointed.
• • •
Shaler
Late that spring, while I was trying on walking shoes and stumbling through the woods seeking in vain to discover if moss really did grow on the north sides of trees, I began reading books about Dogtown.
Cape Ann has a lot of history. Champlain stopped here in 1611 and christened our harbor le Beauport. The incomparable English adventurer John Smith sailed past in 1614, mapped us incorrectly and named our headland “Tragabigzanda” after a princess he’d claimed had shown him kindness when he was a prisoner of the Turks. English fishermen attempted a colony on the edge of Gloucester Harbor in 1623, and by 1631 they had established a permanent settlement. From those earliest days, a sheltered harbor and poor farmland fixed our destiny as a seaport. Through the seventeenth century we made a living denuding our landscape and shipping its timber to Boston and points beyond, and when our forests were depleted we became merchants, all the while doing subsistence farming and increasingly more fishing. As other mercantile towns, better located or with superior facilities, surpassed us as trade centers, fishing became our predominant commercial activity. By the middle of the 19th century we were a major fishing port, and at the end of the century we topped the heap. Ninety years later we’d pretty well caught all the fish, though we didn’t realize it at the time. We were the confused possessors of a proud past and an uncertain future. Could the fishing industry be restored and managed? Or would our spectacular marine topography become the next developable resource? Would we become a peninsula of trophy houses with a museum fishing port downtown?
Every facet of our history, including these most recent questions, bore in one way or another on Cape Ann’s wooded interior. Dogtown had always been a resource for us; a sheltered place to live, a source of timber and granite, pastureland and drinking water. It followed, then, that Dogtown had its place in many of the hundreds of books and pamphlets comprising the written record of our past.
Each of the books I read had its virtue. But it didn’t take me long to discover the bedrock upon which all the other histories of Cape Ann rested. This magisterial text was, reasonably enough, Nathaniel Southgate Shaler’s The Geology of Cape Ann, Massachusetts, which dealt with the most basic aspect of this place, the coming-into-being of the land itself.
The island of Cape Ann and the neighboring portion of the mainland of Massachusetts form a remarkable salient at the northern extremity of Massachusetts Bay... The general deforested condition of the island of Cape Ann ... enables the observer to note certain peculiarities in the distribution of the drift which are often obscured by forests in other parts of this region.
So sayeth.
Geologist, farmer, educator, and philosopher, Shaler was an important figure among Harvard intellectuals at the turn of the century. He was a popular teacher there, a mentor of Louis Brandeis, and friend and pupil of Louis Agassiz. He wrote textbooks on geology, a history of his native Kentucky, science articles for the magazines of the day, and collections of essays on philosophical matters such as the nature of intellectual property or the relation of the individual to society. To prove that scientific study did not dull the imagination, he churned out five romantic dramas in blank verse and a book of poems about the Civil War. He established one of the first laboratories for testing road materials, operated a farm on Martha’s Vineyard, and from 1884 to 1900 was head of the Atlantic Coast Division of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, in which capacity he traversed, on foot, most of the east coast from Maine to Florida. His colleague William James characterized him as a “myriad-minded and multiple personalitied embodyment of academic and extra-academic matters.”
He was a man of enormous energy, and he was a man of science. In his geological report, he seems to swarm over the terrain of Cape Ann — probing, measuring and hypothesizing — seeking to describe its essence and explain its origin. As he develops his ideas he repeatedly employs the construction, “At first I was disposed to attribute this to ... but close inspection of the material leads me to the conviction that ....” His engagement with the evidence of our landscape is dynamic, and this is reflected in his use of language. He’s continually being “forced” and “led” to conclusions.
Shaler’s book on the geology of Cape Ann treats of the massive forces of land formation and glaciation, and his language is every bit the equal of the drama he describes. The body of the Cape is composed of ridges of granite stacked atop “plutonic rocks which were thrust up beneath the old anticlines.” This has resulted in the intrusion of “dikes” and “joints” and “joint planes.” Piled upon Cape Ann is a plateau of glacial detritus referred to by Shaler as “an embarrassment” of “drift” and “till.” It is marked by “bogs,” “shoved moraines,” “drumlins,” “kames” and “serpent kames.” It is thick with (my favorite of all) “erratics.”
