It’s really starting to feel like summer around here in New England. With the arrival of the solstice today and a sunny weekend in the 80’s, I’ve been thinking about this personal project I’ve been working on for the last 10 years on Cape Cod. Every summer, I spend some time working on it, and this year, I’ve been determined to bring more shape to whatever it is exactly. A book, a show, I really don’t know, yet. Not wanting to let summer slip away this year, I’ve already gone into full-on frantic beach mode, squeezing out every last minute of daylight whenever I can and making the one to two-hour drive from Providence to down Route 6 each week whenever it’s nicest.
Heads up: this one’s full of photos and might get cut off in your email inbox! Open it up in the Substack app to see it all.
I took a day off from obligations a few weeks ago and drove down to the tidal flats in Brewster, MA. These are the largest tidal flats in North America, and at low tide, you can walk for miles out into an enormous expanse that remains underwater for half of every day. If you’re in the area, I recommend trying to arrive at high tide, going for a long swim in some of the clearest North Atlantic water you’ll ever find, and then watching the receding tide completely transform the landscape. For lack of any better word, it’s magical. The sand way out there is also purple because of a large amount of quartz deposits in the area. Once low tide is about an hour away, just start walking straight away from the shore for as long as you want (while being mindful of the next approaching high tide). I went a second time a few days later, and with low tide at 5:21, the timing was perfect to have a good swim earlier in the day before going for a walk. Sunset coinciding with low tide is something I’m hoping to catch sometime this summer.
If I’ve ever found my happiest place on earth, this must be it, I thought while walking through tide pools and rivers so far off the shore that I lost sight of where I started. It felt a lot like the first time I went to Herring Cove and meandered all the way to Hatches Harbor, or the first time I saw those massive dunes at the end of the Cape. There’s a feeling of calm and deep inspiration out there that I’ve never found anywhere else, which is why I keep coming back. My hope this summer is to continue to make some new work in places I haven’t been before, and also dig through my archive and organize/curate the last decade into something a bit more tangible beyond the folders of a hard drive.
Over the last month, I’ve been thinking a lot about this place and body of work while listening to three new albums (Kurt Vile’s Philadelphia’s been good to me, Kevin Morby’s Little Wide Open, and Deer Tick’s Coin-O-Matic) that all kind of feel like love letters to certain places. Cape Cod is not my home, but it’s close enough that it sometimes feels like home, and making this work always feels a little like trying to capture an idea of home. I’ve developed a familiarity with it that has taken years and years of staring at a map, following roads out of sheer curiosity, reading books, walking for miles across beach, dune, and tidal areas, and making connections with people who do live and work here. I recommend all three of those new albums that came out over the last month. They’re all beautiful reflections on places of importance to the writers, and they’ve helped me think about this idea of making work focused around the idea of home. I especially love and am also very biased towards Deer Tick’s newest album, since it’s rooted in Rhode Island, where I am also from.
I think summer is a good time to be home, especially if you live in New England. Below are a handful of photos from the last month to celebrate the solstice and welcome the official start of summer. Lots of stone fruits, a day spent picking strawberries, two nights of Deer Tick at the Ocean Mist, about 4,000 trips to get ice cream, a weekend in Portland, and a fascination with big tidal swings. Here’s to the summer ahead, we only get so many!
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If you made it this far and are unsure of what I do, hello! My name is Chris. I’m a photographer and writer based in Providence, RI. I do a bit of everything with a camera and work with brands, musicians, restaurants, hotels, small businesses, and travel publications to help them visualize their own story through my lens. If you’d like to work together, please reach out at hello@chrismongeau.com or through the form below.
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