The dune shack experience
By: Jeannette de Beauvoir, July 18, 2011
Jeannette de Beauvoir - Sunset from the Margo-Gelb house, one of 19 dune shacks in the Province Lands.
These are the Outer Lands, the wild lands. The days are long at the beginning of summer. The sun rises from the ocean and sets back into it fifteen hours later. The dune roses are in bloom and the tree swallows are nesting.
Somewhere along the stretch of beach from Race Point to the Truro town line, 19 weather-beaten cabins hold their own against the Atlantic Ocean. The now-famous dune shacks were built or lived in by eccentrics, drifters, poets, and dreamers—including Eugene O’Neill and Harry Kemp—each one with a story to tell.
Made of driftwood and other washed-up treasures from the sea, these rickety cabins formed the beginnings of the Outer Cape’s artist and writer’s colonies, earning Provincetown the moniker “Greenwich Village of the North” at the turn of the 20th century.
Now administered by a coalition of local nonprofit organizations, artists are invited to stay in three of the 19 shacks for artist-in-residency programs.
I was honored to be one of the invited artists in for a glorious two-week period in June of 2006. I stayed in a one-room cabin built by Russian artist Boris Margo in the 1940s. He built it for his wife, poet Jan Gelb, who started each morning by running naked into the ocean.
The shack sings of its past, of lines of prose and poetry written by lamplight, of brilliant colors captured on canvas, of the images and ideas its walls have nurtured.
The water-pump is located at the end of a hill. When I was there, I pumped and carried six gallons every day up the sand path to the shack.
The smell of kerosene pervaded the room at night, but not for long: even with four lamps, it was difficult to read, and I was usually in bed not long after sunset. At night I could hear the waves coming in or – during storms – the sound of the wind howling around the thin walls.
Built upon a ridge and exposed to the elements, I crept from the shack to the privy at night and saw stars flung up around me, covering the sky all the way to the horizon, everywhere I looked.
The dune shack experience involves being intensely intimate with one's surroundings, but it's a temporary intimacy that makes way, in time, for someone else to do the same. Perhaps its very impermanence, its fleeting nature, is an integral part of the intimacy. The shack is a home, but not a permanent one.
An anonymous member of the Peaked Hill Trust wrote, “you don't just see where the O'Neills or Pollocks or Mailers worked, you work there yourself – it is a living history.”
That was exactly how I felt, one in a long line of people creating something new and exceptional in this beautiful wild place.
Interested in applying for a fellowship?
Write to: Margo-Gelb Shack, OCARC, PO Box 1705, Provincetown, MA
The Provincetown Community Compact also offers an artist-in-residency program at its two dune shacks, C-Scape and the Fowler Shack.
More information is available at www.thecompact.org. Applications are due February 15.
