Ptown Women's Week 2012 (cont.)

I know some of you have been waiting for this post with bated breath and some of you perhaps with baited breath. So, without further ado, here goes. 

I realize that there is a certain irony in looking for the wet spot in Provincetown during Women's Week, but I assure you I was hunting for cranberries rather than what some of you out there may already be thinking! I am never going to hear the end of this one, am I?

I had driven out to an isolated parking area near the forest and was enjoying the scenery so much that I decided to have lunch there on the tailgate of the truck. I had a turkey sandwich with cranberry chutney and finished up the fruit salad from the day before when a woman pulled into the parking lot.

Roasted turkey with cranberry chutney on marbled rye.

I have no idea what spawned the conversation (a hubcap, a sand particle, a pine cone, you just never know with me) but we started talking. She had come to pick cranberries. Cranberries? That piqued my curiosity. Having only seen cranberries in a bag, on my sandwich and on TV, in the Ocean Spray Cranberry commercials, I thought cranberries floated on water and required chest waders to harvest them (see how TV makes you stupid). 

I wasn't doing anything more interesting myself, so I followed her down a very steep sand dune, that I feared I would never get back to the top of. As we walked she told me how easy it was to get lost and that she had been so lost one time that she ended up at the end of the Provincetown Airport runway after dark. Oh shit! I don't want to be lost out here I thought, but also knew I was fresh out of breadcrumbs so I did my best to note the location of the sun in relationship to the big sand dune we came down and the direction we were walking as she proceeded to penetrate (lol) deeper and deeper (lol) into the forest, in search of the wet spot (Oh, I can't believe I am writing this).

Somewhere in the forest.

Finally the dry, desert like sands gave way to a moist, soggy sand and I was pleasantly surprised to find myself  in the middle of a thick, lush, leafy patch of  beautiful red berries. Yippee! The wet spot! Now it shouldn't surprise anyone to know that I wasted no time sampling those berries (did I really just say that? lol). Popping a couple bright red, firm berries quickly into my mouth before my cranberry picking friend could get the words out, "you don't want to eat those ..... (short pause ) .... without sugar". Those berries were so tart they caused my cheeks to dimple instantly. You know, they taste absolutely nothing like the dehydrated cranberries I buy from the store (forgetting of course, that those would be saturated with sugar). Now you may be wondering, did I spit or swallow? (Oh boy...this is only getting worse by the minute). I chewed those berries up entirely, expecting the whole while that they would eventually release some natural sugars ...but they did not! I did indeed swallow them;) Good thing they weren't poison, eh?

A Red-breasted Nuthatch somewhere in the forest.

So after a short while tinkering around my new friends forest and cranberry patch, I turned around and realized .....Oh shit ...where's that steep sand dune we came down? It was gone! We were so deep into the forest that I could no longer see which direction to go to get out. That was it! That was where the fun ended for me.  I hate to eat and run, but bye bye cranberry friend! And like a horse out of the starting gates, I was off and running! Suddenly there were sand dunes all around me and they all looked alike. The sun? Completely obscured by clouds. PERFECT! Before panic set in, I found some shoe imprints in the sand and followed them best I could, but they often just vanished without a trace. Soon, I heard some disembodied voices off in the distance and I knew they had to be near the trail head.  I never located the people that belonged to those voices, but eventually the sun peeked through the clouds and I got a bright sun glare off of the windshield of a car driving by on the road above. I turned sharply that direction and climbed the giant sand dune, arriving at the parking lot only a few feet from the truck. A sigh of relief escaped my lips at that moment. I would probably turn down the cranberry tour in the future!

But when it was all said and done I had conquered enormous sand dunes, an enchanted forest, found the wet spot and tasted the berries! (oh that did not come out right)!

And after all that can you believe that the only photo of cranberries I got were those on the sandwich above? I cannot believe I forgot to get a photo of the berries and I know that doesn't help me out of this jam one bit. So, before this story gets out of hand with some of you.... please let me assure you, that while I am famous for double entendres, sexual innuendos and metaphors, I was only teasing with the playful wording of this story. Dunes are actually sand dunes, wet spot is actually a wet sandy soil, forest is truly a forest and berries are actually cranberries. FOR REAL, Ok?  And now....let the comments fly!