The specialized nomenclature of geology yields some picturesque terms and images, but Shaler was a classicist, and he has that mastery of the musculature of the English language that classicists sometimes have. He deploys his odd-sounding geological terms in a massive, energetic prose, apt to the description of some unimaginably distant era, when whole chunks of our continent wrinkled and thrust, under immense pressure and temperature, and then were worn and filled at vast intervals by mile-thick sheets of ice.
In the arena of Shaler’s report, time is collapsed and all space is intensely localized. The ur-forces which configured our world are not set forth as abstract textbook principles. They are proved out by the very ground upon which we now stand. In the most scientific and particular manner, Shaler narrates the process of Dogtown’s coming into being. Yet the effect, to my ear, is mythic, poetic. It’s as if something informs the Cape Ann anticline, something animate, though not alive in the terms by which we mortals consider our lives.
Our human history does not begin until Shaler is finished with his.
• • •
Olson at the Gate
In 1967 I squeaked out of college with a broken heart and no academic prospects. The Vietnam war was raging and I beat the draft by enlisting in the Navy. My term of enlistment was four years rather than the two it would have been in the Army but, like Cassius Clay, I had “no quarrel with them ’Cong.” I figured, rather than winding up face down in a ditch in the Mekong Delta, it would be better to sail around for an extra couple of years, and learn a thing or two about the world. At boot camp I learned how to be a piece of government property. When that was over they assigned us jobs. As a recruiting gambit in those desperate days, the Navy guaranteed that one of each volunteer’s top three job choices would be honored. I chose journalist and photographer’s mate, two jobs for which I was superbly qualified, and ... I couldn’t think of a third job. As a joke I selected the absurdest rating I could imagine — shipfitter — the Navy’s equivalent of plumber, and thereupon found myself instantly assigned to Shipfitter School in San Diego. I was beginning to learn a thing or two about the world.
The training camp in San Diego was an enormous facility with its own library, and it was in this library that I made the acquaintance of Ezra Pound and his Cantos. I use this turn of phrase because the experience was as profound and vivid as if I’d actually met the man. I was sitting in the main reading room, sufficiently bored to be thumbing through a poetry anthology, when plop! The book fell open to Pound’s “Canto I.”
And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the Godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping...
The page melted. Up welled that strand, that ship, that sea, the sounds of the waves, that swirling blue. The book, the room, the Navy, and my broken heart were pushed to the edges of the universe by the power of Pound’s words, their own kind of software machine for transferring the energy out of Homer and the ancient Aegean, up through the lenses of its later redactors, to Pound’s mind, to mine. How did he do that?
This question occupied the rest of my time in the Navy. Pound seemed to me a brilliant poet, but more than that, he talked like a man who knew something. Some internal power, some knowledge of life, fueled his remarkable poetry, and I wanted access to it. The only way I could think to get it was to fill my mind with what had been in his. So my navy years became a sort of graduate school run by Uncle Ezra.
If I was an eager student, he was a willing teacher. Indeed, he wrote whole books — Guide to Kulcher, Make It New, and The ABC of Reading — for young men just like me. The curriculum was irreverent and eclectic, and my method of study was suitably bent. While my fellow swabbies were out whoring and carousing, I’d be pouring over selected texts, covering the ground Pound had staked out. Because I was the only enlisted man in the entire Repair Division of my ship who could read, write, and operate an electric typewriter, and because I was a lousy plumber, they made me division yeoman on the submarine tender that became my home for the next three years. There was a fat guy named Peters in our division to whom the pharmacist would dispense diet pills by the hatfull, which Peters was only too happy to fork over to me in exchange for a favorable spot on the watch bill, which, being the yeoman, I was in charge of making out each week. So, while Peters was feeding his face and avoiding midnight watches, I was pouring over Pound’s sources all jazzed on Dexedrine, or holed up in my seedy weekend liberty hotel like a junkie Schliemann trying to learn Homeric Greek.
I never did learn much Greek, and I never became a poet. But long after Peters and his diet pills disappeared, Pound’s quirky, distinctly American voice remained, and the poems and essays, and those baffling Cantos; all the material of history — from ancient China to America of the 1940s — piled on the table together, with the comforting structure of historical time collapsed out from under it, and only the texts themselves to illuminate one another. My education was an extended process of sitting with the material and not insisting on its making “sense” until, inevitably, I reached my own understanding of Pound’s mighty epic, and of the texts from which it had been constructed. While he, as an artist, was in agony trying to make his artificial paradise cohere, I was already assuming it did. Reading Ezra Pound became more than anything else an act of belief. That was what Pound gave me in return for my years of study — a belief. A method. A stance in the face of the inscrutable.
