I would rather walk to
Halibut Point at the end of a summer afternoon than to any other place on Cape
Ann. Sitting on one of the great heaps of waste stone, you can see against the
sky the network of cables supporting the deserted derricks, or watch the lights
of the big hotels across the bay, or look down on the flat rocky shore,
deserted now to herons and gulls, where years ago there was built, at the
expense of many trusting and innocent investors, a plant to extract gold from
sea water; and there you can meditate comfortably upon the labors and vanities
and credulities of man.
Charles Boardman Hawes,
Gloucester By Land and Sea, 1923
Charles Hawes bequeaths us one of the vivid neighborhood tours
of the back side of Cape Ann from bygone days. Each of these walks or drives is
worth a look for the variety of the authors' fascinations revealed: Thoreau's
natural history trek of 1858; Reverend Leonard's humanistic observations of
1873; and the Procter Brothers' pleasure drive in 1896.* Hawes in particular is
on the lookout for local color and idiosyncrasy. He acknowledges in his preface
that "there are admirable histories and guidebooks of Gloucester" but
he promises an immersion "for the general reader who cares little for
genealogical tangles and nothing for a catalogue of the annual changes in the
personnel of a town government." He wants more robust adventures.
For Hawes, to write is to aim for literature. In his other
books he takes up adventures at sea with an "on-deck" style reaching
for Melville. He moves to Gloucester at an early point in his career to absorb the
gritty maritime culture. He enjoys an atmosphere of foreboding tension in his
stories as Jack London did, an intimacy with peril and endurance. Down by the
Harbor he takes us inside the Fishermen's Institute and a net factory.
In the chapter "From Annisquam to Folly Cove" we
ramble with Hawes through the north-side villages encountering local lore and
personalities: A few years ago the city
marshal came home to Bay View one night, completely tired out. He had flung
himself down in his chair, when someone pounded fiercely on the door and burst
into the house. "For God's sake, marshal!" the man cried, "come
down to Lanesville quick! A man's murdering his wife." We are taken
into a lamp-lit domestic scene of quick tempers, hard drink, and steely
resolve. It contrasts with the village's generally laconic atmosphere:
There are men in Lanesville who live still
in a world of the past. I found one of them in his store of a winter day, where
I went to try to persuade him to play chess. I am told that he made money in
the old days of the town and that he has no real need to continue keeping his
store, where he now does almost no business at all; but his whole life has centered
on the one interest and the habit of keeping store is too strong to be
broken....
When he looked round the store, my
eyes followed his. I had stepped into a scene out of lives that had ended long
ago. The big room with its counters and show cases was a place of shadows. The
dim light made it seem browner, older, unreal.
I had trespassed on an old man's
memories; I stood bodily, an alien, in a lost world. That man was living in the
past. His face showed it. For the moment I stood in a borderland between two
existences.
"I don't think I want to begin
again," he said.
I was strangely relieved. It would
have been downright profane to play chess with that man in that place."
After his worldly entanglements in Bay View and Lanesville
Hawes arrives at Halibut Point, grateful to be refreshed by solitude. His
meditation there reflects some circumstances particular to his day as well some
timeless ones. The panorama of sea and sky over the granite headlands amidst
bygone, monumental industries of man, still silence many a visitor's turbulent
state of mind.
* Henry David Thoreau, The
Journal Vol. VIII-XlV, ed. Torrey and Allen, 1906; Henry C. Leonard, Pigeon Cove and Vicinity, 1873; Procter Brothers,
Pleasure Drives around Cape Ann,
1896.
