writer-illustrator * painter * photographer
Dune Shack Autumn
I’m off to the Euphoria dune shack this coming Saturday. I won’t have much of a power source except for a Brookstone charger that is supposed to re-charge my phone eight times. The shack has no electricity or running water. It does have an outhouse and hand pump for water. A truck will drop me off with all my stuff. If I want to go somewhere it’s by foot over lots of loose sand. This will be my fifth stint in a shack aside from a couple I’ve stayed in that belong to friends. Euphoria is teeny, but it looks out over the Atlantic. Stay tuned!
* Excerpt from “Building Provincetown, The Book” by David W. Dunlap
Cape Cod National Seashore | Euphoria (Shack 7)
Euphoria is the larger of two shacks that belonged to the writer and preservationist Hazel
Hawthorne Werner — if the adjective “larger” can be applied to a 16-by-12-foot structure. It was
built around 1930, apparently by the coast guardsman Louis “Spucky” Silva, who also built
Thalassa. Werner, the author of The Salt House, arrived in the 1920s, pursuing a vision she’d had
of “a place by the ocean, where you could take a blanket and sleep on the beach and there was
nobody around.” She acquired Euphoria in the early 1940s. For three summers, the writer
Cynthia Huntington and her husband, the artist Bert Yarborough, rented Euphoria. Huntington
described the last of these summers in her own The Salt House, a collection of lovely essays
published in 1999. Euphoria is now maintained and managed by the Peaked Hill Trust.
Hawthorne Werner — if the adjective “larger” can be applied to a 16-by-12-foot structure. It was
built around 1930, apparently by the coast guardsman Louis “Spucky” Silva, who also built
Thalassa. Werner, the author of The Salt House, arrived in the 1920s, pursuing a vision she’d had
of “a place by the ocean, where you could take a blanket and sleep on the beach and there was
nobody around.” She acquired Euphoria in the early 1940s. For three summers, the writer
Cynthia Huntington and her husband, the artist Bert Yarborough, rented Euphoria. Huntington
described the last of these summers in her own The Salt House, a collection of lovely essays
published in 1999. Euphoria is now maintained and managed by the Peaked Hill Trust.
Photo by Kerri Schmidt