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The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
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| Part No: | 080507368X |
| Manufacturer: | Holt Paperbacks |
| MFG Part: | |
| Customer Rating: | 5.0 / 5.0 |
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- ISBN13: 9780805073683
- Condition: New
- Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
The seventy-fifth anniversary edition of the classic book about Cape Cod, âwritten with simplicity, sympathy, and beautyâ (New York Herald Tribune)A chronicle of a solitary year spent on a Cape Cod beach, The Outermost House has long been recognized as a classic of American nature writing. Henry Beston had originally planned to spend just two weeks in his seaside home, but was so possessed by the mysterious beauty of his surroundings that he found he âcould not go.â Instead, he sat down to try and capture in words the wonders of the magical landscape he found himself in thrall to: the migrations of seabirds, the rhythms of the tide, the windblown dunes, and the scatter of stars in the changing summer sky. Beston argued that, âThe world today is sick to its thin blood for the lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot.â Seventy-five years after they were first published, Bestonâs words are more true than ever.
| an outermost house, cape cod and more... | 2010-07-02 | 5 / 5 |
| "A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod ..."
Twelve Coast Guard stations with halfway houses in between arrayed themselves along the 50-mile span of sand and ocean from Monomoy Point to Race Point, Provincetown. "To understand this great outer beach, to appreciate its atmosphere, its 'feel' one must have a sense of it as the scene if wreck and elemental drama."
In his introduction ©1988 Robert Finch explains some geography and geology of Cape Cod. Cape Cod stands a full thirty miles out in the North Atlantic and its eastern beaches front a 50 miles of New England coast and frequently contend with a thousand-mile expanse of North Atlantic weather. Plentiful eponymous cod fish still are caught by mariners on "the outermost of outer shores."
Henry Beston reminds us in his forward to the 1949 edition:
"Nature is a part of our humanity, and without some awareness and experience of that divine mystery man ceases to be man. When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer a part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither the completeness and integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity. "
The Outermost House The Book includes the towns of Eastham, Nauset, Brewster, Orleans, Truro and Wellfleet... Provincetown, too. Beston calls birds and other wildlife "other people, other nations..." and scatters phrases like "these ocean peoples" - "these winter folk" - "people of the outermost waters" - "those sea peoples" through. I love his telling us, "The gull population of the Cape is really one people ... though separate gull congregations." [page 115]
I know Cape Cod, not as a native, either, but as someone who visited grandparents at their mid-Cape house and as someone who settled there for a couple of years at the end of the last century. Nor were my grandparents CC "natives." They had farmed in Nebraska and North Carolina, then found themselves in the greater Boston area. In time they bought an old, hand-hewn clapboard-sided mid-cape house for occasional weekend and summer use and later on sort of retired there. Decades after Henry Beston built his 2-room dwelling and sojourned for a year on the beach, the earth drew them. I'd guess that by then the year-round population was at least 4 or 5 times larger, summer definitely more touristy, but the Cape Cod mystique enticed my grandparents.
As an adult I've preferred boundless expanses of prairie, desert and Pacific Ocean, but I learned about loving the earth from my grandmother and from the Cape Cod land itself. Watching and participating some in the agricultural cycle, identifying which birds were natives, which migrants and when they typically arrived, gave me a feel for our human place in the meteorological seasons and for the circles of birth, life and death.
Henry Beston's Cape Cod was small-scale in terms of square miles, of rocks and landscape reduced by eons of erosion, but the storms he describes were epic in size, style and consequence. Early on in The Outermost House he mentions the "human scale" of Cape Cod and its beaches, and that's exactly right. Having lived in the Intermountain West and gloried in the vastness and geological diversity of the state of Utah and after loving the scope of the drive up California's Central Coast, I can appreciate the greater geological age of the Appalachian Mountain Range, the antiquity of the shores, trees, rocks and shells of Cape Cod.
I cannot recommend The Outermost House highly enough: 5 stars plus! |
| What language! | 2010-03-14 | 5 / 5 |
| THIS is the way I'd like to write. Beston's language is so new with every sentence, so full of visual experience, that I find myself corroborating every description with my own little internal "Yes!"
I spent some days and nights in the same part of Cape Cod as a child with my school, and remember the lighthouse beam winking into the uncovered windows at night, competing with the squabbling girls in my dorm for keeping me awake. Beston brings the actual feeling of the place very clearly to me.
