Memories in stone

An unshakable sense of place in Gloucester's Dogtown

I first heard about Dogtown Commons from my friend Russell and the very first things he mentioned were the boulders. Or rather, the strange messages that were left behind on the boulders in this densely forested stretch of Cape Ann. The cryptic words that have been carved into the glacial erratics range from treacly (“COURAGE”) to fire-and-brimstone (“GET A JOB”) I made a mental note to go and poke around these stones back in December and then I forgot about it as the Omicron wave blew everything up.

But a few months later, a chance meeting in Philly brought Dogtown Commons back into focus. I was visiting the City of Brotherly Love for a cat-sitting gig and my Airbnb hosts Lisa and Robert had furnished my suite with the type of book collection so rich and irresistible that I almost resented the spring weather for luring me outside. In one of our conversations, Dogtown came up somehow and without missing a beat, Robert hustled upstairs to the bookshelf and returned with a collection of poems by the New American poet Charles Olson (1910-1970.) A son of Worcester who would later make his home in Gloucester, Olson is renowned for writing The Maximus Poems, an epic collection of Massachusetts-based poems that chronicle American history through the imagined voice of Maximus of Tyre—the Greek philosopher whose dissertations delved into sage questions such as “Whether the Life of a Cynic is to Be Preferred.”

Soon, Robert was reading aloud select passages from Maximus, from Dogtown - I…

”Dogtown is soft
in every season
high up on her granite
horst, light growth
of all trees and bushes
strong like a puddle’s ice
the bios
of nature in this
park of eternal
events is a sidewalk
to slide on, this
terminal moraine”

More so than before, I thought about Dogtown and wondered, What the fuck is this place? Now, having just returned from a beguiling hike there, I can finally tell you.