Cape Cod: Exploring a Sense of Place
Cape Cod in the Arts: Three Writers
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
The seashore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world. [1]
The most famous of the many people to write about the Cape was the author, poet, essayist, philosopher, historian, and naturalist, Henry David Thoreau, though at the time of his visits, he was not well-known outside of his native town of Concord.
Today Thoreau is perhaps most noted for being the “hermit” of Walden Pond; however, he did quite a bit of traveling in his lifetime, visiting Maine and Quebec, and venturing as far west as Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Mackinac Island. “Wishing to get a better view that . . . [he] had yet had of the ocean,” he visited Cape Cod four times between 1849 and 1857, walking the length of the peninsula on each visit. In Thoreau's time, the Cape was isolated and rural, and its residents considered exotic.
In 1925, writer Henry Beston built himself a two-room cottage in the dunes on the great beach at Nauset. He had intended it as a place for short get-aways, and spent his first vacation there in September 1927. He planned originally to stay two weeks. When the two weeks were over, he found he could not bring himself to leave, so possessed was he by the beauty and mystery of the spot. He extended his stay for a year, keeping a journal which became the basis of one of the most well-known and best-loved books about Cape Cod, The Outermost House. Sitting at a small kitchen table overlooking the Atlantic, he wrote his narrative. As Thoreau had done in Walden, Beston used the progress of the year and the changing seasons as his literary structure (the subtitle is A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod), producing “a single, sustained song, a lyrical meditation on the cycling pageant of the seasons.” [3]
Henry Beston (1888-1968)
Photo: The Henry Beston Society
The book was published in 1928 and enjoyed modest success. Its reputation grew steadily. Eventually the book went through several reprintings to become one of the best-known and most influential books about Cape Cod, bringing Beston many honors. The little house itself was designated a National Literary Landmark in 1964 by the U.S. Department of the Interior for its influence on the creation of the Cape Cod National Seashore. Since the house was in danger from the eroding beach, it was moved back on the dunes twice, making it “the only traveling literary landmark in existence.”[4]
Why has the book enjoyed such popularity? One reason may be the fascination we seem to have with artists and writers who, like Thoreau, isolate themseles and live a simple life while they seek truth. Another likely reason is the work's deep connection with nature. Cape writer Robert Finch, who wrote the introduction to the 1992 edition of The Outermost House, suggests that it is the book's "power to remind us how much, in our computer age, we still rely on the earth's deep, constant rhythms, its basic integrity and equanimity . . . . The recurring cycles of the year, rooted in 'the pilgrimages of the sun,' [are] signs that the cosmos is still intact, . . . that we remain included in something larger and more reliable than our own short-lived enthusiasms. "[5] In short, the cycle of the seasons, like the tides, are signs of something more important than we are, a cycle of life that goes on without and beyond our control.
Beston donated the house to the Massachusetts Audubon Society which rented out the house until the great blizzard of February 1978 washed it out to sea. Thanks to the constant erosion of the shore, the spot where the little house stood is now under water.
Robert Finch (1943--)
Robert Finch grew up in New Jersey, but became a Cape Cod “wash-ashore” in 1971. He has written several books about Cape Cod nature, most notably Common Ground: A Naturalist's Cape Cod, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction for 1982. He wrote the introduction to the 1992 edition of Beston’s The Outermost House, He won the 2006 New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing for his radio show, “A Cape Cod Notebook,” which plays weekly on the Cape NPR station WCAI.
Ever since William Bradford, who in 1620 described the Cape as "a hideous and desolate wilderness" of "wild and savage hue," poets, and essayists have written of the natural environment of the Cape. Numerous novelists as well have set their works on the Cape, yet it is the unique landscape here on this meeting of land and sea which has drawn the most attention.
Thoreau's experiences formed the basis of a series of lectures and of articles that appeared in "Putnam’s Magazine." His book, Cape Cod, was printed posthumously in 1865. It conflates his four journeys into one, describing a single walking tour of the Lower Cape, from Eastham to Provincetown, with the sea as an ever-present backdrop. Thoreau wrote about the topography, plants, and animals of the Cape, but also about the sights he saw and the people he met, mixing natural history with amusing encounters with local people. He devoted a chapter to the lighthouse at Truro, including stories he gleaned from local residents, and using his own skills as a surveyor to measure the building and estimate the rate of beach erosion at the site. He devoted another chapter to an interview with an old oysterman in Wellfleet who had heard the cannons firing at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Yet it is always to his impressions of the sea and the natural world that he returns.
Thoreau’s writings were part of the growing field of travel writing that developed along with the growth of tourism. His articles were published at a time just before the Cape was to be transformed from an isolated area dependent on fishing, to a major destination for tourists. Thoreau himself foresaw that transformation, writing, "The time must come when this coast will be a place of resort for those New-Englanders who really wish to visit the sea-side." [2] His writing in Cape Cod as well as the more well-known Walden would serve as inspiration for other Cape writers after him.
Finch is a thoughtful and keen observer, writing on the Cape’s natural environment and local history as well as the present landscape. My favorite of his books is The Primal Place, written in 1983, not long after Finch had built a house in a historic section of West Brewster. The book is a study of the natural and human-made world of his neighborhood, the wildlife and vegetation, the old road and their names, a historic cemetery, the nearby shores of Cape Cod Bay. In a chapter entitled "The Use of Alewives," he describe the annual spring migration of herring (the local member of the family, Alosa pseudoharengus, is known as an "alewife") up the Stony Brook from the sea to spawn in the freshwater ponds of the Cape, including the millpond of the Brewster gristmill (right). Like the tide, it is a natural event, part of the mysterious cycle of life.
In a Foreword to 2007 edition of The Primal Place, Finch writes
I came to realize that my attraction to this landscape was rooted in the fact that it was neither natural nor human, but an amalgam of the two, a series of overlapping and intermingling layers of natural processes and human alteration that had produced something different from either, and somehow, to my mind, richer and more promising. Such a landscape has come to be known by landscape historians, not surprisingly as “an historical landscape,” and there have been several local attempts to “restore” parts of the land to earlier condition by reflecting such historical uses as grazing, haying, and cranberrying. But to me, this landscape is anything but “historical,” a term that implies something over, in the past, preserved, static, and unchanging. What fascinated me about the land on which I had situated myself was that it was a landscape in motion, an ongoing process, in which, yes, I could by understanding the processes involved, learn to read something of its past, but equally coming to see what it was becoming, where it was heading.
The book was . . . in large part an attempt to understand just where it was that I lived. . . .[6]
What Finch did in writing The Primal Place, by observing, studying, thinking and writing, was to imbue his particular place with meaning—in short, he was creating a sense of place in his corner of Cape Cod.
1. Thoreau, Henry David (2011-03-30). Cape Cod (p. 128). Kindle Edition.
2. Ibid., 183.
3. “About Henry Beston,” from Writer Naturalist Henry Beston. Friends of Henry Beston. http://www.henrybeston.com/about.html.
4. Robert Finch, introduction to The Outermost House by Henry Beston (Boston: Henry Holt 1992) xxxii.
5. Ibid., xxviii.
6. Robert Finch, The Primal Place, (Woodstock: Countryman Press, 2007), xi.