So, when Charles Olson came along I was ready for him.
Poet Charles Olson
In 1967, while I was sleeping on my mother’s couch, nursing my broken heart, and waiting to go into the Navy, a friend invited me to accompany him on a party-boat fishing trip. We left his home in Wellesley, Massachusetts and within an hour were turning off the highway to Gloucester, where the fishing boat was docked. As we drove down Concord Street and Essex Avenue to the center of town, the place captured me. The turns the road took, the houses it passed, the way the land rose and fell, the particular combination of ledge and glade, the smell of salt in the air, the rushing clouds overhead ... the sum of these things engaged me in a deep conversation, and I realized that I’d be spending the rest of my life in Gloucester. In 1971, after my four-year Navy hitch was up, I returned to Gloucester, found a cheap apartment, and waited for civilian life to begin. I took long walks, I looked at maps. I went to the library and had another of those extraordinary meetings.
Charles Olson, who died in 1969, looms large in the annals of American poetry. In their celebration of the Millennium, National Public Radio named his cycle, The Maximus Poems one of the top ten poems of the 20th century. Olson was a deep thinker and an influential theoretician whose ideas were heavily drawn upon my mid-century intellectuals. The man invented the term “postmodern” in its non-architectural use. (Dictionaries may someday record that the word which named a literary era first appeared in Olson’s 1955 essay “The Present is Prologue.”)
I didn’t know any of this at the time. I was simply curious about the poet who had lived and worked in Gloucester, my newly adopted town. So, one rainy afternoon in the public library, I picked up the first volume of Maximus Poems and was soon captured by it, just as I had been by Pound. Not only that, but because he was writing about my town, his writing was immediate to my experience. He was talking in some passionate, obscure manner about how to live, about how I might live in this place — a subject in which I was most interested! Thanks to my training with Pound, I was hardly deterred by the fact that almost all of what he said was incomprehensible to me. Over the next few years I sat with it, poured over it. (Where were those diet pills when I needed them?) Slowly I began to discover some of Olson’s sources, and I tried to fill my mind with them, and bring them back to his writings, and consider the material in its new context.
The first book in the Maximus cycle centered on the city of Gloucester and her people — the fishermen, the politicians, the pioneers. The second book moved to Dogtown, and expanded to encompass Greek, Arabic, Asian, Norse, and American Indian mythology and cosmology, mixed with Olson’s ruminations on what the historical record and the land itself revealed about the lives of the earliest settlers, and what these lives might mean to us. In the third book of Maximus Poems, posthumously edited and published, he is back wandering the streets of our town, a solitary figure, ascetic in his own way, exploring his innermost reaches. The first was inspirational, the third shone with a radiance of spirit, but for me it was always that middle book, Maximus IV, V, VI, and its marvelous Dogtown poems that were the core of the cycle.
At six feet, eight inches, Olson was a big man physically, and he was possessed of an enormous native energy that made him seem even larger. He was an indefatigable talker whose conversations overflowed social norms. During his teaching days it was not unusual for seminars to go on all night. At one legendary “reading” in Berkeley, California, Olson kept talking until everyone went home and the janitors came in and shut the hall down. He was, I soon realized, a wild man, and this realization did not make him a less attractive figure to me. His rhetorical stance (one reviewer called the style of his essays “attack prose”) was one of resistance to what he saw as the sacred cows of western intellectual tradition. These included everyone from Aristotle to the academic poets of his day. His likings were even more intense, and were delivered with such passionate assurance as to be irresistible to me. Hesiod and Herodotus, Pausanius (another travel book for my backpack!) on one hand, Husserl and Whitehead on the other; Keats, Shakespeare, Melville, Jung, and Rimbaud thrown in for good measure. The list went on. William James’s description of Shaler would apply equally to Olson — “myriad-minded and multiple personalitied embodyment of academic and extra-academic matters.” In fact Olson knew and respected Shaler’s work and even quoted long sections of The Geology of Cape Ann in his Maximus Poems.
I risk the tedium of this back story because quite unexpectedly, just as I leaving the library and starting down the road to Dogtown, Charles Olson appeared before me. Hundreds and hundreds of pounds of him astride my path, arms folded across his chest, belly of his faded denim work shirt bulging between the buttons, breath whistling in a frightening way through his nostrils, those huge greedy eyes, whites showing all around, angry caterpillar eyebrows arched above, wanting to know what the hell I thought I was up to, heading off to his place, with his man Shaler in tow?
