Sandspit at Great Brewster Island
Yesterday I travelled with the Friends of the Boston Harbor Islands to one of their islandy flock, a worn, ancient nubbin called Great Brewster Island, nine miles out from the busy bustle of the waterfront.
Long ago, Native Americans paddled out to these islands in search of fish or refuge from enemies. For a very long time in recent centuries, they were part of a busy, messy, fast-changing Boston culture that lived and died by the sea. For four centuries, Boston built on these islands, lighthouses and docks, forts and prisons, hospitals for contagious diseases and catch-alls for orphans and delinquents and those who fell under wartime suspicion. Families lived out here on some of the islands, fishing and managing tiny farms and crafts, connected to the mainland by small boats and an incredible hardihood. On others, wealthier sorts seeking peace from the reeking city built the occasional summer home and played at boats and picnics and watercolor painting. The guide showed us old black and white photos of Gilded Age ladies in enormous hats, posed on the beach with their long skirts sweeping the wet sand.
During the Second World War, a fear of dark dangers that might track across the Atlantic caused the US armed forces to take over almost all the chain, building in great guns and mines and radar nearby the crumbling forts from the Civil War and War of 1812.
From the Sixties onward, the great movement to clean the nation's air and water, to recover its animals and plants and natural landscapes, became another turn in these islands' long history, as the harbor and its old rocky guardians gained new guardians of their own, who saw them as a crucial part of both the city's history and the state's ancient natural setting. Our guides included both a park ranger and the highly articulate Stephanie, the author of East of Boston, a guide to the wettest, rockiest part of the city.
They've made a wise compromise, the friends of the islands and the multitudinous agencies and authorities who now guard over the chain. Several of the islands are set up to welcome visitors in big, fun-seeking batches. They have regular commercial ferry service during the summer, they have beaches and big docks and picnic areas, concessions to sell hotdogs and fried clams, concerts and Revolutionary War re-enacters. Others, like Great Brewster, are being allowed to travel the road back towards something like wilderness. There's no regular boat service here, you must arrive with a nature tour and a ranger, or in your own boat. There's no dock, even: we were brought over in a sturdy little thing called the Beachcat, which was beached, true to its name, in the shallow water--you jump down into the wet and wade ashore.
It's not a neat place, not pristine. It's a chunky old speck in the ocean with a glacial drumlin hump and a long narrow finger of rock arcing out into the ocean. Staghorn sumac, tree of heaven, and voracious vines and scrub growth have quickly taken over, and paths are barely visible. Private boats often stop here, but not of the elegant kind. Remains of camp fires, empty plastic fuel cans, an old coffee pot among blackened ashes, even an abandoned propane grill, and the occasional beer can ornament some clearings. Old red bricks worn away into ovals tumble on the beach amid the native rocks. You stumble across the crumbling foundation of a small house here, remains of a gun emplacement there, a fire hydrant retreats under a spreading tree. Wooden fences are sinking into aggressive meadows, and a picnic table the nature conservancy put here a while back now teeters on the brink of an eroded bluff.
But you get the most spectacular view of the great Boston Light on neighboring Little Brewster, with its neat lightkeeper's house tucked at its foot. The other islands loom out of the ocean, there Fort Warren on Georges Island, over there a lonely remaining chimney from a vanished mansion on Calf Island, and far out into the mist, Graves' Light, at the very edge of the open sea. Black cormorants and jumbo gulls sun themselves, indifferent to a few human visitors. The sky feels huge. The air is pungent with salt, stone, seaweed, and the rocky shore is tumbled with wet bits of freshly deceased crab and mussel. Up the steep drumlin, you wade up paths have overgrown with grass, lined with mullein, butter and egg plant, and tiny asters. Down by the shore, if you want to hike the long snaking sand spit out to its end, you tread over cobblestone-like rocks for half an hour, soles aching, though when you get to the end, the view is totally worth it.
This is a great way to re-experience the city that I will drive through again tomorrow to work, full of business and purpose and politics and struggle. It's literally getting a distance, by seeing it from a different angle.
