51 - 4/20/11 - Chasing Mr. Ridley

Initial Impressions

Christopher Setterlund

51 – 4/20/11

Chasing Mr. Ridley

            I love adventures, especially ones that seem to be impossible to complete.  Living on Cape Cod there are very few of these such adventures to be found, but there was one.  In the dense woods of North Truro sits a grave, not a cemetery, a grave, a single grave.  The stone is barely more than one foot by one foot in size and sits in the middle of an area of roughly six square miles.  Luckily there is a little bit of help from the fact that Montano’s Restaurant can be used as a jumping off point in the quest.  My adventure will hopefully show that finding a literal ‘needle in a haystack’ can be done, though it might take you a while as I found out.

            The grave I was in search of was that of Thomas Ridley who died of smallpox all the way back in 1776.  Ridley was a fisherman who ended up having ten children with his wife Elizabeth.  After he died of smallpox and was buried far from the village his wife lived to be 74 and ironically was buried in a regular cemetery, Provincetown Cemetery Number 1.  There was not much else I could find about Mr. Ridley, but the biggest fact, how he died and how that impacted where he was buried, is definitely known. 

            Finding that grave was something different all together.  I began by watching a video made by the CapeCast folks in which they found the grave but did not really share how they found it.  The main thing I got out of it was that if you made it to a very large sand pit you had a fighting chance of finding the lonely grave of Mr. Ridley.  Being that it was such a daunting task to find something so remote I knew I needed a partner in crime to help me, and possibly go for help if we got lost.

            The only person I knew who would dare to come with me was my friend Emily.  She loves the same sort of adventures as I do which meant I did not have to worry about trudging deep into the woods and having her abandon me.  Now, for this trip we took a right off of the parking lot at Montano’s in search of the sand pit.  No map, no gps, only our instinct.  What did it get us?  Lost.

            That’s not to say that we did not have fun.  The things that we found out in those woods were odd and creepy.  At the bottom of one of the kettle holes were pieces of broken beds and chairs really far out which made us wonder who would carry these things out there to dump?  Oddest of all was the dirty white dress hanging from a tree branch, really, some person decided to leave their clothes out there.  Okay.  So after a few hours of going in and out of kettle holes with no luck Emily and I called it a day.  However this only made me more determined to find Mr. Ridley’s grave no matter what.

            I returned a week and a half later on a sunny day off, ready to find the grave and film it when I did.  I studied the map and found that Emily and I had been so close to where the sand pit was, we had need to take a left at a fork in the path.  So that was exactly what I did this time.

            Finding and filming the elusive sand pit was quite easy and thus I believed that the grave would soon be in my sights.  Once at the top of the sand pit I decided to go right and keep my eyes peeled.  What started out as a highly positive adventure disintegrated into a fruitless search.  Those woods can disorient you quickly, especially when looking for something so small.  I thought the grave looked like it was in a slightly open area so that was all I had to go with.  Any open area I went over to, until I had no idea where I was headed.

            I descended into madness really quick and it only got worse when a big owl swooped out of a tree nearby.  I then found myself yelling out loud to Mr. Ridley that he was not going to get rid of me that easily.  The madness got worse when I started finding different colored tapes wrapped around various trees.  I thought maybe it was a trail of bread crumbs leading you to the grave, or just tape to mess with me.  My video shooting ended with a tress stand for hunting as I started believing that I was never going to find Mr. Ridley’s grave and maybe never find my way out.  That second trip ended being close to four hours of walking and ending up out on the highway walking with shame back to Montano’s.  I went home humbled, but still believing I’d find that lonely grave.

            I returned for a third and final time complete with a rough set of directions, drink, food, my gps, and a raw foggy day.  Once again I found the sand pit with ease and knew from the directions that the grave should be just to right of the sand pit maybe 700-800 feet back.  I had to find a kettle hole and go around it, in between two of them, with the grave supposedly right in front of you as you walk.  Easier said than done.  I tried to use the gps to keep me going in the right direction but it got no signal.  It looked like I was going to be lost again as I kept thinking I was close only to keep wandering further from where I should have been.

            I decided to find my way back to the sand pit and start over again with the directions.  I wandered through the broken trees and brush with no clue where I was going.  Then suddenly up ahead I saw it.  I literally stumbled upon the grave of Thomas Ridley as I was going back to the starting point.  I nearly fell over and screamed like Rocky at the top of the mountain in Rocky IV.

            The first thing I did was take out my phone and send a photo of the elusive grave stone to Emily.  She was there at the start and deserved to see it before anybody else.  After that I shot a video and many photos including a touching one of me hugging it like a kid on Christmas.  It was both cute and creepy.  I finished off my protein bar and Powerade while sitting next to Mr. Ridley’s grave.  It was weird, I am not a cemetery guy but this was different.  So few people know this place exists, and fewer have seen it.  Now I can always say I am one of them.  The last real adventure on Cape Cod is over.  Ironically after walking only a few hundred feet I had no idea how to get back to the stone.  It’s okay though, I only needed to see it once, that was enough.  It was nice to meet you Mr. Ridley, bet you don’t get too many visitors.  Cheers! 

The odd dress hanging from a tree from the first trip.

My first view of the grave.

Closeup of the grave, with the last name spelled wrong.

See what I was up against, almost camouflaged at 50 feet away.