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The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey
At once a majestic journey across the West, a significant work of history, and a moving personal saga, The Oregon Trail draws readers into the journey of a lifetime. Learn more
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This was an interesting view of a seafront environment by a naturalist, but also a bit of time travel to an era where men doing rounds on the beach with lanterns were considered serious aids to maritime navigation, and where the postal carrier had time to sit and visit. All the details of the weather, the wildlife and the human interactions make for something greater than just a description of sea birds.
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This book was written in the 1920s and is a classic of the wonders-of-nature style. In this, it most resembles works like John Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra and Edward Abbey's Beyond the Wall. Beston records a full year spent in a tiny, two-roomed house (a shack, really) on the Eastern Shore of Cape Cod, a place renowned for having a lot of weather, whose fury he records with great eloquence. He wrote about everything he saw there -- the sea, sky and birds, mostly, about also about the few human residents of the area, including its tiny complement of fearless Coast Guardsmen (they appear most vividly in a gripping account of a shipwreck). Beston describes everything he sees in simple but graceful prose that, on occasion, rises to a kind of rapture. My favorite passage (which I have framed on a wall) rejects the common notion that animals are fundamentally inferior to humans: "...for the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings, they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners in the splendor and travail of the earth." It's a wonderful read.
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This near-classic account of the author's year alone in a self-built cottage on Cape Cod's shore, sometimes dips a little into purple prose. "Then time gathered like a cloud, and presently the stars began to pale over an ocean still dark with remembered night." These descriptions often sound lovely and poetic, but they might tend to roll off your back like water off a duck, just because they contain no sharp particularities to stick in your mind.
Nevertheless, this is undeniably a stirring account of the ritual of the seasons that Beston observed from his solitary outpost on the beach near Eastham, Massachusetts. And in among the occasionally too general sonorities, there are many, many truly telling metaphors, as when he describes a wind that was "a thing to search the marrow of one's bones."
I initially felt a little frustrated reading his descriptions of his sand and sea surroundings. I wanted to turn the page and find a big glossy picture that would immediately convey the details to me. But then I realized that such a longing was a laziness, and that it was actually better to have to create the picture myself, to build it slowly from Beston's words. This made my experience of nature more interactive and ultimately more satisfying. I was forced to use my imagination. It was like listening to radio, rather than having the completed pictures of TV always there - bam - in front of me. Ultimately my having to create the scene myself in my mind's eye made me concentrate more and appreciate better the beauties being described.
However, I do think that a better map of Beston's location might have been helpful to orient the reader at the outset.Read more ›
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It is wonderful to ready good writing that celebrates the natural world without romanticizing it. Beston describes the ocean and its waves with a clarity of understanding and expression I have seldom read. His connection with the natural world and especially with birds reveals the wonders there while neither refusing to see the violence inherent nor impose a human ethic on that living way.
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I had never heard of Henry Beston until a friend lent me--or, more accurately, pressed on me--his copy of The Outermost House. After reading this book, I understand his sense of urgency: this is a work of unique and lasting beauty, surely one of the greatest nature books ever written. In detailing his year in his cottage at Eastham Beach (now Coast Guard Beach) on the Atlantic side of Cape Cod, Beston combines a Thoreauvian zeal for nature and the examined life with a Proustian ability to record exactly the sight, sound, feel and scent of the world around him. Page after page is filled with unforgettable passages; his descriptions of the markings and songs of the shore birds alone are enough to move you to tears. His story of the plight of a doe caught in an icy flood is almost as suspenseful as a Hitchcock movie; his tribute to the courage of the Coast Guard "surfmen" who rescue shipwrecked sailors is particularly resonant to us who--after Sept. 11, 2001--have learned something about the value of those who safeguard the public. Beston is so quotable a writer that I'm shocked he's not better known. A few quotes should demonstrate: "Nature is a part of our humanity, and without some awareness and experience of that divine mystery man ceases to be man." "Man can be either less than man or more than man, and both are monsters, the last more dread." "Poor body, time and the long years were the first tailors to teach you the merciful use of clothes! Though some scold today because you are too much seen, to my mind, you are not seen fully enough or often enough when you are beautiful." "Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science. It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy.Read more ›
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This item: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
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