Anne’s Path
Compared to this sort of thing, the woods were a relief. Not easier, but complicated in a different way. Real trees.
A few days after my first foray I returned to Dogtown, this time armed with a trail map. The weather was crisp and clear, and I was edgy and eager. I had already developed an organizing concept for my walk. It went like this: Why should I drive to Dogtown to begin my walk? Since all of the center of Cape Ann is wilderness, I should be able to enter the woods near my house on the northern tip of the Cape, and work my way southward to Dogtown center. Perhaps there would be one main trail. More likely, one trail would branch into the next, all the while gradually tending southward.
This particular morning my plan was to work my exploration up toward my house from the south. The main entrance to Dogtown, the place from which I’d begun my first walk, was on Cherry Street, in the southwest corner of the wilderness area, perhaps five road miles from where I lived. Just this one last time I’d drive down there and park in the lot where the rolled-over cars used to be. Then, using my trail map, I’d pick a route back north to my house. Once I’d learned that route, I could dispense with the automobile altogether. I’d walk out my front door and commute to Dogtown center on foot.
The reason for beginning in the parking lot was that my trail map only covered the bottom half of Cape Ann’s wooded interior. These southernmost woods, I gathered, were what officially constituted Dogtown. This major portion of the map was shaded green and had contour lines and various trails marked out and named. Up in the northern part of Dogtown, where I was headed, the detailed green faded off to featureless white. It was dramatic in that way that maps can be dramatic. As far as it was concerned, those northern woods were terra incognita.
After an hour of picking my confused way from one path to the next I’d barely gotten halfway up my map. There was still a lot of Dogtown ahead of me, and all that beckoning white space at the top of the page. I began walking faster, and then, just north of Whale’s Jaw, I began to jog, very slowly at first, then more vigorously, as I discovered that it was possible to move along the trail in this manner without falling on my face. After a few hundred yards I could feel a sweat coming on so I dropped back to a walk and considered the results of this experiment.
I knew I was supposed to be stopping and looking, sensitive to every nuance of the natural world around me, but I felt stupid doing this if I couldn’t even figure out where I was. The walking felt too damned slow to get me anywhere and the map seemed more like an imposition than a guide to my surroundings. I jogged another quarter mile and the sweat started to run. This made me feel as if I were accomplishing something. I knew that crashing through the woods at see-nothing speed was heresy. Already I could hear Thoreau tsk-tsking over my shoulder. But by God, it felt good! I pounded on for a few more minutes, like some fat old dog who’d finally broken out of his back yard pen and was having the time of his life running wild in the woods, then resolved to chuck the map. I’d get to know these paths and trails by jogging every inch of them. And when I was done I’d have my own whole map of Dogtown alive in my head. Not dotted lines, but the real topography of the place and all its ins and outs, ups and downs, including the white land to the north.
I came to a place where the trail split into three branches and I stopped for a moment, considering my options. Though least used, the center trail tended in the most northerly direction of the three. I entered tentatively upon it, jogging slowly, uncertain whether or not the path would peter out. After a few minutes I came upon a polished granite marker set flush in the ground.
Anne’s Path
Her last breath was loving
The smell of pine.
The sweat went cold on my chest. This would’ve been Anne Natti, my neighbor. In the 1980s she’d been murdered in these woods by a vagrant. We all remembered the story, mourned her loss, but I’d never had any idea where the crime had actually occurred. Now I knew. She’d died near this spot, and her relatives had set the plaque here in her memory. I was just at the part of the page where the map went white.
What a Trail Could Be
It was rainy and raw for the next few days, archetypal March-in-New-England weather. Then the rain stopped and the sky lightened from lead to slate. I ventured out my front door, jogged a few hundred yards down Langsford St., turned left up Butman Ave. for a few hundred more, then did a quick left-right up Washington and down Bianchini, past the big Bay State granite quarry on my left, and into the woods. Total elapsed time, five minutes — maybe half a mile overall.
