Music Welcome to Snewscast, the podcast designed to help you fall asleep. Find us on Snewscast.com and follow us on Instagram at Snewscast to find behind the scenes content. If you enjoy our show, please write a review on the Apple Podcasts app. Please know that we read and appreciate every single one. If you would like to get an email once a week with upcoming sleep stories and other news, subscribe to the snooze letter at snoozecans.com. This episode is brought to you by our Patreon supporters and by pitchpines and windmills. Tonight, we'll read a selection from Cape Cod by Henry David Thoreau, published in 1908. Thoreau was an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher. A leading transcendentalist, he is best known for Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for disobedience to an unjust state. The row traveled to Cape Cod in Massachusetts four times, which inspired this excursion or travel book. If you would like to hear more The Row on Snuescast, check out The Wild from March of 2021, along with Walden, parts 1 and 2, which

both aired in 2019.

Let's get cozy. Close your eyes.

Relax your... Close your eyes.

Relax your body into the softness of your bed.

Now, take a few deep breaths. After spending the night in bridge water and picking up a few arrowheads there in the morning, we took the cars for Sandwich, where we arrived before noon.

This was the terminus of the Cape Cod Railroad, though it is but the beginning of the Cape. As it rained hard with driving mists and there was no sign of its holding up, We here took that almost obsolete conveyance, the stage, for as far as it went that day, as we told the driver. We had forgotten how far a stage could go in a day, but we were told that the Cape roads were very heavy, though they added that being of sand, the rain would improve them. This coach was an exceedingly narrow one, but as there was a slight spherical excess over two on a seat, the driver waited till nine passengers had got in without taking the measure of any of them, and then shut the door after two or three ineffectual slams, as if the fault were all in the hinges or the latch. While we timed our inspirations and expirations so as to a system. We were now fairly on the cape, which extends from sandwich eastward 35 miles and then North and Northwest 30 more in all 65 and has an average breadth of about five miles. In the interior it rises to the height of 200 and sometimes perhaps 300 feet above the level of the sea. It is composed almost entirely of sand, even to the depths of 300 feet in some places. For the first half of the Cape, large blocks of stone are found, in there mixed with the sand. But for the last 30 miles, boulders, or even gravel, are rarely met with. There are conjectures that the ocean has, in course of time, eaten out Boston, Harbor, and other bays in the mainland, and that the minute fragments have been deposited

by the currents at a distance from the shore and formed this sandbank. Above the sand, if the surface is subjected to agricultural tests, there is found to be a thin layer of soil, gradually diminishing from barnstable to trurro where it ceases. But there are many holes and rents in this weather-beating garment, not likely to be stitched in time, which reveal the naked flesh of the cape, and its extremity is completely bare. I at once got out my book, the eighth volume of the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, printed in 1802, which contains some short notices of the Cape Towns, and began to read up to where I was. For in the cars, I could not read as fast as I traveled. To those who came from the side of Plymouth, it said, riding through a body of woods, 12 miles in extent, interspersed with but few houses, the settlement of Sandwich appears with a more agreeable effect to the eye of the traveler. writer speaks of this as a beautiful village, but I think that our villages will bear to be contrasted only with one another, not with nature. I have no great respect for the writer's taste, who talks easily about beautiful villages, unbellished per chance with a fueling mill, a handsome academy, or meeting house, and a number of shops for the different mechanic arts. Where the green and white houses of the gentry drawn up in rows, front on a street of which it could be difficult to tell, whether it was most like a desert or a long stable yard, such bots can be beautiful only to the wary traveler, or the returning native, or per chance, the repentant, misanthrope. Not to him who, with the unprejudiced senses, has just come out of the woods and approaches one of them by a bare road through a succession of straggling homesteads where he could not tell which is the home's house. However, as for Sandwich, I cannot speak particularly. Ores was but half a sandwich at most and that must have fallen on the buttered side some time.

