Katherine Axt '01 is becoming an expert on shipwrecks, seal blubber, and frostbite at sea. She can tell you a thing or two about shell and weir fishing, as well. Senior Andrea Costella's newfound passion is the lore of early twentieth-century lifesaving stations—stories of all-night beach patrols and harrowing rescues. And classmate Carrie Roy '01 is mastering the geology of two barrier islands just off Cape Cod.

Axt, Costella, Roy, and eight other women are students in a unique seminar focusing on Cape Cod's Monomoy islands, once the site of a thriving fishing village and now a federally protected wildlife preserve. The community-based learning (CBL) course, Nonfiction Writing: Writing Journalistic Narratives for Magazines and Books, is taught by journalist North Cairn, a lecturer in MHC's English department, and the author of By Monomoy Island Light (Northeastern University Press, 2000). The course explores literary and journalistic techniques used to re-create an historical era and a specific maritime disaster. Cairn's students are collectively researching Monomoy's once-thriving Whitewash Village, a nineteenth-century lighthouse (still standing but no longer in operation), and the Wadena, a coal barge that ran aground in 1902 on its way from Norfolk to Boston during a northeast gale. During the rescue attempt twelve men, including all but one of the lifesavers stationed at Monomoy, lost their lives.

Though Whitewash Village flourished as a harbor and fishing center throughout the mid-to-late 1800s, and as a summer community through the early twentieth century, the port was literally filled in by tides and drifting sand. Ultimately, the entire barrier spit was reclaimed by the federal government and set aside as a wildlife sanctuary in 1944. “Many of the town records were lost in a fire in a town hall where they were kept, earlier in the twentieth century,” says Cairn. “What makes this course particularly challenging,” she says, “is that students are having to use every conceivable method to get information.” Because their subject is a terrain now inhabited not by humans but by birds and animals, students have had to summon the island culture through interviews with Cape Cod fisherman, by visiting local historical societies, and by poring over newspapers from local archives. They have taken one class trip to the Cape, and some students are planning another possible outing to gather information.

“We have the opportunity to be real-life journalists,” says Costella, who is learning “to be fearless, to go out and talk with complete strangers.” Roy, who considers herself less outgoing, has found the interviewing process “a bit intimidating.” But she has nonetheless braved telephone conversations with geologists and a marine anthropologist and has traveled independently to the Museum of National History in Brewster.

Axt, an Iowa native whose trip to Cape Cod afforded her her first glimpse of the Atlantic Ocean, has learned that fishermen are early risers. She recently set her alarm clock for a 6 am telephone chat with a shell fisherman. She has also conversed with a Nantucket fisherman's wife (and mother of seven) and with octogenarian brothers who regaled her with tales of their boyhood days on Monomoy, eating berries and catching birds and fish. Axt's related research on a fishing community in Maine led to an entertaining conversation with “a rough and tough lobsterman,” who proudly recounted his “brawls and fights.”

In addition to gaining skills in interviewing and researching, says Cairn, students are learning “how to write a narrative—they have to tell a story.” For examples of “how people reconstruct history from documentation long after people are dead,” her students are reading recent accounts, such as best-sellers The Perfect Storm, by Sebastian Junger, and In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, by Nathaniel Philbrick; and Shackleton's Forgotten Men: The Untold Tale of an Arctic Tragedy, by Lennard Bickel, and Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, by Stephen E. Ambrose. “History, as we know it,” says Cairn, “always involves leaving people out. The fuller story hopefully emerges later. This course, in part, is trying to give students a tangible sense of what it is like to try to retrieve the ‘voices' that have not been included in the recorded history of a very special and endlessly changing place.”

Cairn lived for parts of three summers in the abandoned lighthouse keeper's quarters on South Monomoy island whileresearching her book. She describes Monomoy, which separated from Cape Cod in 1958 and broke in two in 1978, as “one of the most dangerous points on the shoals off the Cape.” At least three thousand shipwrecks have been recorded in the area over the past four hundred years. Cairn says the islands, together roughly seven-and-a-half miles long and one-plus mile wide at the widest point, are “a good test case for how the government—in this case, the United States Department of the Interior's Fish and Wildlife Service—must effectively deal with the public to reclaim land, set it aside for wilderness, and enhance the diversity of its bird and animal species.”

Cairn and her students are planning another trip to the Cape, but it is unlikely that they will make it to Monomoy (a thirty-five-minute trip by boat from Chatham). “We've made six unsuccessful attempts to get out to the island, and it was impossible due to rainy weather, high winds, high surf, and then fog,” says Cairn. “I do think our efforts have given the students a vivid understanding of how difficult it was for people who really lived out there.” But Monomoy's elusiveness has not dampened student enthusiasm. It has all been “awfully exciting,” says Andrea Costella.