On Cape Cod, there is an old rail bed that reaches 22 miles from Harwich to Wellfleet, running mostly through scrub pine and an occasional marsh, and a few times jumping the tracks to weave though a town where all traces of the old railroad have been covered by paved streets and souvenir shops. Over this rail bed is a modest bicycle path used by riders, walkers, skaters, dog walkers, runners and, based on the occasional scat trail, various local fauna.

Many home owners, motels, resorts and restaurants have opened sandy paths from their back yards to the edge of the trail.  Many more have not; their yards and parking areas abut, overlook or touch upon the trail in silent co-existence.

Perhaps half way down the trail, on the Western side (after the turn North at the elbow of the Cape), there is a stretch of perhaps one hundred yards that is posted in red and black signs, five of them: “Private Property.”  There is a fence for some of this distance, a sharp dip in terrain for some of it, and for almost all of it a wall of greenery and brambles, and (no doubt) lurking ticks bearing Lyme Disease and mosquitos (no doubt) bearing encephalitis, that is about as impentrable as you can get these days, since the took down the Berlin Wall and since our wall along the Mexican border seemingly is porous in the extreme.

You cannot tell what is on the other side, the forbidden side of these signs.  The woods are deep enough that, when you try to figure it out from the Route 6 side there are not enough clues to decipher the geography and, indeed, enough overgrowth that it is quite possible that the other side of the signs contains — nothing.  Nothing but bushes and trees and disease-carrying insects.

Why is this land “posted”?  Did some poor misguided lawyer tell the owner that such posting would protect the land from being claimed by others who trod upon it?   It is not possible to tread.  Deep in the woods is there some secret governmental installation producing $3 T shirts with pictures of clams on them?  I would have been told.  Is the land owned by a crusty old Yankee who has just about had it with the New Yorkers on $1600 bikes with 40 gears who tear down the path at high speed, to the peril of the five year olds out for their first family bike ride?  A nice thought, but unlikely.

I once had a client who lived on the beach and wanted to keep the public away from his line of vision.  He inquired about fencing down into the water.  He inquired in an academic but scary way about the Massachusetts law on trap guns.  Misguided and misanthropic as he was, there was at least a reason you could ascribe to his misanthropy.

As Samuel L. Jackson confessed to Clint Eastwood, “I just gotta know.”  I am awaiting the falling of the fall, and with it the falling of at least some of the leaves.  I will be left with brambles and conifers and logs and watery peat and some fencing and five signs, but I am going to go back up the Cape, get on my bike, bring a knife of functional dimension, and hack my way a few yards (or more) to the West.  If I am successful, I will report back on my discovery; or report that there is indeed nothing there but — nothing.

Does anyone wish to join me?  As Clint famously replied, “how lucky do you feel?”