I only saw that it was a closely built town for a small one, with glassworks to improve its sand and narrow streets in which we turned round and round to we could not tell which way we were going. And the rain came in, first on this side, and then on that. And I saw that they in the houses were more comfortable than we in the coach. My book also said of this town, the inhabitants in general are substantial livers. I suppose they do not live like philosophers, but as the stage did not stop long enough for us to die, we had no opportunity to test the truth of this statement. It may have referred, however, to the quantity of oil they would yield. It further said, the inhabitants of Sandwich generally manifest a fond and steady adherence to the manners, employments, and modes of living which characterized their fathers, which made me think that they were, after all, very much like all the rest of the world. And it added that this was a resemblance which, at this day, will constitute no impeachment of either their virtue or taste. Which remark proves to me that the writer was one with the rest of them. No people ever lived by cursing their fathers, however great a curse their fathers might have been to them. But it must be confessed that ours was old authority, and probably they have changed all that now. Our route was along the Bayside, through Barnstable, Yarmeth, Dennis, and Brewster, with a range of low hills on our right running down the Cape. The weather was not favorable for wayside views, but we made the most of such glimpses of land and water as we could get through the rain. The country was, for the most part, bare.

Or with only a little scrubby wood left on the hills. We noticed in your myth, and if I do not mistake, in Dennis, large tracks where pitchpines were planted four or five years before.

They were in rows as they appeared when we were abreast of them, and accepting that they were extensive, vacant spaces seemed to be doing remarkably well. Well, this we told, was the only use to which such tracks could be profitably put. Every higher eminence had a pole set upon it, with an old stormcoat or sail tied to it for a signal that those on the south side of the Cape, for instance, might know when the Boston packets had arrived on the north. It appeared as if this use must absorb the greater part of the old clothes of the Cape, leaving but few rags for the peddlers. The windmills on the hills, large, weather-stained, and the salt works scattered along the shore, with their long rows of vats resting on piles driven into the marsh. Their low, turtle-like roofs and their slider-win-mills were novel and interesting objects to an inlander. The sand by the roadside was partially covered with bunches of a moss-like plant, which a woman in the stage told us was called poverty grass because it grew where nothing else would. I wish struck by the pleasant equality which rained among the stagecoach company and their broad and invulnerable good humor. They were what is called free and easy and met one another to advantage as men who had at length learned how to live. They appeared to know each other when they were strangers. They were so simple and downright. They were well met in an unusual sense, that is, they met as well as they could meet and did not seem to be troubled with any impediment. They were not afraid nor ashamed of one another, but were contented to make just such a company as the ingredients allowed. It was evident that the same foolish respect was not here claimed for mere wealth and station that is in many parts of New England. Retired sea captains in easy circumstances who docked of farming as sea captains are want. A respectable and trustworthy looking man in his wrapper, some of the salt of the earth, who had formerly been the salt of the sea, or a more courtly gentleman who, per chance, had been a representative to the general court in his day, or a broad red-faced Cape Cod man, who had seen too many storms to be easily irritated,

or a fisherman's wife, who had been waiting a week for a coaster to leave Boston,

and had at length come by the cars.

Still, we kept on in the rain, or if we stopped, it was commonly at a post office. And we thought that writing letters and sorting them against our arrival must be the principal employment of the inhabitants of the Cape this rainy day. The post office appeared, a singularly domestic institution here. Ever and a non the stage stopped before some low shop or dwelling. And a wheelwright or shoemaker appeared in his shirt sleeves and leather apron with spectacles newly Don, holding up Uncle Sam's bag, as if it were a slice of homemade cake for the travelers, while he retailed some piece of gossip to the driver, really as indifferent to the presence of the former as if they were so much baggage. In one instance, we understood that a woman was the post-mistress, and they said that she made the best one on the road, but we suspected that the letters must be subjected to a very close scrutiny there. While we were stopping for this purpose at Dennis, we ventured to put our heads out of the windows to see where we were going and saw rising before us through the mist, singular bear and hills, all stricken with poverty grass.

Looming up as if they were in their horizon. Though they were close to us, and we seemed to have got to the end of the land on that side, notwithstanding that the horses were still headed that way. Indeed, that part of Dennis, which we saw, was an exceedingly barren and desolate country of the character which I can find no name for. such a surface perhaps as the bottom of the sea may dry before yesterday. It was covered with poverty grass and there was hardly a tree in sight, But here and there, a little weather stained, one storied house with the red roof. For often the roof was painted, though the rest of the house was not. Standing bleak and cheerless, yet with a broad foundation to the land where the comfort must have been all inside. Yet we read in the Gazette for we carried that too with us. in 1837, 150 vessels belonging to this town sailed from the various ports. There must be many more houses in the south part of the town, else we cannot imagine where they all lodge when they are at home, if ever they are there. But the truth is, their houses are floating once, and their home is on the ocean. There were almost no trees at all in this part of Dennis, nor could I learn that they talked of setting out any. It is true there was a meeting house set round with lumbarity poplars in a hollow square. rose fully as straight as the studs of a building, and the corners as square. I could not help thinking that they needed a revival here. Our book said that in 1795 there was erected in Dennis an elegant meeting house with a steeple. Perhaps this was the one, though whether it had a steeple or had died down so far from sympathy with the poplars, I do not remember. Another meeting house in this town was described as a neat building. But of the meeting house in Chatham, a neighboring town, for there was then but one. Nothing is said except that it is in good repair.

