Labor day weekend 1995 we were clandestine kayak camping in the dunes of Monomoy Island, a wildlife refuge just off of Cape Cod. We kayak camped a lot back then. With the tick explosion there is no way I would do it today. Walking around we stumbled on a tar paper shack with a note on the door welcoming travelers and inviting them to stay. So the three of us moved in. We were the only people on the island that weekend. The shack, which probably hadn't changed much since the 1930s had views of grass covered dunes out every window. Deer roamed the yard unafraid of us. The interior was clean and had the comfortable look of old wood.
There was a bedroom with bunkbeds, a sitting area with couch and chairs and a kitchen area with an old sink and a hand pump for water. There was no electricity but there were kerosene lanterns. An outhouse was connected by a wooden walkway. Waves could be heard crashing ashore on the ocean side beach. At night we could hear fishing boats motoring by and the sky was full of stars. On the wooden ceiling beams numerous notes were written or carved in the wood. Names, dates and comments by people who had stayed in the shack going back decades. One of them described how the shack had saved their lives after being shipwrecked during a winter storm back in the 1940s.
These shacks were the remains of a fishing village going back to the 1800s. The Federal govt. had taken over the island in the 1940s. In 1970 it was designated a Federal Wildlife Refuge and the people who owned the 12 remaining shacks were granted lifetime rights. When an owner died their shack was destroyed. The owner of this shack was in her 90s and had been summering there since the 1930s. She died in 1999 and soon after the last shack on Monomoy Island was burned to the ground by Fish and Wildlife. That was one of those weekends you definitely remember.
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