I’d used the rainy period to refine my exploration technique. I purchased a street map of Gloucester and spread it out on the kitchen table next to my trail map. Though it did not delineate trails in the wooded interior, the street map did indicate, by means of a dashed line, several old roadways that ran through the woods. By looking at the two maps together, it was a simple matter to convince myself of the continuity of trails and old roads leading from Bianchini Road to Dogtown Square. I had also purchased one of those sports watches with a big readable dial. I figured my woodland jogging would go at an easy pace, between 10 and 12 minutes per mile, counting obstacle jumping and pauses to scratch my head. The speed wasn’t as important, however, as the uniform rate of the jog. I would measure distance by time.
The woods were bare, with little piles of dirty snow huddled under old leaves. Aiming for Anne’s Path, I took the first southerly branch off my narrow entrance path. By comparison with the trails back in Dogtown center, this was a broad thoroughfare, wide enough for a cart or a pickup truck. I knew that this northern end of Cape Ann had been the center of a flourishing granite industry in the 19th century, and as I passed miniature water-filled quarries on my left and my right, I guessed that the road I was on had been built to haul the granite out of the woods.
My neighborhood is the region in the north part of Gloucester known as Lanesville. It centers around a small harbor, Lanes Cove, from which, in the hundred years between 1830 and 1930, countless tons of locally-quarried granite were shipped. The woods in this part of the Cape are dotted with miniature quarries, too small to be individually named, known generically as “motions.” The rock-rimmed excavations had filled with water over the years, and now, as bird baths, forest pools, or frog-breeding grounds, lent a lovely texture to our northern woods. In addition, there were another three dozen larger commercial operations which sported the names of the companies that developed them, or of the men who had pioneered them. Like the motions, they’d all filled with water in the decades since they’d last been used. Some were integrated into the water supplies of Gloucester and Rockport. Some became swimming holes for the locals. Bay State quarry, adjacent to my entrance to the woods, was of such depth that it had been used for testing sonar in the 1950s. It still sported the long, mysterious jetty that had been used to deploy the research equipment.
Big holes or small, the granite that came out of them would be sized to order for specific jobs, or cut into paving stones of uniform dimension, then hauled by oxen or rail to Lanes Cove, where it would be loaded onto beamy, single-masted wooden cargo ships known as stone sloops, and shipped to Boston or New York or Philadelphia or even New Orleans and Havana. The volume of granite that came out of our innards is difficult to conceive, but Shaler’s “remarkable salient” paved a good part of the Eastern seaboard. Save for the invention of macadam, Cape Ann would probably be entirely hollowed out now, like a giant molar waiting for its filling.
There were several places for stone sloops to dock along our stretch of coast. A mile north of Lanes Cove was Folly Cove, where there’d been a quarry within spitting distance of the water. A mile south was Bay View. This had been a small natural inlet which they’d built up with a big stone pier to receive the granite from a major quarrying operation in which the infamous Civil War general Ben Butler had been an investor. The Folly Cove quarry had been deserted for years. Bay View was now a state marine research station. Lanes Cove, with its picturesque granite breakwater, sheltered a few fishing and lobster boats as well as the inevitable pleasure craft.
These woods in this quarrying end of the Cape had a different character than the woods down near central Dogtown. They were more open, more cut through with well-defined paths which once had led from quarry to quarry and then to the water. They were punctuated by old excavations and by heaps of the accompanying waste rock called grout. Added to the morainal features left by the glacier, the quarries lent a wild, lunar aspect to the place, softened or at least made more interesting by seventy years of erosion and overgrowth.
I came to be familiar with this terrain because I spent weeks getting lost in it. I kept thinking I was getting on trails that were headed south, only to have them dead end at quarries or veer west, toward the water. Of course Lanesville, as all of Gloucester, had grown a great deal since the days of granite and oxen, and all those paths which had once run to the water now terminated in the back yards of houses built along the edge of the woods, guarded, in most cases, by snarling dogs who, for once, did what God intended dogs to do when He deemed they adopt us as a host species, namely, scare the bejeesus out of intruders like me.
In my enthusiasm I began going out every day regardless of the weather, attempting to extend the frontiers of my trail knowledge southward. I kept emerging in those Lanesville back yards until one day I took a left fork where I’d always taken a right, and jogged happily along until I wound up on a road in Rockport, over on the other side of the Cape. Damn! One more time ... Up Bianchini Road, past the Bay State Quarry and into the woods, right turn onto the main trail, bypassing a left and a right, then left on a big trail, bypassing the tempting right fork, down through some swampland, log bridge over a sweet little stream, left again, instead of right into someone’s back yard (no dog) then happily down that trail to the southeasterly fork and, oops! Rockport again.
