Beach/House, Fall 2024
Shadows lengthen. The crowds are gone. The weather is at its most glorious. Autumn arrives and cozy season begins on the Outer Cape. It’s the time of year when people here head back indoors to tackle some of the household projects that were impossible to even think about during summer’s hubbub. Evenings that were spent dining outdoors are now savored in front of a fire. In this special edition of the Provincetown Independent's home, garden, and design pages, we’re easing our way into the fall projects that come before the year-end holidays and the promise of the new year ahead.
Shadows lengthen. The crowds are gone. The weather is at its most glorious. Autumn arrives and cozy season begins on the Outer Cape. It’s the time of year when people here head back indoors to tackle some of the household projects that were impossible to even think about during summer’s hubbub. Evenings that were spent dining outdoors are now savored in front of a fire. In this special edition of the Provincetown Independent's home, garden, and design pages, we’re easing our way into the fall projects that come before the year-end holidays and the promise of the new year ahead.
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Provincetown Independent | BEACH / HOUSE | <strong>Fall</strong> <strong>2024</strong> | 11<br />
A grass compass seen last winter at Newcomb Hollow <strong>Beach</strong><br />
in Wellfleet. Blades of beach grass carving circles in the sand<br />
inspired the writer’s project. (Photo by Kai Potter)<br />
A weight, a wire, and a nail are cobbled into an apparatus that<br />
would mimic the action of a beach grass compass, carving<br />
circles into slate. (Photo by Cole Barash)<br />
A scratch circle the writer created by leaving a compass<br />
apparatus set up on an old slate roof tile on the beach over the<br />
winter. (Photo by Cole Barash)<br />
Scratch Circles<br />
Stories of the winter wind, the compass grasses, and the sand<br />
By Kai Potter<br />
We stood on the steps of the dune shack,<br />
chipped enamel cups full of strong coffee<br />
in our hands, and looked out over a world<br />
made clean and new. The footprints we left in the<br />
sand in the days before, records of our coming and<br />
going, were buried and smoothed over. The tumbling<br />
and skipping of grains of quartz and feldspar<br />
had filled our steps like windblown snow.<br />
I had waited for this chance to be in the dunes<br />
to think and write and live in a shack for a week<br />
with my partner, Eli, as if in some simpler time. A<br />
wind had been blowing off the ocean and through<br />
the hollows of the Province Lands for days when<br />
we got there. And all through the night it whipped,<br />
spraying the seaward side of the shack in sharp,<br />
sand- filled gusts. The pounding woke us and kept<br />
us restless and tight- chested until dawn. Out in the<br />
dunes, all the world, its rawness, beauty, and indifference,<br />
feels close to the skin.<br />
The morning was still. The wind had calmed to a<br />
light breeze, its fit had passed, its discontent blown<br />
out. Now it rested. We stepped from the wood stairs<br />
onto the smooth sand and walked to the beach, past<br />
the gap in the snow fence with its twisted wire ends<br />
that grab at your shirt, down the little dune, and to<br />
a trail nestled into a broad sandy valley edged with<br />
heathers, beach plums, and dune grass.<br />
We saw no other signs of steps in the sand. No<br />
human footprints, no winding snake’s path, no<br />
lobed paw prints of the fox. No living thing had left<br />
its mark yet today. Except one. Around each clump<br />
of dune grass, drawn in a clean line in the new sand,<br />
was a perfect circle.<br />
I’ve always called these marks grass compasses.<br />
But they are also known as scratch circles, and<br />
they appear on coastlines throughout the world,<br />
wherever there is sand, grass, and wind. Scharrkreis,<br />
a German word meaning “scrape circles,” is a term<br />
that archaeologists use to refer to versions left in<br />
sediment and discovered in the geological record<br />
dating as far back as the Precambrian.<br />
In the dunes, with time and space to sink deep<br />
into my fascination with these compasses, I would<br />
lie on my stomach on the sand, chin resting on my<br />
hands, and watch them form, one gentle breath of<br />
wind, one trembling blade, one grain of sand at a<br />
time. The wind, a subtle energy, comes down and<br />
moves through the dunes. The grass, a sensitive<br />
living instrument, responds. Its blades sway, pivoting<br />
from the central point of the stem, sweeping<br />
in little starts and broad, graceful arcs, turning like<br />
the needle and chisel points of a drawing compass.<br />
The tip of the blade brushes gently over the forgiving<br />
medium, and in a slow, patient, creative process,<br />
the sand yields to the sweeping of the grass,<br />
becoming a canvas for the process, telling the story<br />
of its own creation.<br />
After we left the dunes, the circles remained in<br />
my mind, and I set about finding a way to recreate<br />
them.<br />
I built a series of little apparatuses intended to<br />
act like clumps of beachgrass. They started simple,<br />
became more complex, and then, guided by nature’s<br />
designs, returned to simplicity. I used a weighted<br />
base and incorporated wheel bearings, an upright<br />
bolt for a stalk, steel wires as blades of grass, copper<br />
sails to feel the wind, and heavy nails fastened<br />
to the wire tips.<br />
These models needed to be sensitive enough<br />
to feel a light breeze and sturdy enough to last the<br />
winter, because the plan was to set them out in the<br />
dunes closer to home in Wellfleet. In October, Eli<br />
and I carried them out to Newcomb Hollow <strong>Beach</strong>,<br />
set them on old slate roof tiles that would bear the<br />
Scratch circles in a show at Gallery 7a in Provincetown. (Photo by Cole Barash)<br />
mark of the blades’ movements, and left them to sit<br />
until April. They lasted through winter storms and<br />
spring nor’easters, turning in the wind, inscribing<br />
circles in the stone.<br />
I don’t know why I felt compelled to recreate<br />
these stories of the wind, the grass, and the sand,<br />
but it seems I was not the first one to do it. Archaeologists<br />
working in South Africa believe that a recently<br />
discovered batch of Scharrkreis fossils there,<br />
100,000 years old, might have been made by early<br />
hominids. They would have observed sedge grasses<br />
drawing circles and, in a moment of inspiration,<br />
felt compelled to recreate them. If this is true, those<br />
scratch- circle fossils would be some of the earliest<br />
evidence of our human ancestors depicting prehistoric<br />
life. Early humans, sensitive observers, telling<br />
a story, making art.<br />
A collection of Kai Potter’s “On the Landscape” columns<br />
was published this year by Provincetown Independent<br />
Books. See shop.provincetownindependent.org.