Both which remarks, I trust, may be understood as applying to the Church's spiritual as well as material. However, elegant meeting houses in my estimation belong to the same category with beautiful villages. I was never in season to see one. Handsome is that handsome does. they did for shade here in warm weather, we did not know. Though we read that fogs are more frequent in chatham than in any other part of the country, and they serve in summer instead of trees to shelter the houses against the heat of the sun.

To those who delight in extensive vision, is it to be inferred that the inhabitants of Chatham do not?

Probably.

Also, the unobstructed sea breeze answers the purpose of a fan. The historian of Chatham says further that, in many families, there is no difference between the breakfast and supper. Cheese, cakes, and pies being as common at the one as at the other. But that leaves a still uncertain whether they were really common and either. The road, which was quite hilly here, ran near the bay shore. Having the bay on one side, and the rough hill of Scargo, said to be the highest land on the Cape on the other. of the wide prospect of the bay afforded by the summit of this hill, our guide says, the view has not much of the beautiful in it, but it communicates a strong emotion of the sublime. That is the kind of communication which we love to have made to us. We passed through the village of Suez in Dennis. On Suez and Quivette next, we had a misty recollection of having passed through or near to the latter. It may be denominated a pleasant village, but in comparison with the village of Sandwich, there is little or no beauty in it. However, we liked Dennis well, better than any town we had seen on the Cape. with so novel novel, and in that stormy day, so sublimely dreary, Captain John Sears of Suez was the first person in this country who obtained pure marine salt by solar evaporation alone. though it had long been made in a similar way on the coast of France and elsewhere. This was in the year 1776, at which time, on account of the war. Salt, was scarce and dear. The historical collections contain an interesting account of his experiments, which we read only for a saw the roofs of the salt works. Barton Stable County is the most favorable locality for these works on our northern coast.

There is so little fresh water here emptying into ocean.

Quite recently, there were about two million of dollars invested in this business here.

But now, the Cape is unable to compete with the importers of salt and the manufacturers of it at the west. And accordingly, our salt works are fast going to decay. For making salt, they turn to fishing more than ever. The Gazette will uniformly tell you, under the head of each town, how many go a fishing, and the value of the fish and the oil taken. How much salt is made and used. How many are engaged in the coasting trade? How many in manufacturing palm leaf hats? Leather? Boots? Shoes? And tinware? And then it has done. And leaves you to imagine the more truly domestic manufacturers, which are nearly the same all the world over. Late in the afternoon, we wrote through Brewster, so named after Elder Brewster, for fear he would be forgotten else. Who has not heard of Elder Brewster? Who knows who he is? This appeared to be the modern built town of the Cape, the favorite residents of retired sea captains. It is said that there are more masters and mates of vessels which sail on foreign voyages belonging to this place than to any other town in the country. There were many of the modern American houses here, such as they turned out at Cambridge Port, standing on the sand. You could almost swear that they had been floated down Charles River and drifted across the bay. Perhaps we have reason to be proud of our naval architecture, and need not go to the Greeks, or the Goths, or the Italians, for the models of our vessels. Sea captains do not employ a Cambridge port carpenter to build their floating houses, and for their houses on the shore if they must copy any, it would be more agreeable to the imagination to see one of their vessels turned modern upward in the Numidian fashion. We read that at certain seasons. The reflection of the sun upon the windows of the houses in Wellfleet and Truro across the inner side of the elbow of the cape is discernible with the naked eye at a distance of 18 miles and upward on the country road. This we were pleased to imagine as we had not seen the sun for 20 hours. The same author, the Reverend John Subkins, said of the inhabitants a good while ago, no persons appear to have a greater relish for the social circle and domestic pleasures. They are not in the habit of frequenting taverns unless on public occasions. I know not of a proper

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