This probing from north and south had been a great innovation. By now I was feeling like Frobisher or Hudson or Davis in search of a northerly passage to the Orient, making these failed experimental journeys out into the cold and fog, then returning and recording what had been learned, trying to correlate it with evidence from past journeys, to fill in that blank white space on the map. I jogged the same trip next day, but this time I took an oblique fork before I came to the back yard of the day before, and got on for a few more minutes before I found someone else’s back yard. (As annoying as these backyards were, they were the only way I could devise — the compass had not been invented yet — of keeping myself oriented. Rather than batting around in the interior vastness of these woods, I was working my way through like a coasting vessel, landfall by landfall along the western verge.) Then one day, I thought I recognized a part of the trail. I was almost certain I’d been lost there the week before. I marked it with a distinctively-colored piece of bark.
Two days later I set off from the north, all muted excitement, and got lost. Two days after that I found my improvised trail marker, cut back hard at that junction, and wound up on a path that led me to Anne’s Path. What a moment! Balboa, gazing across to the Pacific, could not have experienced a deeper flush of satisfaction than I felt as I approached the joining-place of my northern and southern probes. True, Balboa’s view vastly outweighed my own discovery. But just for an instant, the sense of accomplishment was the same. I had explored the terrain, and had discovered the route from my house to Dogtown Common.
As I progressively made known the larger territory between my house and Dogtown, I began to get a sense of the trails in a way that had little to do with lines on pieces of paper. I had imagined, during those first confused jogs, that people who are adept at traveling in the woods find their way by assembling a sort of visual narrative of their route, which they “play back” in their mind’s eye, to direct themselves. I tried to learn to do this and failed. I couldn’t keep the narrative straight, and my eye for detail was not sufficient to allow me to recognize a particular tree or boulder on a second visit. And anyway, I did all my exploring on the jog. Things seemed to go by so fast I couldn’t keep them straight.
Safe jogging required that I pay attention to the trail under my feet, and I was thus forced to notice that each trail had its own particularity. Certainly there was a large visual component to this. Some trails were leaf-covered, some were stony, some orange, some brown. But other factors entered in. Some went uphill or down, were wet or dry, spongy or hard, smelled moldy or dusty. After my visual narrative idea had proved itself unworkable, and I’d learned to relax to this new kind of texture, important peripheral information began to seep in. I noticed that I could occasionally locate myself by the way a trail felt.
It was a matter of using all the input available. Not just the visuals, but the position of the sun, direction of the wind, angle of the terrain, type of growth, material of the trail — all these things factored into a much more complex recognition system than I had imagined at first. This was deeply satisfying. I still got lost a lot, but now instead of, Where am I? it was, Ahh. I’ve been lost here before!
• • •
The Only Way
The only way to deal with an erratic like Charles Olson was to give as good as you got. I squared my shoulders, pointed my chin at his chest, and told him he knew damned well what Shaler and I were doing out here since he, as much as anyone, had a hand in shaping my journey.
I told him it was my fate, as it has been his, to have been born with an acute sense of my own existence. I’d never been consciously aware of it, I said, until he’d coaxed it out of me. Now we were stuck with it, and there was no point pretending he didn’t know what I meant. It ran through everything he wrote, from “Written in Gloom on Watch House Point” to The Maximus Poems, and it reinforced my idea of myself; clarified it, validated it.
“It” was that strange unshakable sense I had of being here — of all this being here — for the very first time. Certainly history and culture exist, but in this perception they are simply elements in a field of materials, all of potentially equal use. Time begins with my time, and I am the agent of creation within it. Sure, there are powers beyond my ken before which I am smaller than the smallest dust mote, and yes, I still get speeding tickets and endure the million hassles to which the flesh is heir. But the essence of my relation to this world is that of an aboriginal inhabitant.
It’s as if, I told Olson (walking in circles now, developing this fragile concept, partly making it up as I went, partly pulling it out from inside, whence it had always informed me) — it’s just as if I were the first man here, like one of those first settlers you so revere, who came to this place and used it right. I’ve felt that way my whole adult life, as if I were the first settler in this world. And every day I wake with that feeling of newness. This world is mine to see what I can do in it, to discover it, to have commerce with it.
