He had traveled by dory on the Concord and Merrimack rivers, by foot across the White Mountains of New Hampshire and through the forests of Maine. He knew the woods and fields and rivers of his native Concord as he knew his own garden. On his trip in 1849 Thoreau was visiting the Cape for the first time. Most travelers, of course, are in a hurry and so take Route 6, the mid-Cape highway, which is a straight shot to the outer Cape, with not much to look at except exit signs and pitch pines. For the traveler who is not in a hurry, the northshore road along the bay-Route 6A-is by far the prettiest way to go. While modern dentistry has taken care of the women with faces like Ws, nature has been induced to line the road with fine shade trees. The traveler’s view is much more agreeable today.
“They had prominent chins and noses,” he wrote, “having lost all their teeth, and a sharp W would represent their profile.”
He found the landscape bleak and almost bare of trees, the houses poor and weather-beaten. One morning in early October 1849, Henry David Thoreau peered through the rainstreaked window of a stagecoach as it rolled along a sandy, rutted road on the north shore of Cape Cod.
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