Annual ElucidationThose readers who can recite this by heart might move along to other parts of the newsletter; this section is for those who need a refresher course in how the whole “how does one land oneself in a dune shack?” thing.The truly unfortunate thing about all this is that the nature of it is to be easiest for meticulous, organized people, whereas the shacks are likely to appeal to creative, spontaneous ones. If you figure out a way of reconciling this dilemma, please share. In the mean-time:Step one, and this is something most folks reading this have already accomplished, is to become a member of PHT. This includes keeping that membership up to date. Only those who are members as of Dec. 31, 2014 will receive a letter early in 2015 asking if they might like to use a dune shack during that year. Mind you, getting the membership in the mail as of Jan. 1, 2015, does not count. And, whereas in past years our hard-working E.D. has let the date slip by a bit here and there, that will not be the case this year. No arguments will be brooked; she has heard them all. Yes, we have all lost the form under the paper piles on our desks, so do it now, while you have it in your hands.Your membership date is either on the label of this hard copy of the newsletter, or on the email that led you to this e-copy.If you are a current member on 1/1/15, you will receive a piece of mail several weeks later asking if you want to use a dune shack during the upcoming year, and if so, what are your scheduling limitations. Both of these items are critical: Despite her best efforts, Carole (our hard-working E.D.) has not yet developed the degree of telepathy that allows her to know your wishes. Even if you have asked for exactly the same week for the past 25 years, she may not recall exactly which week it is, nor that your school year begins before Labor Day, nor that you are sensitive to the fur of the early-season caterpillars and cannot use a week in June. It is not

enough that you know these things, yourself, you must tell her. In writing. Before the due date.The other thing to keep in mind is that while over 400 members might express interest in staying in a shack, there are not quite that many weeks in a summer. Even with several shacks to manage, PHT cannot fit in everyone; a hard and sad truth.So this is how it works: When you join PHT, you join as a sort of ‘class’ – a bit like becoming a freshman. As long as you keep up your membership and keep asking for time in a shack, you maintain your ‘class’; if you let slip a year with either the membership or the request, you go back to being a freshman. Within each class (which is to say, those who all joined at the same time) everyone receives a randomly generated number. (It used to be literally picked from a hat, but the computer does it by now.) If you are among those who have been waiting for the longest time (a senior, so to speak), your class gets first shot at shack time. If your name comes out of the ‘hat’ first, you get right of first refusal on your first-choice time and shack.Therefore, it is a combo waiting list and random chance process. You can figure out that if there were, for example, 400 people in the queue and they were evenly distributed among four classes, there would have to be 100 shack-weeks just to accommodate the senior class. There are more than 400 people, they are not evenly distributed, and many people who have been waiting the longest have scheduling issues that have kept them from getting out to the dunes for a week, so it isn’t as cut and dried as it sounds. But you see how it works.Once the due date for making your request has passed, Carole will pull out the names and place them on the schedule as they best fit. This means that some people will be offered their first choice of weeks and other will be asked if they want a week they haven’t chosen because that is where they could fit in. You get to decide if you want to use that week, and shack, or if you want to wait for another try next year.

December 2014 Julie Schecter, editor phtmail@pobox.com Number 82

If you spend a week in a PHT-managed dune shack, you will go back to being a freshman the following year.One more thing. Every year there are grumbles of “how come she was in a shack last year and she is back again this year?” This might happen in only one of three ways: (1) She and her spouse are both mem-bers; one got a shack last year and one got a shack this year. (2) She has a group of friends and whenever one of them gets a week, they share it amongst them. (3) She is a caretaker and for two weeks is responsible for driving five shacks worth of guests to and from the shacks, introducing them to the experience, fixing any minor issues with the shacks, making sure that all guests are comfortable and safe, and dealing with gas tanks, outhouses, balky refrigerators and people who overpack. She deserves it. Carole will let you know what week you might stay in a shack, if you choose to do so, and ask you to reply to her in a short amount of time so that the schedule might be arranged. She will interpret absence of response to this note as a lack of interest and move to someone on the waiting list.One more note of how some folks get into a shack more often than they might: From time to time a guest drops out of the schedule after the season has begun, sometimes with only short notice (most often due to dire health issues) and to keep a shack from going empty for even a brief period of time, the ‘short-notice coordinator’ flies into action. This person may make 50 phone calls asking if someone on the short-notice list can use the shack. The person who calls back first is usually the winner. Please don’t join the short-notice list if you live in (for example) Alaska; you would be hard-pressed to get to Provincetown in time for the ride out to the shack.Good Luck All.

Dunies in TrainingFrom Ellen LeBow: Once I took a visiting Haitian colleague named Abner to the Provincelands dunes. I did it to have him experi-ence our own Wonder of the World, and for me to re-experience a personal, troubling paradox.