My life is empowered by this vision. And as much as you, or Professor Shaler, or Dogtown itself are your own unique beings, so too you are parts of the world before me, and I lay claim to the use of you, much as you in your own individuality have the use of me. If we can work together, that’s fine. If we can’t, I’ll find another way... I paused to catch my breath.
Olson nodded in silence, arms akimbo now, gave just the hint of a smile, turned a quarter way round to make room on the path, and we started off, Shaler not far behind us, shaking his head at the thought of two such puffed-up tom turkeys leading him into his woods.
The Yankee Genius
There is no Dogtown experience quite as jarring as walking along a wooded path and suddenly confronting a large boulder upon which are incised foot-high letters proclaiming:
USE YOUR HEAD.
Scattered throughout the lower portion of Dogtown are two dozen similar stones, each bearing a different motto, ranging from high camp to zen. My favorite is carved into a corner of one of the largest glacial erratics on all of Cape Ann. It says SPIRITUAL POWER, and it would be a good epitaph for the best works of the man responsible for those monuments. His name is Roger W. Babson. He is a Yankee genius, a human erratic, a pure product of America.
He resembles, in his most widely circulated photograph, that bogus Kentucky Colonel who mass-markets fried chicken — fleshy, friendly face, twinkling eyes, satisfied smile and a trim goatee. An odd duck, but likeable.
And he was odd —- wild as a youth, maladjusted. He was born in 1875 in a white clapboard house which still stands in one of Gloucester’s downtown residential areas. As a boy he got himself kicked out of private school and began hanging out with lower class toughs. In his early teens he suffered a nervous breakdown and dropped out of public school for a time. When he was a young man he contracted T.B. and became a convert to vegetarian diet and fresh air. Thereafter he never slept or worked in a heated room. There is another famous photo of him dictating a letter to a secretary. Both of them are bundled up in blankets and shawls, and the secretary is wearing mittens, and grasping strange metal prongs (no doubt designed by her boss) with which she strikes the keys of the typewriter. He never took a drink, and in 1940, long after its influence had waned, he became the Prohibitionist Party’s candidate for president. If he wasn’t a racist, he was certainly a believer in genetic determinism and in the primacy of “native-born, white stock.” Though a rigidly rational man all his life, he managed to convince himself that the conquest of gravity was our next technological frontier. He endowed a non-profit organization called the Gravity Research Foundation which, to this day, sponsors academic papers on gravity. Still waiting to be claimed is its million-dollar prize for the production of the first successful anti-gravity device. That these eccentricities do not define him is a tribute to the breadth of his intellect.
While engaging in such wing-nut activities Roger Babson also managed to become a millionaire many times over by pioneering the mass collection and delivery of statistical information to the investment industry. Building on this base, he expanded into business forecasting and became a key figure during Wall Street’s roaring years. It was the old story of the man who sells supplies to the gold miners becoming richer than the miners themselves. Babson saw an under-inhabited niche, an early “service industry,” and invested in it rather than in the market it served. When he predicted the onset of the Great Depression — he was the only major forecaster to do so — his place in history was set. In 1932 he accomplished the even more difficult feat of predicting the market’s bottom, much to the advantage of his clients. Babson went on to found three colleges, write more than forty books, and to serve as adviser to seven presidents, from Roosevelt to Roosevelt. He was one of the few American businessmen called in to visit Khrushchev during the Russian premiere’s tumultuous visit to New York in 1959. His interest in gravity led him to assemble an unmatched collection of Isaac Newton’s original works and to compile a Newton bibliography that is still consulted today. He was an influential figure in national religious organizations and a founder of the Open Church movement. He even, if yellowed newspaper articles from the 1920s can be believed, found time to invent the parking meter.
“I don’t think I ever played a game of ball in my life.” he recalled in his later years, “Even as a youngster I liked work. It interested me.” One of the places he found work was his grandfather’s dairy farm, a rambling establishment north of the downtown area. “About a mile distant, in a direction away from the city, were the pastures where for about six months of the year the cows spent the days grazing.” It was Roger’s job as a boy to take the cattle out to Dogtown. The pastures on which his cows grazed constituted about 1150 acres of undeveloped land at the center of which were springs, a stream and a natural valley, the whole comprising a prodigious watershed. Shaler describes it this way:
With the map of the island before him the reader will perceive that the Cape is in good part divided into two regions by the deep indentation of Gloucester harbor and a corresponding indent known as Sandy Bay. Between these two depressions... the surface of the Cape is, save for the encumbering envelope of drift, much lower than along the other part of its area.
