JEFFREY LOVE

EUPHORIA

In May 2024, I had the privilege of spending a week in one of the Province Lands dune shacks maintained and managed by Peaked Hill Trust (PHT) in Provincetown, MA. The shack happened to be Euphoria, owned for many years by one of Provincetown’s legendary figures, Hazel Hawthorne Werner, who bought Euphoria in 1943. She lived there every summer until she turned her keys over to PHT in 1986. They have lovingly tended and cared for it ever since, and they offer a variety of stays to trust members, artists, writers, etc.

Euphoria has stood in its current location since 1952, the year I was born. During my week there, I was vividly aware of the bookend effect this created, residing in a space largely unchanged since my birth, while venturing out into the present and the landscape of the dunes to photograph several times daily. A division of time and space that others before me had surely experienced, and I felt a tangible kinship to all those who had occupied the shack throughout the span of my life.

Euphoria itself came to symbolize for me the finite nature of my existence, resting as it does in a landscape far older, at the edge of an infinite universe. Sitting on that porch at night, gazing out across the sea and up at those billions of stars, is something that defies all efforts at description.

But my intuitive sense of connection to the limitless was clear and direct out there in the dunes, a reminder for me of where I can find meaning in my fragile, temporary time on this planet. In the end, I think it’s simply enough to know that we are all an integral part of the infinite, our physical beings composed of atoms cooked for billions of years in the hearts of now-gone stars. And for that simple, yet profound awareness, I’m indebted to Euphoria and to Peaked Hill Trust.