The road ended where the water should have been.
We’d been driving for almost eight hours when my mother turned right off of Route 6A, the main street that divided the Cape Cod town of Brewster in half, onto Linnell Landing, a narrow road that sloped down through the pine trees toward the bay.
It was 1970, and we were there to drop my brother off at Monomoy, an all-boys sleepaway camp, for the first time. On the left, private homes—neat cottages and bungalows, most shingled with weathered cedar—were set back from the road, and on the right, the camp’s low-profile utilitarian buildings, painted army-issue grey, sat in the shadow of the pines. Fritz would be spending the next two months there.
My mother continued down the hill to the small municipal parking lot next to Linger Longer, a group of cottages the camp owned where she and I would be staying for a few days after dropping Fritz off. When we emerged from the cover of pines into the clear sunshine of midday, we expected to see the bay, where, we’d been told, campers swam and sailed every day. To find this empty basin of flattened damp sand was a bit of a blow.
As soon as my mother parked the car, I jumped out and ran to the beach. My mother and brother, his hand raised to shield his eyes from the sun, followed.
The day was still and hot, and the heat shimmered and bounced off the rocks in waves.
The beach was empty of people but for an older couple, fully dressed except for their bare feet. As they walked past us, the man said, “Don’t worry—it’ll come back. Always does.” A few sailboats, listing against the blue of the sky, nestled in the sand, their sails furled tightly against their booms, seemed to confirm this.
The woman looked at us from beneath her wide-brimmed straw hat trimmed with a colorful striped grosgrain ribbon and hitched her thumb at the flats. “Low tide—the best babysitter on the planet,” she said to my mother.
I started to run toward the nearest jetty, but my mother called me back. We had to bring the bags in and take Fritz to his cabin. By the time we returned, maybe the water would have, too.
After we dropped Fritz off, my mother and I were invited to take a tour of Wono, the girls’ camp half a mile down the road. Unlike Monomoy, which stretched out under the shadows of tall evergreens over blankets of pine needles that filled the sea air with their sharp scent, Wono was brighter, much of it open to the sky. The two entrances were separated by one hundred yards along 6A, and the campus itself unfolded over fifty acres of sloping green lawns, clusters of cabins, dirt pathways, and paths strewn with wood chips all the way to the bay.
My mother parked in front of a large white house, and we went into the office to meet our guide, a junior counselor dressed in white shorts and a white T-shirt with the Wono logo emblazoned on the upper left chest. She pointed out the archery range, and on our way to the beach, we passed a massive dining hall, an outdoor theater, groups of three and four cabins clustered together, and tennis courts. By the time we reached the boathouse, where the sails and boat tackle were stored, I was asking my mother if I could return as a camper the following summer.
“Camp rules say you have to be seven,” she said. I found that unacceptable but didn’t say anything and walked ahead of them to hide my disappointment.
Beyond the boathouse, a wide path between the dunes on either side opened onto the beach. As promised, the water was returning. The flats had become sandbars, white as bone, and the bright blues and greens of the bay darkened as the tide came in.
I climbed one of the dunes, steep and high, and stood amid the waist-high seagrass. The lighthouse at the tip of Provincetown, less than thirty nautical miles across the bay, glimmered in the sun. The fleet of sailboats, lifted by the incoming tide, strained against their mooring lines, bows pointed into the wind. As the water rose, the wind picked up and the halyards and shackles tapped rhythmically against the masts, a sound that comforted me and seemed to extend a promise.
I wasn’t yet aware, at least not in any conscious way, that anything crucial had been missing in my life until I saw those boats. I had an almost preternatural confidence in myself and a certainty—I was so certain—about what I wanted. I was capable of great joy and, more than anything, I moved easily through the world. But in the last year alone, in that little room with the piano and lace curtains, I’d also learned too much about betrayal and the harsh reality that nowhere is safe.
But I felt safe here. I had no intention of waiting two years to return. I was determined to be back the next summer as a camper.
I stood on the dunes and surveyed my kingdom.