The Race Point Rambler

Dune shack and buoys

My friend Buddy’s buoy garden is all untidy. It grows in the sand sloping down from his dune shack, an oasis of color — bold, artificial color — in the endless pallor of the place Thoreau called the “Desert” of Provincetown. When the bayberries have shriveled and dropped to the ground and the rosehips are withered in the rosebushes, the buoys are still standing on their long wooden stems — big ones shaped like rockets and smaller ones the size of cannonballs, with bands of red, green, orange, purple, blue and yellow around them. Most of them are lobster pot markers Buddy has combed from the beach. Every lobsterman chooses his own color scheme for his buoys, and Buddy’s garden must represent at least 45 of them — 45 lobstermen who would never know what an exhaustive rainbow they make all put together. Bits of rope and shreds of netting still cling to some of the floats, and others Buddy has embellished with painted-on polka dots, stars and swirls. “Psychedelic” is the look he is going for.

But the garden is untidy at this time of year. Winter storms have scoured the hillside, leaving some of the buoys on shaky footing or with the leggy look of untended houseplants. Windblown sand has rubbed the paint off in places and pitted the Styrofoam underneath. Worst of all, dune bandits have made off with a few specimens, perhaps wanting to expand their own buoy collections. Buddy will know how many are missing when he conducts his buoy census in the spring. Spring is the time for all gardeners to get to work, and on the first warm, dry day in May I will find him barefoot on the deck, with a crooked-bristled brush in one hand and a cup of paint in the other, touching up a stripe here, a polka dot there, and adding flourishes where needed. He cannot abide shabbiness in his buoy patch. Opposite the door to the dune shack, the rosebushes are beginning to bloom; on the path to the bluff the beach pea is preparing its purple flowers. It will be a bountiful season in the desert of the dunes!