Pilgrim in Dogtown

Smack dab in the center of Cape Ann--Massachusetts’ “other cape”--is Dogtown Commons, over 3000 acres of storied wilderness full of glacial erratics, abandoned colonial foundations and legendary tales of witches, wild dogs and wonderment.

Dogtown Road, Dogtown Commons

I learned of Dogtown Commons shortly after, as a single mother, I began to bring my young daughters out to Cape Ann for vacations. Dogtown, the guidebooks said, was not to be entered without a compass, ideally without a guide and certainly not without notifying family members you were going in. And because it had been the scene of a brutal murder in 1984, gruesomely described and painstakingly reported in Elyssa East’s excellent 2009 book, Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town, I was never inclined to bring my daughters there, though I was mighty curious about the place.

But Dogtown has changed (a little) and my daughters are young women now and this year, during my visit to Cape Ann, I ventured past the desolate gate that separates the wild from the working class suburban.

The cover of Elyssa East's book

I went in.

I didn’t really expect to have the kind of spine-chilling sense of being followed that East describes in her book. I didn’t expect to see the strolling, black-caped warlock or the confounding teepee structures she saw. After all, her forays into Dogtown were in the naturally-more-mysterious autumn, when the tourists were gone—not that Dogtown itself has any--and the native eccentricity of Cape Ann is more apparent. (I’ve lived there in the off season and seen how the local culture supports it anomalies and eccentrics with tenderness and tolerance.)

Nevertheless, I went into Dogtown Commons with caution. Because it is easy to get lost there. It has been home to its share of oddballs and loose screws. And it’s a wild place, despite being surrounded on the periphery of the island by civilization. So I went in on high alert, channeling the sheer, subtle awareness of Buddha after he awakens.

But there is another strange aspect to Dogtown. During the Depression, Roger Babson, entrepreneur, business theorist and founder of Babson College in Wellesley (as well as tenth-generation of the Gloucester Babsons), took it into his head to hire unemployed stone-cutters from Cape Ann’s granite industry. He sent them into Dogtown to carve into the larger glacial boulders inspiring (?) and preachy admonitions to living the moral life. I’d long known that you could climb through the thick undergrowth of the barely perceptible pathways and see stones inscribed with eight-inch, bold font directives such as “Industry,” “Initiative,” “Integrity” as well as the more pointed supposed verities such as “When Work Stops, Values Decay,” “Prosperity Follows Service” and “Help Mother” (and I confess I rather like that last one).

Honestly, I’d never cared to see the Babson boulders. I’d wanted to experience the more raw and austere Dogtown, the scarier Dogtown where maybe I might catch sight of a warlock in a black cape. So when I entered the Commons a week ago and found myself espying the boulders, I was initially disappointed. Oh. These, I thought. “Kindness.” Sigh. “Truth.” What of it? Pontius Pilate asked Jesus what truth was and Jesus said nary a word. And these trees wouldn’t talk.

Then I walked some paces onward, tripping over stones (and it’s impossible not to trip in Dogtown, shifting, stony terrain that it is), the sun at noon, and I realized I was lost. Not lost exactly. But not found, either. The paths and the non-paths all look alike. There was nothing otherworldly happening. But it wasn’t comforting, either, this possible lost-ness. The locals don’t tend to swarm Dogtown. The tourists largely don’t know about it. There is no well-trod way.

And then I saw another boulder. I couldn’t see if it said anything. There were plenty of speechless boulders. I walked around the other side. And it said “Work.”

I wasn’t lost. I was on the path, as such a path it was.

And I began to see an uncomfortable irony: that the preachy, moralizing Babson who’d sent his hired workers to bastardize maxims in granite was now providing not a moral compass (I don’t need to be told “Never Try, Never Win”), but an actual verbal compass as I made my way through this small patch of strange wilderness.

Rocking an erratic

I felt an odd gratitude for the notations. But on emerging safely from the Commons, I felt an even stronger desire to re-enter a less prescriptive Dogtown—if only the one in my own head or heart—where I have subtler guides than clobbered boulders to help me chart my own paths.

Declaring Interdependence on the Fourth

These are stirring and familiar words from The Declaration of Independence:

            Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

            

Along with enjoying our sparklers, hanging out Old Glory and gathering around our grills, we do well to read Mr. Jefferson’s famous words all the way through.

            It is good to read—or to hear; it’s great oratory--The Declaration of Independence if for no other reason than to be reminded of what the shapers of this nation sought. They were not seeking blind obedience to an unchangeable set of rules. They weren’t after a might-makes-right mentality (in fact, they were trying to get away from that one with the British). Instead, they sought an opportunity to be thoughtfully self-governing, rather than exploited by a richer, stronger nation who saw, in the colonies’ resources, much that could benefit Britain—if only the colonists could be managed.

            Well, they couldn’t be managed. The colonists were driven by a dream. But not a fanciful dream: Jefferson says, “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.”

            The Declaration shows us that even before the United States was the United States, there was a hope that here, in this land, there would be the option for self-governance and the option for freedom to live as men and women chose.

            In these times, a certain kind of conservative Christianity and a certain kind of American politics seem strangely wedded to each other. A few years back, Newsweek ran a cross-wrapped stars-and-stripes on its cover. And “God bless the United States” has become the de rigueur tag line to end all political speeches, the way a preacher ends a sermon with “Amen.”

I’m sure that, in honor of the Fourth, some will raise glasses to toast the Supreme Court’s ruling, as I will. But others will wring hands and claim that both God’s word and the Constitution have been besmirched. Indeed, Bobby Jindal has already announced that the ruling “will pave the way for an all-out assault against the religious freedom rights of Christians who disagree with this decision." And the fundamentalist Christian, American Family Association put out a statement saying “There is no doubt that this morning’s ruling will imperil religious liberty in America….” This is, of course, unlikely in the extreme.

And though I never thought I’d be favorably quoting Jeb Bush, his response to the Supreme Court ruling seems to me to be consistent with the vision espoused by Jefferson. Bush wrote, “In a country as diverse as ours, good people who have opposing views should be able to live side by side.”

That seems to me to underscore the deeper meaning in The Declaration. If Jefferson was declaring our need for independence from Britain, he was also underscoring our interdependence with one another.

            John F. Kennedy spoke of our interdependence when he addressed the United Nations with these words in 1961: “Never have the nations of the world had so much to lose or so much to gain. Together we shall save our planet, or together we shall perish in its flames.”

            Martin Luther King, in his address “Beyond VietNam” given at Riverside Church in New York in 1967, knew our interdependence was crucial to our future when he said, “We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.”

            And Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence itself, warns us of what happens when we are not aware of our interdependence: “…all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

            The Declaration calls us to live a common life with one another, promoting each other’s “Safety and Happiness.” The challenge to do so and the opportunity remain ours.