In the unavoidable comparison of Cape Cod to a flexed arm, Eastham is just after the elbow, entered as soon as you've passed through the elbow crease of Orleans. Here Route 6, the single highway bisecting the Cape, always seems to me to speed up in its eagerness at reaching the "real" Cape. Everyone who loves the Cape, on the eastern edge of Massachusetts, has their own idea of which part is the most relevant, the most quintessential. For me it is the "Outer" or (more confusingly) "Lower" Cape: Eastham, Wellfleet, Truro and Provincetown. But Eastham, coming first in that sequence of towns, was a place that for years I blew through on my way farther out.
This changed the summer my husband and I discovered a last-minute bargain, a rental house in Eastham near Thumpertown Beach. Arriving in the last days of August with our three-year-old son, we found a tiny red house bearing such a strong resemblance to the brave Little House in Virginia Lee Burton's classic story for children that it was equipped with a copy of the book, along with the usual beach chairs and lobster pot.
The house sat among pines at the end of one of those quiet sand roads that honeycomb Eastham once you leave the highway: those wending sand roads lined by low pines whose shed needles, baking under the sun, give off the delicious aroma of pine sap. Scuffing along down those roads are sun-rosy kids with their hair glued in ropes to their heads from their most recent swim. My husband had holidayed on the Cape as a boy, and it was along Eastham's quiet sand roads that he rediscovered the Cape of his childhood, almost completely unchanged.
Eastham shares with the rest of the Outer Cape a lovely overall narrowness, so that it really feels as though, if you were just a bit taller, you could stand with one foot in the crashing Atlantic and one in the calm, gleaming bay. On the Atlantic side, Eastham holds Nauset Marsh, an aquatic version of that secretive maze of sand streets. In the marsh, islands of grass are threaded through by silver channels of tide; on the eastern horizon the Atlantic beats against the hot white sands of Nauset Spit.
If Nauset Marsh, in its vast, unspoilt beauty, seems to belong to the pre-human days of the Cape, the bay-side beaches in Eastham are endearingly human. President Kennedy forever preserved the pristine condition of the Outer Cape in 1961 when he signed the legislation creating the Cape Cod National Seashore; as a result, the Outer Cape feels just as settled as you want it to be, and no more.
All the Eastham town beaches front a portion of Cape Cod Bay so shallow that at low tide the water simply disappears; the motor boats sit waiting on their keels, and the beach-goers, all of whom read the tide charts, head out on to the flats armed with oyster rakes, buckets, and even baseball equipment. When the tide comes in again, it's the turn of the beaches to vanish – the bay can sometimes reach halfway up the aluminium stairs leading down from the bluff. As a result of this exquisite sensitivity to tides, the whole of Eastham feels even more attuned to the sea's daily motions than the rest of the waterbound Cape. I visited the Cape for years before finally, in Eastham, learning to read the tide charts.
Every year we take the gentle walk to the top of Fort Hill for the view over the marsh to the ocean. Every year we visit the Nauset Light, the quintessential red-and-white lighthouse (on certain days you can climb the tight corkscrew of stairs), and the windmill, also open to the public. Every year we line up for the fried clams at Arnold's, arguably the best of the many outstanding casual seafood restaurants on the Cape, where you can strain your arteries with fried everything and top it off with ice cream. The Cape Cod Rail Trail is a 25-mile paved bike path; rent bicycles at Little Capistrano Bike Shop, across the street from the Salt Pond Visitor Center. You can pedal just over the town line into Wellfleet for a movie at the only drive-in theatre on the Cape, and one of the last left anywhere.
And then there are the beaches, the main reason everyone comes – those on the ocean side attracting surfers in wetsuits and those on the bay side everyone from toddlers to clammers. It's on the bay side that you can find my favourite, free attraction: the view of the sun setting over the bay from any of these west-facing beaches, especially First Encounter Beach, named for the first meeting between pilgrims and Native Americans.
"Outermost cliff and solitary dune, the plain of ocean and the far, bright rims of the world, meadow land and marsh and ancient moor: this is Eastham; this is the outer Cape," wrote Henry Beston in The Outermost House, his nature-writing classic, published in 1928. Beston had lived alone for a year in a rustic shack in the Eastham dunes, bearing witness to the oceanside wild. In 1978 winter storms swept not only Beston's little house but most of the surrounding dunes out to sea. Now only the delicate Spit protects the grandeur of the marsh from the ocean. The changelessness of Eastham, that preserved world of childhood that my husband rediscovered, is always balanced by such reminders of inexorable change. This constancy and flux are the best reason to visit Eastham again and again.
Susan Choi's latest novel is My Education (Short Books, £7.99). To order a copy for £5.99 with UK p&p, click on the link
Essentials
A four-bedroom, self-catering house sleeping up to seven people costs from $2,000 per week through vacationcapecod.com. Return flights from Heathrow to Boston start from £912pp with Virgin (virgin-atlantic.com; 0844 209 7777). A week's car rental costs £200 with Alamo (alamo.co.uk; 0871 384 1086). For more information and ideas on Cape Cod and New England go to discovernewengland.co.uk