Haiti is in the throes of a deforesting epidemic. The destruction of forests begun by the early French colonists impoverished the countryside, and now the impoverished farmers cut still existing trees in a last ditch attempt to make a living selling cooking charcoal to poor city dwellers. Though older citizens still remember forests of Lignam Vitae and Mahogany, the problem is reaching a tipping point of no return. Abner is one of the many Haitian educators who heed the warning and try to teach his young students how to reverse the teetering trend. I thought he needed a visual.So we trudged the deep sand path to the first summit of the dunes. Gazing out at 360 degrees of elegant, alien landscape, I told him this wasn’t always so, these were once hills of great, dense, wet, hardwood shorn to that point of no return. What remains is this wind-shaped, treeless sand-scape -impossible to farm, impossible to build upon.Abner’s incredulity rose, and silenced. It was an image he took home with him in his bones.My paradox was how such blind acts of devastation, the ones we blame for threatening the world today, brought forth this unparalleled beauty. I thought, shouldn’t there be smoking ruins?I thought, what kind of justice is that! And finally felt some faint hope for the end of the world “as we know it.”2…..A stroke of luck brought us back to Zara’s shack. It was only a few weeks after Seth and I brought our two 11-year- old goddaughters from Haiti home to live with us in Wellfleet. This was their virgin stay at my most loved shack.There were a slew of personal reasons we took them to live here. The all-encompassing one was to relieve

Membership Renewal Please send to PHT, P.O. Box 1705, Provincetown, MA 02657 Name(s) _____________________________________________________________________________________________

Street or P.O. Box ______________________________________________________________________________________

Town _____________________________________________ State and Zip _____________________________________

Phone ____________________ Email ______________________________________ Date Today ___________________

Member ($35) _____ Student ($20) _____ Senior ($20) _____ Donation $______ Book order ($13.45) ____

Jersey ($23./shirt) x #____ = $________ Tote bag ($10./bag, plus $3. shipping for up to 3 bags) x #____ = $________

Important Note: Cut-off date for mem-bers to receive shack invitation is in fact, for real, and no-more-will-be-

taken-after December 31, 2014!

them of what impoverished Haitians suffered from the most: lack of opportunity.Not only were we offering the girls opportunities to be safe, healthy, educated, loved and curious, but to taste the richness of Shakespeare and Harry Potter and James Brown. To feel the glee of Manhattan, eat an oyster, know the Provincelands dunes and love the little shelters that cling with their claws to their shifting flanks.The girls didn’t worry about the sad history of vanished hardwoods. Their focus was on the softness and heat of our surroundings. I wondered if they would feel, like every kid who ever wrote an entry in a shack’s journal, the gratitude generated by the simplified life within the little doll-ish house with its pump and lamplight, away from the beat of the world.When they appeared underwhelmed it soon dawned on me why. Until they got to the US all they ever knew was lugging buckets of water and lighting lamps with matches. They cooked and ate outside, washed in basins and hit the outhouse. There are no cars or lights to escape where they grew up, no devices from which to cold-tur-key. Those were OUR burdens to lay aside.As time goes on the shacks have grown into the girls’ awareness. They are beginning to grasp the magical details that draw so many of us back to them. The busier their American lives become the more they will see the shacks’ austerity as a cleansing thing. I foresee living on Cape Cod, and protecting the dunes, slowly informing their true inheritance.

Calendar !Holidays – as if you didn’t know – have arrived. Time to let your friends, family and anyone else on your gift list know why you are so stuck on the dunes and shacks. They may still not understand, but it won’t be for your lack of trying with gifts of this brilliant, one of a kind and first time ever PHT calendar.   Below you will find a photo of the cover shot, one of 12 (imagine that!) which will send you back to the dunes and the shacks every time you glance at it, and for only $20. per calendar. A dedication to PHT co-founder (and amazing person in every possible way) Joyce Johnson, appears on the calendar's opening page. They have been donated to PHT by an anonymous and hugely generous donor, so all proceeds accrue to PHT.  The income will help PHT protect the shacks that it manages -- you know, little things like new roofs, replacement fridges, maybe solar panels, and possibly even a change of locale (refer to earlier discussions about Thalassa's precarious posi-tion). Get yours before everyone else beats you to it.  Send your order (plus a check for $20. per calendar, plus $2. Shipping and handling) to: Mike Ward6 Trout Pond LaneChatham MA 02633 He will send you your calendar forthwith.

Does PHT have your email? Please send it in to help conserve your donations.

Good News on Two FrontsDespite the heavy weather starting out the blowy, sand-moving season, Thalassa is no closer to the edge than it was when last reported on. Nor is it any farther, but that is only wished for and not expected. PHT and the Park Service are, in conjunction, contemplating that a move might be in the shack’s future, but have no conclusions as to whether, when or where.As to the second bit of news, PHT has been offered and accepted one-year of leases on the shacks that it has managed over the past years. This includes Zara’s shack, which PHT has managed, but was under lease to

Zara Ofsevit Jackson, who passed away earlier this year. These leases are, of course, no assurance of what might happen in the future, but they are reassur-ing, anyway.

Lost and FoundAt Boris's there was a nice black and orange heavy weight Provincetown High School hoodie, a blue back pack, a blue gray rain slicker and a gray tee shirt. Maybe someone still loves them. Write to PHT for more info.

Not to Forget PHT Tees and TotesAlso for crossing items off your holiday list: PHT tee shirts, tote bags and books of writing from the dunes

IS YOUR MEMBERSHIP CURRENT?

If the label on the paper copy of your newsletter reads 'Please Renew' next to your name, your membership in PHT has expired or is about to. You can renew your membership with the renewal form contained in this newsletter. Otherwise, the date on the label is the time at which your membership in PHT will expire. You are an active member of PHT until that date.If you receive an e-copy of the newsletter, your membership date is contained in the email that gave you the link to this newsletter.

The tote has dark green printing on a lighter green fabric of recycled material which is both sturdy and capacious. Guests of the Margo-Gelb shack will recognize the image on the tote as the view out the front door. Totes are $10. each; plus postage of $3. for up to 3 totes.

near Euphoria, by artist Kerri Schmidt of Boston:

The tee is long-sleeved and has white printing on a lovely soft black fabric. It comes in women’s sizes S, M, L, & XL (all of which run very small), and unisex sizes M, L, XL & XXL. The cost is $23. for each shirt, including postage