Dogtown Common

Author's Comments

There is a particular silence in Dogtown that I have not found elsewhere on Cape Ann. Not the silence of remoteness, exactly, because Gloucester is right there, fifteen minutes by car. It is the silence of a place that was once inhabited and then was not. Cellar holes sit in the underbrush. Stone walls run through the woods to no particular purpose. The forest has come back over what was, three hundred years ago, a small struggling town. And then there are the boulders. Babson's carved exhortations are scattered across miles of unmarked trail, and finding them feels less like sightseeing than like archaeology. STUDY. WORK. KINDNESS. IDEAS. HELP MOTHER. The lettering has weathered into the granite in a way Babson probably did not anticipate, and the slogans now read as something stranger and more melancholy than the Depression-era pep talks they were intended to be. The forest has absorbed them. They feel less like instructions and more like fragments of a lost civilization, which in a sense they are. I come in late September when the bugs have eased and the light reaches the forest floor at a low angle. Morning is the time. The boulders catch sidelight then, and the carvings show themselves in shadow. Bring the GPS. The trails genuinely will confuse you, and I have wasted an hour more than once trying to find a stone I had photographed the year before. This is not a place that gives itself up easily. The photographs come slowly and most of them are quiet. That is the point.

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