The Breakwater

This is a story about the day I visited where I grew up, fifty years after the events described occurred. The story won a writing contest and was published in the Spring of 2012 in Ocean Magazine

The Provincetown breakwater is a unique opportunity for tourist to walk to the tip of Cape Cod. Today it looks like a walkway to adventure. It was not always that way. In the 1950’s the granite walkway had large gaps where fish entered, trying to escape the dangers of the bay.

As I step onto the breakwater, I take a deep breath of air filled with the salt from the sea. The craggy granite rocks form a pathway to the sea. In the distance, the breakwater meets the golden sands of the Cape’s tip. Wind filled sailboats and fishing draggers scurry back and forth from the deep blue of the ocean to the shelter of the turquoise bay. Meanwhile two majestic white lighthouses stand guard to the entrance of the bay.

            The sky is blue with wisps of clouds and shrieking seagulls hover just above me.

The air and the sounds of the gulls remind me of a time when my friends and I would spend an afternoon at the breakwater hunting sand sharks; a time when the massive granite rocks had gaps and allowed the sea to enter the nearby salt marshes. 

At high tide silvery herring and baby blues would find the openings and swim into the salt marshes only to become trapped as the tide recedes. Sleek grey sand sharks follow the younger fish, moving into the swirling cloud of fish, and begin feeding.

I stand at the edge of the breakwater, as the water laps at my feet; I magically become a harpooner of old. Instead of hunting whales, I hunt sand sharks! As the sharks follow the flashing schools of fish, I aim just behind their dorsal fin and let fly! The shark thrashes about, flinging salt water before I am able to flip him onto the rocks. The salt water is refreshing on my tanned face, but stings my eyes. Squadrons of squawking sea gulls descend to feed. The hunters have become meals for sea birds and their fledglings.

One day I arrived to see an ambulance taking away one of the younger boys. Normally, he would tag along with me, and my friends. Tired of waiting, he had started to hunt on his own. However, what he believed was a dorsal fin was in fact a tail fin. In the thick cloud of fish, he didn’t notice how close his foot was to the shark’s tail fin…. That was the end of us ever hunting sharks again.

That winter, the engineers returned to repair the breakwater. Sharks could no longer enter the marshes during high tide….

Walking the mile and a half long rocky path, along with the other summer tourists, I visit the Cape tip and take pictures of the beautiful lighthouses that still guard the entrance to the bay. I again watch the boats moving back and forth from the ocean to the bay. Seagulls continue hovering, searching for food for their young. In my mind’s eye, I travel back fifty years and, I see a group of boys providing seagulls morsels of salty shark while hunting for whales.