“There is no other landscape like it anywhere.
”
To travel by reading is a delightful excursion. For some time I’ve wanted to write a post gathering together great writing about Cape Cod, especially after studying nature and travel writing with author Katy Aalto this year.
THOREAU’S CAPE COD
Then last week, my youngest son, Samuel, and his friend Josh walked to the end of the Cape. They were going to start from our home in Boston, a trip of 137 miles or so. But this week, Josh had the deadline of a flight to South Africa to learn the coffee trade. So they compromised and started in Plymouth, Massachusetts—which took off the first 37 miles.
They talked about the trip for a year. Then all of a sudden, they left last Wednesday morning, and we picked them up in Boston from the Provincetown ferry on Saturday night. The walk-and-camp trip was a success.
One thing Samuel did to prepare was to read Cape Cod by Thoreau.
So here, from me, are some treasured finds on spectacular Cape Cod. Whether you go via pages or in person, let these accompany you.
“Cape Cod is the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts ... behind which the State stands on her guard, with her back to the Green Mountains, and her feet planted on the floor of the ocean … boxing with northeast storms. ”
The book is an account of three trips Thoreau took to the Cape, several years after his escapades at Walden Pond.
Thoreau vigorously walks the Great Beach, taking note of everything in his path, including gruesome details of a shipwreck. The Outer Cape was not then somewhere visited for pleasure but a working and spare landscape of constant shipwreck and struggle.
The book was published three years after the author’s rather early death at forty-four.
In the Footsteps of Thoreau
My focus in this post is long-form nature or travel writing. But I will mention one guidebook, In the Footsteps of Thoreau: 25 Historic & Nature Walks on Cape Cod.
The book is a rich combination of natural history notes, maps, details of specific hikes, and the history of fifty-five sites along the way.
Along with a thorough guide to following in Thoreau’s footsteps, the book includes a walk to the location of Henry Beston’s ‘Outermost House.’
“In 1857, Henry David Thoreau made his last walk along Cape Cod’s Great Beach at the age of 39. Coincidentally, 70 years later in 1927, Henry Beston finished his own Cape sojourn on the Great Beach, also at the age of 39.
Both wrote books about their Cape Cod experiences that have become world-renowned classics: ‘Cape Cod’ and ‘The Outermost House.’
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The Outermost House
Home from traumatic work as a volunteer ambulance driver in Verdun, France, during World War I, Henry Beston retreated to the Outer Cape. He bought fifty acres of remote dune land and built a tiny two-room house from timber carried across the dunes. He stayed for a year.
Henry Beston wanted to marry successful poet Elizabeth Coatsworth, but she had an ultimatum: publish something first. No book, no marriage. In the year following his time at the beach, Henry transformed his sheaf of notes into something publishable. The Outermost House, one of the all-time classics of nature writing, was published in the fall of 1928. Beston and Coatsworth were married the following June.
“Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science.”
“Listen to the surf, really lend it your ears, and you will hear in it a world of sounds.”
A strength of Beston’s writing: vividly described sounds.
Henry Beston’s Outermost House was built on the dunes 1-1/2 miles south of Coastguard Beach.
Henry’s only neighbors were at this former Coastguard Station. Coastguard Beach, Eastham, Massachusetts.
The Outermost House was cited by Congress as one influence on the decision to create the Cape Cod National Seashore in 1961.
The House on Nauset Marsh
There are those, like Thoreau and Beston, who came to observe in order to write; and those who write from the overflow of years lived on Cape Cod.
The next two authors are of the second, residential, variety. I find their writing richer, with a different flavor.
Wyman Richardson was a Boston-area doctor whose family had owned an old farmhouse on the outer Cape for several generations. Richardson visited frequently as a way of escape, any time from March through October, over the course of decades. The house became a known friend. He observed the comings and goings of tides, storms, and migrating birds.
Facing ill health in his 50s, Richardson wrote his observations during late-night sleepless hours at the house. Each chapter first appeared as an essay in The Atlantic Monthly. The essays were published in 1947 as The House on Nauset Marsh. The book is also considered a classic.
“A nature lover, he followed the ways of the marsh creatures, on air, land and water, and he wrote about them with sureness and affection … ”
My favorite chapter is ‘Do-Nothing Day,’ which you can read from the archives of The Atlantic.
Nauset Marsh Trail
The Cape Cod National Seashore Visitor Center in Eastham sits beside the Salt Pond featured in Richardson’s book.
The trails he describes on his property are now the Nauset Marsh Trail within the confines of the National Seashore. Richardson’s farmhouse is still owned by the family and sits back a few hundred feet from the trail across a meadow.
I visited there in September last year specifically to follow in Richardson’s footsteps, with his book in hand. The landscape sprang to life, one curve after another of sandy boardwalk or trail through cedar trees.
Click on any image to enlarge and view as a slideshow
Eastham, Massachusetts: a literary meeting place. Here, Thoreau began his walk; Beston spent his year, and to the right, Dr. Wyman Richardson lived and wrote by the Salt Pond.
Three by Robert Finch, Cape Nature Writer
Both the Beston title and The House on Nauset Marsh have introductions written by Robert Finch.
Finch is the writer I turn to the most eagerly for news of nature on the Cape. He has lived on Cape Cod in Wellfleet for more than 40 years and gives a weekly talk on WCAI, the Cape, Coast & the Islands NPR radio station. His slim volume, A Cape Cod Notebook, is a selection of those talks, which won the 2006 New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing.
You can listen to Robert Finch’s talks on Cape Cod at WCAI.
Finch edited A Place Apart: A Cape Cod Reader. This hefty book covers the gamut of Cape topics and is an excellent launching point for exploring a range of authors. It was how I discovered The House on Nauset Marsh.
A recent title by Robert Finch is The Outer Beach: A Thousand-Mile Walk on Cape Cod's Atlantic Shore, a collection of fifty years of Finch’s observation and essays.
Start Here
You don’t have to walk there from Plymouth, or even the length of the Great Beach, to visit this unique place.
I invite you to read your way along Cape Cod, literally or figuratively.
Any one of these books is a good place to start.
“A man may stand there and put all America behind him.”
Books and book Shopping on the Cape
Physically on the Cape and want to go book browsing …?
Cape Cod and the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket are currently home to twenty-three independent bookstores.
My Favorites
Travel & Books: a print of the picturesque Parnassus Book Service, Yarmouth Port, hangs in our guest room, reminder of a happy trip
Parnassus Book Service, Yarmouth Port, used books and prints. A favorite bookstore of artist Edward Gorey, who lived nearby and whose home is worth a visit. Boston Magazine said: This is not where to go for the latest from the New York Times bestseller list—it’s where to go to lose yourself for days at a time.
Titcomb’s Bookshop, East Sandwich, a family-owned bookstore of new and used titles; frequent author talks and events.
The memorable Brewster Ladies’ Library, in Brewster, has a terrific annual library sale.
The Sturgis Library in Barnstable is also remarkable. It is in the oldest building housing a public library in the United States. Also great sale shelves.
Thanks for Reading!
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