He reminds me to watch my surroundings with the attention I remember having as a child; living so far away from the environment I learned then, I have often been too busy to notice the growing things around me now. The sense of place is built on recognizing these elements of the natural world: the behavior of birds; the patterns of weather and light and earth; the habits of wild plants. I am reading The Outermost House as I go through the Master Naturalist course for my region and I find it entirely relevant to my new pursuit.
"The world to-day 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." I would answer Beston that we are also sick for lack of artists like him to draw us back to these elemental things. There are not so many who recognize this basic and important need. |
| the Outermost House | 2010-02-08 | 5 / 5 |
| | I spend a week on the outer Cape every fall and love the dynamic of the seashore. This book richly enhanced my already extant love of the seashore. Beston's descriptive passages read like poetry and bring the seasonal cycles of the Cape to vivid life. I thoroughly enjoyed it! Highly recommend. |
| Experience the Cape | 2010-01-12 | 5 / 5 |
| | I first borrowed this book from someone and read it quickly so that I could return it. I loved it so much that I asked for it for Christmas and Santa came through. I have vacationed on the Cape for many years. This book shows you everything about Cape Cod in a whole new light. You will hear the waves differently, never look at the shore birds the same way again and know what it's like to be on Cape in the dead of winter. If you love Cape Cod let The Outermost House take you there. Enjoy! |
| "The creative pageant" | 2009-06-29 | 5 / 5 |
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Henry Beston wanted to find his voice as a writer. He had served as an ambulance driver in France during WWI and since then had earned a living on children's fairy tales and magazine articles. He fell under the spell of Outer Cape Cod while writing about the coast guardsmen stationed at Eastham, and in 1925 had a small cottage built in the dunes between ocean and marsh. There he spent much of the next two years, finding his voice as a writer and much more. The The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod, published in late 1928, is the eloquent result. Never out of print since its publication, it has always been one of the most influential classics of nature writing. His strength was not scientific observation, but the exploration of our relationship with nature.
Alone on the beach, he lived in his 20x16-foot cabin, which he called the Fo'castle for its ship-like economy of function and intimacy with the ocean and the weather. The land and sea birds, the smells and sounds of the beach, the wind, sea, sand, plants and animals--all move to the heartbeat of the year's passage. Beston's writing is both detailed and metaphorical; he had the rare gift of sharing his observations without monopolizing the frame.
He was aware that Nature has its own momentum and all the occurrences about which he wrote are subject to that dominant force. An old wrecked ship, thrown up in a storm, showed its bones against the sky and then receded again. Of seals, he wrote: "They have a trick of swimming unperceived under a flock of sea ducks, seizing one of the unwary birds from underneath, and then disappearing with their mouths full of flesh and frantic feathers. A confusion follows; the survivors leap from the water with wildly beating wings, they scatter, wheel, and gather again, and presently nature has erased every sign of the struggle, and the sea rolls on as before." These life-and-death events are just a ripple in the fabric of the elemental world.
Finally in September, Beston spent a night on the beach and before dawn, "In the luminous east, two great stars aslant were rising...Betelgeuse and Bellatrix, the shoulders of Orion." His beach year at an end, the observer distilled his impressions: his reverence and gratitude for "the great natural drama," his understanding that creation is still going on, that the observation is only relevant to that moment, that "poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science." Beston was convinced that a reverence for nature must underpin all our achievements, or else they can't have true meaning. His writings influenced others who took the case forward. He moved to Maine and lived quietly with his family, never an activist, too much the literary perfectionist to ever be a prolific writer. Though he wrote several other books, none of them were quite as perfectly integrated as The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod. Much as I cherish his Maine writing, this is the book that I turn to again and again for peace and perspective.
Beston had the Fo'castle moved back from the encroaching sea a time or two, then donated it to the Audubon Society in 1959; it finally perished in "The Blizzard of '78." In 1961, forty miles and 43,500 acres of beach and dune were protected by the creation of the Cape Cod National Seashore under the stewardship of the National Park Service.
I listened to the excellent 2007 audio production (strangely, the first), read by Brett Barry. Beston's language has such a rich cadence that it's a wonderful choice for audio, especially if you are already familiar with the book. On the other hand there are so many passages that you'll want to linger over...I think most committed readers should not start their audio careers here. But whether you read or listen, you must experience this wonderful book.
Linda Bulger, 2009
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