Destination 1: the dog in Dogtown

One of our plans for living in America was to explore a new continent but fate conspired to keep us in Cambridge for most of 2012. Now, at the beginning of 2013, it feels as though we have the opportunities to explore at last: we no longer need crutches or wheelchairs when we go out; we have a car so we can legitimately travel with the dog (rather than hiding him under a blanket in a zipcar); we have sat-nav so we can, hopefully, arrive at our intended destination without several detours and raised voices; and today the snow has melted enough to make a decent length walk seem both viable and attractive.

Dogtown Common is a great destination for a good dog walk. It's a three thousand acre abandoned wilderness close to the fishing port of Gloucester - about an hour's drive from our home. There are stone ruins of houses for Iola to explore, abandoned cellars for Nathan to poke about in, trails for Maya to map-read, lots of sniffs for the dog, and an assortment of stone boulders which were inscribed with edifying statements in the 1930s and which have fascinated me since I first read about them.  

Dogtown Common occupies the center of Cape Ann. In summer, the Cape is busy with tourists: think sandy beaches, kooky artists' colonies, whale-watching trips, cafes and lobster shacks with sea views. Even then, the interior of the Cape is relatively isolated. Today - the beginning of March - it felt as though we had stepped into a different world. There was an old, heavily bearded man leaning against his car who solemnly handed us a map and there was a person hunched over the steering wheel of a car with the engine running. I slowed down as I walked past the car, just to check that he was ok, and he must have seen me out of the corner of his eye because he bashed his horn a few times and then went back to sleep. We all hurried away but the man with the beard didn't move.

Gloucester, MA was one of the first areas of the United States to be settled by Europeans. The area was affluent: a sea port, well situated for trade, and surrounded by seas that were so filled with cod that one could almost walk on the water's surface. The interior of the Cape became home to the community who didn't fit into the mainstream: the rejects, eccentrics and paupers. It must have seemed a Godforsaken place: by the 1700s it was completely deforested. A barren landscape filled with granite boulders. Now the area is thickly wooded again: a little how I imagine Cumbria would look if there were no sheep. But the ground remains littered with enormous boulders and smaller piles of stones where walls and houses would once have stood.

The area was depopulated by the 1800s. In the 1930s, as the trees were regrowing, the area became popular with artists including, for example, the American modernist painter Marsden Hartley. This was also a period of depression and the rich industrialist and philanthropist, William Babson, put the local unemployed to work carving edifying statements on some of the larger boulders. In this way the landscape feels a little like walking through a sculpture park which harks back to the depression of the 1930s. Babson's intent was that people would read his huge rocks for a little lesson in self-improvement.

Always keen on an edifying experience, I encouraged the girls to carefully consider each statement. It didn't go quite how I intended: Maya tried to dramatically enact each word, Iola used each boulder as a climbing challenge, and we're all now convinced that the dog can read because he paid more attention to the writing than the rest of us.

When we returned to the car park, the man who had been 'asleep' over his steering wheel had disappeared but we thought that we saw the heavily bearded man lurking around in the forest. From it's first settlement through to the present day, this area has been heavily associated with witchcraft. There are runes and images and strange writing on the stone thresholds of each of the abandoned fallen down houses. Some trees are decorated with mirrors and symbols whose significance we do not understand. I'm not sure that I would want to visit this area alone: there is something sinister in the weight of the silence and the way that the leaves seem to move about on the ground even when there is no noticeable breeze. But the girls have been exposed to values intended to help them weather this new depression and sequestration, the dog had a fantastic walk, and we returned home (easily, by pressing the home button on the sat nav) with plans for our next walk. I know very little about fate and the forces that sometimes seem to transpire against us, but I do know that there is a bearded man wandering about among the trees and boulders who probably knows a lot more than me. Next time I see him, I'll wish him a 'good day'.