Thumpertown, Campground, Boatmeadow,
First Encounter, Sunken Meadow, Cole Road

Not enough people understand that the position of the sun and the way it arcs over
a beach is very important for serious sun-worshippers. It makes a huge
difference. For instance to view the sunset in Brewster or Orleans, you must
crane your neck to the left, setting your lawn chair facing the south and
horizontal to the shoreline. But in Eastham, at all the bayside beaches, the
sun rises directly behind you, browning your shoulders, and then lowers itself
gently into the horizon, like a lady taking a bow on center stage. Right in
front of you.

The flats are spectacular any time of day, especially when the bay seems to have
emptied out, and you can walk a half mile or so into Cape Cod Bay. Some people
say you can heal yourself of almost anything this way, and who am I to say you
can’t.

There’s always the possibility, while you’re roaming around out there in all that
emptiness, that you’ll suddenly feel the bulge of a quohog under the arch of
your foot (which you must quickly dig up and take home in your pocket.) And
when the tide slides in on a hot summer afternoon, and you are floating along with
it on your big old air mattress…well, you must give yourself this gift someday.

Walking out at low tide when the sun is setting right in front of you, and you are
heading into its golden path, you probably feel as if you’re part of an unclaimed
dimension.

I think you probably are

Boatmeadow is not a true Cape Cod Beach as we know it. For one
thing, it’s more of a meadow for beached boats — overturned canoes, dinghies,
kayaks, some of them untouched for decades. As for the beach itself, there’s
not much room to spread a blanket and almost no one does — just a tiny
semi-circle of sand beyond the lumpy parking lot at high tide. And at low tide,
well, the thing to do at Boatmeadow is not to be lying around on a blanket anyway, but to be walking away from the lot and the semicircle, and to keep on walking until you are very far removed
from all your realities.

A small river, just a creek at low tide, flows into Boatmeadow. It was once a
watery thoroughfare that sliced right through the lower cape, from the bay to
Town Cove to at the Eastham/ Orleans line. The little river mostly filled in,
of course, a long time ago and now is part of a great sea of watery marshland
that salts the beauty of Eastham. This series of paintings was produced over a
year’s time, through all seasons and weather changes and times of day. It’s an
incomplete series, because I will still be painting Boatmeadow Beach when I am
a very old lady, even older than I am now.