The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod Book

"The world today is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dune these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year."

When I read Michael Cunningham's Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown back in July, I knew I needed to get back to Cape Cod rather quickly. So I pulled The Outermost House off the bookshelf and spent part of February on the dunes of this beautiful peninsula once again. The two books were written nearly seventy-five years apart, but no matter. I was equally charmed by both Cunningham's and Henry Beston's experiences. Beston's work was more immersive and his quiet adventure more isolated. Beston built a tiny, two-room cottage on the sand in Eastham, Massachusetts. His closest neighbors were the coastguard men stationed at Nauset Beach; his companions were the various forms of wildlife of which he loved to study. He was not, however, a trained naturalist or scientist. Rather, he was a writer, and a very gifted one, that adored the earth and all its treasures. He intended to stay at this humble abode, christened the Fo'castle, for just two weeks. He was unable to tear himself away, however, and instead settled there for a year - a blessing for us who are then fortunate enough to read of his accounts throughout the four seasons.

"A year indoors is a journey along a paper calendar; a year in outer nature is the accomplishment of a tremendous ritual… We lose a great deal, I think, when we lose this sense of feeling for the sun. When all has been said, the adventure of the sun is the great natural drama by which we live, and not to have joy in it and awe of it, not to share in it, is to close a dull door on nature's sustaining and poetic spirit."

Beston worships the sun, the ocean, and even the night. He takes advantage of all the senses to describe everything around him, and he does so with such enchanting expressions. His words are calming and rhythmic like the sea. He looks to the sky and is amazed by the flight of birds; he scrutinizes the sand for the smallest patterns of life found in the insect world. He speaks of shipwrecks which were not uncommon during this time and place. He writes of the marshes to the north and the changing tides along the beach to his south. He may have spent the year alone, but I felt l was right there with him as he climbed "big dune" to gaze about on all sides. There is a moment when he catches a glimpse of a sole swimmer in the ocean, and we learn of his love for the human body as well.

"All my life it has given me pleasure to see beautiful human beings. To see beautiful young men and women gives one a kind of reverence for humanity (alas, of how few experiences may this be said), and surely there are few moods of the spirit more worthy of our care than those in which we reverence, even for a moment, our tragic and bewildered kind."

It's interesting to note that although Henry Beston was not considered a naturalist, Rachel Carson noted this was the only work that had an influence on her own writing. Furthermore, he was awarded a medal from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for his service in literature. According to the introduction in my copy, this distinction was previously awarded only to Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot. The little house on the beach was distinguished as a National Literary Landmark in 1964, only to be swept away by a storm in 1978. Alas, my dream to visit the place in person someday was squashed. I'll be content with a trip straight to Cunningham's Provincetown instead.

"Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science. It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy."