The Giant of Longnook Valley... The Giant ofLongnook Valley
The Giant of Longnook Valley
Trurois on that part of the narrow land that sweeps inward at the crook of the Cape’s long arm to form Provincetown. Here where the scrub pines grow tough and scrawny, and the Truro Hills roll from backside to bayside tangled with a mesh-work of clinging bayberry, wild blueberry, sturdy beach plum, and coarse hog cranberry, is Long Nook Valley, a deep hewn wedge carved in the rugged face of the lower Cape ... a valley that stretches from the broad waters of the Atlantic on one side of Cape Cod to the deep half-moon waters of Cape Cod Bay on the other. Straight through the Truro Hills goes Long Nook Valley. The ancient sun shines down on a place as old as Time, a place primitive, wild, and strangely beautiful. From the deep floor of the valley, the hills rise to the sky, silhouetted with the bony-fingered scrub pines. In this time-scarred gouge through the hills, legends could well have started, and superstition and folklore have their ancient origin.
The formation of Long Nook Valley is a legend itself and concerns Meloof, a giant legendary figure who lived in the Cape region even before the great glacier came down from the north to chew deep paths in the surface of the earth ... when this earth was filled with mysterious mists and vapours, rising from a land and sea still in a state of flux and yet unformed.
With arms as long and mammoth as the towering elms of Yarmouth, and legs packed with resilient strength of the mast of a great schooner, with a chest as huge and powerful as the ancient Hercules, Meloof was no mortal man. His voice could bring the wild rains down from the skies, his whisper could churn the waters of the sea into white foam. Meloof could stand in the deepest waters of Cape Cod Bay, and by stretching out his arms, touch with one fingertip what is now Provincetown, and with the other, what is now Orleans.
When Meloof got into his fishing craft, the waters all along the Cape shores rose as if in swift high tide. This boat was immense, its sides thick and massive, its length enough to hold even the giant’s tremendously long legs, gargantuan frame, and seven league boots. Out in the wide, free expanse of the Atlantic, in the mist and haze, went Meloof for a day of fishing. Where the hot sun shot through the steams and vapours, Meloof dropped anchor. He lay back in his boat, holding in his great hands his fish pole, made from the top of a 200 foot pine tree. These huge trees grew in great profusion at one time over the Cape, until a tidal wave came and stripped the lower Cape of every living thing, leaving in its wake the dwarfed, grotesquely scrawny pine trees now found there. Melooflolled about on the waters, dreaming giant dreams, his line slack in his hands.
Meloof was shaken from his lethargy! The fishing line was a lashing whip in his hands! The pole bent and arched into the water like the tautly drawn bow of an Indian. It quivered and trembled. It snapped up and down. It swished to and fro in the air. Meloof’s shoulders were wrenched with the sudden pull at the line, and his boat was nearly capsized by the tremendous snap of the line—suddenly, he knew what lay at the end! The giant, the prize of the deep waters that Meloof had time and again stalked and hunted, but without success.
In one swift movement, Meloof uncoiled his huge frame and sprang to his feet, bracing them hard against the sides of the boat. His nostrils dilated, and his eyes were wild and eager with the anticipation of a battle with an adversary worthy of his own size and strength. Meloof’s muscles bulged like the sides of a water cask. Blue rope veins throbbed in his temples. Sweat poured down his massive back, and the cords in his huge powerful wrists and hands stood out like hawser lines. With a great bellow, Meloof threw back his head and braced himself more firmly against the furious strain of the battle.
As abruptly as it had started, the tight drawn tension of the line slackened. Then, in another instant, the line sprang taut and alive when the creature at the end of Meloof’s line propelled itself out of the water and into the air several hundred feet. A giant codfish, with scales as large and thick as oversize barn shingles, eyes as big and bulging as washtubs, and a gaping slash of mouth as wide as a cave, twisted and turned in the air. A frenzied monster of the darkwaters, the giant cod thrashed about in an effort to escape.
Back and forth raced the giant cod. Blue calm waters churned white and angry. Breakers house-high piled up on the shores. The whiplash of the line through the water, the rushing of the boat back and forth, made mountainous waves and whipped the wind to gale force. The cod broke surface, and then sounded the depths again. Then up-up- into the air until Meloof’s line was almost perpendicular to the water. No rearing stallion of the gods and his deity rider had such a battle. The victory would go to the wiliest strategist, and this the cod seemed to sense, for, with its eyes red with fear and anger, its fins quivering with the strain of battle, it leapt into the air once more, and then plunged into the water, sounding bottom. There it pivoted about and headed straight for land. The water foamed white from the speed of the cod’s course, and, behind him, fanned out in an arc as it was cleaved by the bow of Meloof’s boat.
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The bullet-like course which sped Meloof and his craft straight towards shore was perhaps more terrible than the actual battle in the ocean. The shore loomed bigger ahead of him, but still Meloof held fast. His tremendous strength was sapped from the strain of the battle, but he still had a giant’s determination to conquer. With a last surge of strength, the cod ceased its twisting, turning, gyrations and plowed through the shallow waters of the shore, up and over the beach, and straight into the Hills of Truro, dragging Meloof and his boat behind him!
Rocks and boulder formations cracked and split, hurled up and aside like pebbles. The sky was dark with flying particles of sand and earth. Right across the Cape from Atlantic to Bay furrowed the frenzied cod and its tenacious captor, plowing and ripping a deep scar through the hills!
And thus was formed Long Nook Valley in Truro on Cape Cod. Traces of the giant cod are found even today in the form of fish scales as large as barn shingles. Some say that these fish scales are really pieces of mica, left by the great glacier movement down from the north, but Cape Codders know better. They are the petrified scales of the legendary giant cod that hauled Meloof and his boat straight across the Cape through the hills of Truro, forming Long Nook Valley.