The map provided in Shaler’s book will also show the reader ranges of hills on both sides of this valley and a large swampy area above it, to the north. This area, Brier Swamp, feeds a healthy stream named Wine Brook (so called because of its tannin-dyed waters) which feeds another stream known as Alewife Brook, which runs southwesterly down the center of this valley and ultimately empties into Mill River, which, in turn, empties into the Annisquam River on the western side of Cape Ann. In the 1600s a tidal dam and mill were erected on Mill River downstream from the junction with Alewife. The mill was used to grind grain and to saw the logs harvested from the primal forests of Dogtown. Until recent years, Alewives, small herring-like fish, still took their age-old journey up Mill River and into Alewife Brook to spawn. Place names here nestle into their own history.
Roger Babson
In any event, when young Roger Babson took his grandfather’s cows to pasture, he followed the rich valley of Alewife Brook into the heart of Dogtown. In 1930 the Gloucester Water Board estimated that this brook and its watershed could be counted on for an average daily flow of 2 million gallons. This was water they badly needed to supplement the city’s original reservoir. All they had to do was plug the downstream (southwest) end of the valley surrounding Alewife Brook and they’d have their reservoir. So the City of Gloucester turned to Roger Babson to acquire these 1150 acres of his family’s pastures. Their conservation as protected watershed was the first, and the single greatest factor in marking out and stabilizing Dogtown. The way in which the land transfer was accomplished says much about the kind of person Roger Babson was.
By 1894 he had sufficiently recovered from his youthful wildness to have graduated high school and matriculated to MIT. In 1898 he was set to graduate when his old nervous disability struck once more. He suffered some kind of mental fatigue during a crucial test and could not continue. He told his professor, Charles Spofford, of his difficulty, and Spofford allowed him to lie down and rest until the attack had passed, whereupon he got up and successfully completed the exam. Thirty years later Babson, now a wealthy man, was approached by the Water Board for the purpose of purchasing the watershed land on which they hoped to construct their reservoir. Babson had been advised that he could make as much as $100,000, no small sum in those Depression days, by selling the property. “When I found, however, that Professor Spofford’s firm were the engineers, and that he was anxious I should make it a gift, I decided to present it to the City, taking no pay whatsoever.”
It took only six months for the work-hungry men of 1930 to shore up the valley walls and build the dam. The valley filled quickly, and today is a beautiful elongated reservoir backed by hundreds of acres of pristine woods, still the most fruitful watershed on Cape Ann. The bronze plaque on the gate to the pumping station below the dam reads:
This reservoir, watershed and reservation are for the people of Gloucester, the land having been given in memory of my father and grandfather, who roamed over these rocky hills — they had the vision that some day it should be conserved for the uses of the City and as inspiration to all lovers of God and Nature.
This would be a perfect ending to the story, but Babson, who maintained his involvement with Gloucester and Dogtown throughout his 93 years, added another chapter. It was a part of his makeup that he couldn’t resist giving advice. The same is probably true of many men of his sort — Teddy Roosevelt comes to mind. They’ve found success following what seem to them obvious principles, and in their enthusiasm and native generosity, they want to share these precepts with the world.
In 1927 Babson wrote a book entitled, Dogtown, Gloucester’s Deserted Village. After tracing Dogtown’s early history and present configuration, Babson ends with his reflections on “Dogtown’s Economic Cycle” in which the history of this place becomes a parable about the cyclical nature of economics ... “fortunate are those who get on when the wheel is at the bottom and get off when the wheel is at the top.” Dogtown, in its final meaning to Roger Babson, is a moral exemplar, a lesson provided by nature on how men should govern their financial affairs.
To be certain that we would not miss this message, (and he took childish delight in his insistence on this) Babson then wrote what he called his “book in stone.” He hired quarrymen who’d lost their jobs to the Depression and instructed them to carve his inspirational mottoes on the faces of huge boulders throughout the watershed area.
So, on my jogs through that lower 1150 acres, when I am reminded to
GET A JOB,
or
HELP MOTHER,
I experience something between irritation and amusement. On the other hand, after churning up the boulder-strewn hill on the way to the highlands of central Dogtown,
COURAGE
— just the way it stands there, forthright on its modest stone — never fails to give me enough juice to get me up to
SPIRITUAL POWER.
► Gregory Gibson, the author of this story, was also featured in our story “The Ones Who Live.” Read it here.