A Century Ago

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.