When I speak or write of Cape Cod, seldom is it an accident or about a place “where I just happened to be.” To me, the Cape is holy ground, where I “take off my shoes” with  reverence. And anything I write or think about Cape Cod, anything that takes place there, any photographs I take, are always accompanied by the feeling that I’ve returned to a spiritual homeland.  

 I was not born there; I cannot ever make myself into a true Cape Codder. A native New Englander, yes, born in Newton, Massachusetts, but at age twenty-two I married and moved to California, where I have lived ever since. Nonetheless, at age seventy-five, from way across the United States, I still care deeply for this landmass Thoreau described as a “bended arm”  seemingly laid upon the Atlantic, fragile and glorious.  

The gift shop cliché “sand in your shoes” applies here, with its implication that something of Cape Cod forever attaches itself to you. Yet Cape Cod air, whose healthy qualities my mother enthused over, can’t be taken away. My brother-in-law Peter used to carry out a slightly longer-lasting practice; after a summer weekend on Cape, having squeezed in his last saltwater swim Sunday afternoon, he’d skip his usual shower. “I don’t want to wash it off!  All the way back to the city [New York] on the bus, I keep touching and tasting the salt on my arms— and for a minute, I’m still back there.”  

While he wouldn’t have put it this way, Peter understood something which I often think of in wording from the Book of Common Prayer; he was invoking an “outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual grace.” Make that an “outward and tangible, even delicious sign.”  

Delicious? Well, almost. As a teen I used to take a gulp of pond every summer, though of course told not to. Minister’s Pond water was sort of thick, not unpleasant, and a bit earthy. My yearly mouthful was a way to fully know this place where I swam so avidly; so was noticing the iron that left a rusty-orange skim on my arms and puckers on my fingertips after hours of swimming. 

 A taste, a step, a touch, many steps, hundreds of steps and touches and footfalls—all add up to knowing Cape Cod: the ground, the leafy carpet in the woods, the sand, the water on the face of the earth, through your feet, and hands. Body and soul.  

All this imprinted me from early on. I own a snapshot of an earnest toddler, sun-bonneted and padding around in four-inch-deep water: Sally in the shallows. A few years along, though my image exists in memory only, I was Sally in the backseat on the drive down, listening to the grownups. “Oh, it’s so pretty down here!”  Or, “Don’t you love that view, that perfect little cove?” I was hearing worship, much the way I heard praise to God in church. And then of course, we’d arrive and there I was, wading again, paddling, and later swimming and rowing a boat. Eventually we moved to the Cape and lived there. I came to love the smell of sun on pine needles as I walked paths in the woods; I also let my eyes roam Nauset Marsh from the trail at Fort Hill.  

All those visits and my growing visual abilities came to form my idea of beauty. Every summer I’d return to those wavelets which seemed to make the baby steps with me; later I’d rejoice in actual waves, their bounce, jump, swoosh! Crash! Habit instilled not boredom but a sense of necessary annual events, returns to the “slish, slish” of lapping waves and the way the sun marked the sandy bottom with shifting nets of ripple and sway.  

Though I would learn and come to love many other places, too, these Cape sights and sensations indelibly imprinted on me an idea of beauty. First love, if you will. Little wonder I keep returning and marvel that I can still find it. On Cape Cod.